Types of Islamic fundamentalism: origin, development, goals

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National Institute for Strategic Studies

Department of Informational Security

Types of Islamic fundamentalism: origin, development, goals

Petriaiev O.S., Postgraduate student

Annotation

The article explores the reasons for the emergence and development of various types of Islamic fundamentalism. The history of social relations, like any other phenomenon of social life, is not static, but is filled with many changes taking place both between social systems and within each of them. These processes bear signs of historical regularity, lead to social changes in social relations and serve as an indicator of social development. Along with the structural, procedural and functional changes in society, there are changes in its spiritual life, which are sensitive and opposing in relation to changes.

An important element of the spiritual life of society, its bond, is religion, as one of the elements of the knowledge of being, which forms the consciousness, psychology and ideology of society. The historical development of Islam, as the youngest and second largest believer of the Abrahamic religion, went through the same social changes as all other religions, and was accompanied by processes of confrontation with new social relations in the form of the emergence and development of Islamic fundamentalism, which are Wahhabism, aka Salafism, Qutbism and Deobanti. Wahhabism / Salafism, Qutbism and Deobanti, although they arose in different historical periods of time and geography, they are connected by a common goal - the struggle for “pure” Islam against the liberalization of Muslim society, its elite and attempts at Westernization, as well as for the spread of Islam and the Arabic language.

Also common to them is the fact that having arisen at different times and in different geographical regions of society, they remain not only active to the present day, but also continue to develop in parallel under conditions of common goals and rivalry. All the indicated forms of Islamic fundamentalism are united by the choice of objects of struggle for "pure" Islam, which are: total anti-westernism, anti-liberalism, ant-Semitism and the struggle against secular regimes in the Islamic world, which in many countries are represented by the military elite, closely connected with the Western world. Islamic fundamentalism defined its forms of struggle in the spread of Islam through the resettlement of Muslims in non-Muslim regions, the propaganda of Islam and the Arabic language among non-Muslims, and terrorism in order to intimidate residents of non-Muslim regions. In the context of the modern global transformation of society, Islamic fundamentalism has determined a new direction in its struggle with the Western liberal world. In parallel with the permanent process of mass migration of Muslim migrants from different countries of North Africa, the Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia, Islamic fundamentalists organize targeted introduction and adaptation of their representatives in new territories in order to preach anti-Western ideas and a radical version of Islam, and promote denial Western liberal values.

Thus, the modern activity of Islamic fundamentalism, manifested in the form of Wahhabism / Salafism, Qutbism and Deobanti, has become an existential security threat not only to the national states of the Islamic world, but also to the countries of European content and the United States.

Key words: Islamic Fundamentalism, Wahhabism, Salafism, Qutbism, Deobanti.

Анотація

Види ісламського фундаменталізму: виникнення, розвиток, цілі

Петряєв О.С., Аспірант кафедри інформаційної безпеки Національного інституту стратегічних досліджень

Стаття досліджує причини виникнення та розвитку різних видів ісламського фундаменталізму. Історія суспільних відносин, як і будь-яке інше явище соціального буття, не статичне, а наповнене безліччю змін, що відбуваються як між соціальними системами, так і всередині кожної з них. Дані процеси носять ознаки історичної закономірності, ведуть до соціальних змін суспільних відносин і є індикатором у суспільному розвиткові. Поряд із структурними, процесуальними та функціональними змінами суспільства, відбуваються зміни і в духовному його житті, які носять сенситивний і протиборчий характер стосовно змін.

Важливим елементом духовного життя суспільства, є релігія, як один з елементів пізнання буття, яке формує свідомість, психологію та ідеологію суспільства. Історичний розвиток ісламу, як наймолодшої та другої за чисельністю віруючих авраамічної релігії, пройшов через такі ж соціальні зміни, як і всі інші релігії, і супроводжувався процесами протистояння новим суспільним відносинам у формі зародження та розвитку ісламського фундаменталізму, якими є ваххабізм, він же салафізм, кутбізм та деобантизм.

Ваххабізм / салафізм, кутбізм та деобантизм хоч і виникли в різні історичні проміжки часу та географії, проте їх пов'язує спільна мета - боротьба за «чистий» іслам проти лібералізації мусульманського суспільства, її еліти та спроби вестернізації, а також за поширення ісламу та арабської мови. Також спільним для них є і той факт, що, виникнувши в різний час і в різних географічних регіонах суспільства, вони залишаються не тільки активними дотепер, але й паралельно продовжують розвиватися в умовах спільних цілей та суперництва.

Усі зазначені форми ісламського фундаменталізму поєднує і вибір об'єктів боротьби за «чистий» іслам, якими є: тотальне антизахідництво, антилібералізм, антсемітизм і боротьба зі світськими режимами в ісламському світі, які у багатьох країнах представлені військовою елітою, що тісно пов'язана із західним світом. Своїми формами боротьби ісламський фундаменталізм визначив у поширенні ісламу за допомогою переселення мусульман у немусульманські регіони, пропаганду ісламу та арабської серед немусульман, і тероризм з метою залякування жителів немусульманських регіонів. В умовах сучасної глобальної трансформації суспільства ісламський фундаменталізм визначив новий напрямок своєї боротьби із західно-ліберальним світом. Паралельно з перманентним процесом масової міграції мусульман-мігрантів з різних країн Північної Африки, Близького Сходу, Центральної та Південно-Східної Азії, ісламські фундаменталісти організують цільове впровадження та адаптацію на нових територіях своїх представників з метою проповідування антизахідних ідей та радикальної версії ісламу та пропаганди заперечення західно-ліберальних цінностей. Таким чином, сучасна діяльність ісламського фундаменталізму, що виявляється у формі ваххабізму/салафізму, кутбізму та деобантизму, становить екзистенційну загрозу безпеці не лише національним державам ісламського світу, а й країнам Європейського контенту та США.

Ключові слова: ісламський фундаменталізм, ваххабізм, салафізм, кутбізм, деобанті.

Introduction

The ideology of Islamic fundamentalism has existed for several centuries and manifests itself in the form of aggressive propaganda following the norms prescribed in the Koran, hadiths and suras, as well as in the form of terrorism, as a reaction to social changes in society. From the last quarter of the 20th century to the present, Islamic fundamentalism has become an existential threat to stability, national interests and security in the countries of the Western and Islamic worlds. Terrorist acts committed by representatives of Islamic fundamentalism in the United States and European countries have become systemic in nature, and in their form, they bear signs of extreme cruelty and sophistication.

Islamic fundamentalism as a current of Islamic political thought had an understandable reason for its appearance. Islamic fundamentalism originated as a movement against the colonialism of various empires that sought to subjugate and reform Muslim society in the Islamic world. After the end of World War II and the decolonization policy in many Islamic states that gained independence, national governments came to power, adapting Western political and economic models and administrative and political institutions to the national and cultural traditions of their states. The aggressive imposition of a policy of modernization and secularization of Muslim society has caused the reactionary movement of Islamic fundamentalism to intensify as a response to an attempt to change traditional society. On this basis, in different parts of the Islamic world, such ideologies as Wahabism, aka Salafism, Kutbism and Diabandism, arose. Despite the fact that these movements appeared in different parts of the Islamic world and different time periods, they have a common structure and goals.

The article main goal. Comparison of the philosophical and ideological structures of Islamic fundamentalism in Wahhabism / Salafism, Kutbism and Diabandism, and forecasting potential threats to the national states of the Islamic and Western world.

Recent literature review. The topic of Islamic fundamentalism was studied by such scholars as: Dale C. Eikmeier, Adis Duderija, Besnik Sinani, Graham E Fuller, Sarah Ben Nefissa, Mahmoud Hamdy Abo El-Kasem, Amir Sheikhzadegan, Muhammad Moj etc.

The main research material

islamic fundamentalism antiwestern struggle liberal

Since the 18th century, Islam began to take radical forms, which was caused by a number of social and historical factors. One of the first modern radical Islamic ideologies was Wahhabism, which is a puritanical form of Sunni Islam that is common in Saudi Arabia and partially practiced in Qatar. The word Wahhabism comes from the name of the Muslim learned theologian Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab, who lived on the Arabian Peninsula in the eighteenth century (1703-1791). Today, the term Wahhabism is used to refer to an orthodox version of Islam, purged of any innovations or practices that deviate from the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and his seventh century companions.

Among adherents of this religious trend in Islam, in general, preference is given to the term "Salafiya" rather than "Wahhabism", which have different historical roots, but in recent years have become interchangeable, and above all in the West. Some Muslims consider Wahhabism to be a Saudi form of Salafi. However, unlike eighteenth-century Saudi Wahhabism, modern Salafism grew out of a reform oriented movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that developed in various parts of the Islamic world and gradually became more conservative. In line with other puritanical (dogmatic) Islamic teachings, Salafis believe that the Qur'an and the Prophet's practices (hadith) are the highest religious authority in Islam, rather than subsequent commentaries prepared by Islamic scholars who interpret these sources. It should be noted that Salafism is not a consolidated movement and its single “sect” does not exist, however, the Salafi interpretation of Islam appeals to many Muslims around the world who are striving for religious renewal in the face of modern challenges.

According to a number of scholars, violent jihad, in its essence, is not connected with the dogmatism of Islamic belief. Among some strict Muslims, whether self-proclaimed Salafists or Wahhabis, jihadi propaganda is a relatively new phenomenon and continues to be a major controversy among these groups. While clerics and Wahhabi convert advocated religiously motivated violence and played a military role at key moments in Saudi Arabia's history, most scholars attribute the rise of militancy in the wider Salafi community to the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Afghan war against the occupation of the country by the Soviet Union received wide support throughout the Muslim world and mobilized thousands of Muslim volunteers. Radical beliefs quickly spread through separate groups of mosques and madrasahs (Islamic religious schools) located on the Afghan-Pakistani border, which were funded by Saudi Arabia, the United States and a number of Western European states. After the war in Afghanistan, militant Salafism denounced the leaders of many Arab states as apostates, as they continued to cooperate and promote the development of Western “imperialism”.

In the 21st century, followers of the ideas of Wahhabism were able to come to power in various regions of the Muslim world. For example, in Egypt, representatives of the Salafi political party, the Muslim Brotherhood, took power for one year after a coup d'йtat in 2011-2013, after which they were removed from power by a military counter-coup. In Syria and Iraq, the Salafism created the unrecognized state of the Islamic Caliphate or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which lasted from 2013 to 2019. In Afghanistan, after the withdrawal of US troops and a coalition of NATO countries, in 2021 the Taliban came to power, which also adheres to the ideas of Salafism [1, с. 39-51].

The further development of Wahhabism, Salafism and the religious structure of Islamic fundamentalism was reflected in the works of the Egyptian Islamic theorist and philosopher Said Ibrahim Qutb. His teachings on Islamic fundamentalism are known today as “Kutbism”. It also formed the basis of the ideology of the Islamic political movement in Egypt, the Muslim brotherhood.

The ideology of Qutbism also includes the works of other Islamic theorists, such as the Islamic philosophers Abu-l-Ala Maududi, who later became the ideologist of the Pakistani Islamic party Jamaat-i- Islami (Islamic Society) and Hasan al Banna, a preacher and political figure in Egypt, who provided an intellectual rationale for the foundations of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism.

Qutbism is not a structured Islamic teaching developed by one scholar, it is also not united in one source and does not belong to one religious sect within Islam. Qutbism is a combination of dogmatic Islam, intolerance towards other ideologies and religions, which includes elements of Sunni and Shiite Islam, which are united by broader Islamic goals and methods of establishing Islam. Qutbism advocates justifying violent political methods, primarily terrorism, to destroy non-Muslims and apostates; to build a “pure” Islamic world. Islamic terrorist leaders such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi built their organizations on the principles of Qutbism, trying to translate this radical teaching into a global plan of action [2, c. 113-142].

Kutbism is built on the common basis of dogmatic Islamist currents like Wahhabism, Salafism and Deobandism. These radical movements in Islam have common features:

• the belief that Muslims have departed from true Islam and must return to “pure Islam”, the period of the time of the Prophet;

• the path to "pure Islam" lies only through the literal and strict interpretation of the Koran and hadiths, along with the fulfilment of the commandments of the Prophet;

• every Muslim must independently interpret the primary sources, without being slavishly attached to the interpretations of Islamic scholars;

• any interpretation of the Qur'an from a historical, contextual point of view is a distortion of it, and that much of Islamic history and classical legal tradition is mere sophistry.

Returning to the personality of Said Qutb, the Egyptian Islamic theorist became an inspiring figure for thousands of Muslims in building the Islamic world. Qutb argued that the whole world, including Muslims, is in a state of Jahiliya, that is, ignorance; when the way of man replaced the way of God. According to Qutb, since Jahiliya and Islam cannot coexist, then offensive jihad was necessary to destroy the Jahiliya society and Islamize the whole world. As long as the Jahiliya is not defeated, all true Muslims have a personal duty to wage an offensive jihad. Qutb added the concept of “offensive jihad” to the widely accepted concept of “defensive jihad”. Thus, offensive jihad against non-Muslims in the name of the spread of Islam and the rule of God is not only justified, but glorified.

In addition to offensive jihad, Sayyid Qutb used the Islamic concept of “takfir” or excommunication of apostates. Declaring someone takfir created a gap in the religious teachings of Islam around the prohibition on killing another Muslim and, in fact, made the execution of an apostate a religious obligation. An obvious use of this concept was to declare secular rulers, officials, organizations, or any Muslims who opposed the Islamist program as takfir, thus justifying killings and attacks on them. Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, later convicted in 1993 of the attack on the World Trade Centre, referred to Qutb's takfiri writings during his trial for the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. The concept of takfir along with offensive jihad has become an argument for any Islamic extremist to justify attacks against anyone [3, с. 181-197].

Summing up the activities of Said Qutab, it is worth saying that he was able to create a concise and logical theory that opposes the Islamic world against Jahiliya, the world of Christianity and capitalism. In addition to conducting offensive jihad, Qutbism spreads the idea that Islam is the only correct creed that saves the masses from disbelief, which leads to the decay of society and its death.

Deobandi is another Islamic fundamentalist movement that is less known in Europe, but at the same time is an important element in our study. The ideology of Deobandi originated in British colonial India as a reaction to the social policy of the colonial authorities of the British Empire. Islamic theologians in British colonial India believed that the policies pursued by Britain were corrupting the Islamic society of the colony.

The fundamentalist Deobandi movement was founded in the second half of the 19th century by theologians Muhammad Qasim Nanautwi (1833-1880), Zulfikar Ali (1821-1905) and Muhammad Yaqub Nanautavi (1833-1886). The first madrassa to study this doctrine was opened in 1867, in the city of Deoband, Saharanpur district, Uttar Pradesh, from which the name of the movement originated. The religious teachings of diabandi were seriously influenced by Arab Wahhabism, which was actively developed and preached in the Arabian Peninsula, which at that time was under the control of the Ottoman Empire. After the appearance of the first madrasah, similar Islamic schools were opened in other cities.

The emergence of diabandi was a response to the British suppression of the uprising known as the sepoy uprising or the first war of India's independence of 1857-1859. The emergence of a new Islamic ideology was a reaction to the advancement of Western civilization and materialistic ideology in the Indian subcontinent. Islamic theologians feared that Islam might lose its dominant role in Indian Muslim society, for this reason, Sheikh Imdadullah al-Muhajir al-Makki, his student Sheikh Muhammad Qasim al-Nanatuwi and associates developed a plan to protect Islam and its teachings, which consisted in creating religious schools and Islamic centers that would teach “pure” Islam and Sharia law [4, c. 65-92].

Supporters of the deobandi movement adhere to the idea that there are two main directions in Islam: Tariqa and Sharia, or law based on religious texts and their understanding, as a path derived from religious experience. Consequently, they accepted Sufism in all its disciplinary manifestations, as well as the role of the ulema (theologians) in interpreting the four branches of Islamic law. The foundations of religious knowledge are laid down in the Koran, hadith, qiyas (reasoning by analogy) and ijmah (consensus), but for their understanding it was required that the ulema act as interpreters.

The main goals of supporters and students of Deobandi were:

• preservation of the teachings of Islam;

• struggle against colonialism, foreign military and political presence;

• missionary activities to spread the teachings of Islam;

• spread of Islamic culture;

• the spread of the Arabic language, which made it possible to study the Koran and Sharia law from primary sources and serve as a language of communication in the Islamic world.

Gradually, the number of madrasahs and Islamic centres preaching Deobandi increased. They appeared in Afghanistan, Malaysia, Bangladesh, modern Pakistan, and after the migration crisis of 2015 and the withdrawal of US and NATO troops from Afghanistan in 2021, they penetrated into Western Europe.

Deobandi and some of its elements resonated during several wars in Afghanistan.

In particular, during the Soviet-Afghan war of 1979-1989, in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, where military training camps for the training of the Mujahideen operated, Deobandi supporters were actively engaged in promoting their ideas among the Afghans, from whom fighters were formed against the Soviet presence. Soviet troops, propaganda of Marxist ideology, and the creation of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan were seen as a new form of colonial conquest.

Later, the Deobandi movement played an important role in the formation of the political movement of the Taliban, and graduates of Islamic Deobandi schools took important government posts in Afghanistan in 1996-2001. Further, Deobandi strengthened the environment of the Afghan Pashtun society during the twenty-year occupation of this country by US and NATO troops. Islamic fundamentalism among the illiterate population of the Afghan provinces became a natural reaction to the introduction of Western values, which were met negatively by most of the Afghan population. After 2021, Deobandi began to penetrate into Western Europe, where the Muslim population, especially those from Afghanistan and Pakistan, find support in it against the Western culture of left-wing liberalism and nationalism of individual European countries [5, c. 15-65].

The following is a table of similarities and differences between the Islamic fundamentalist movements Wahhabism / Salafism, Qutbism and Diabandi.

Conclusion

Islamic fundamentalism has emerged in various regions of the world. The reasons for its occurrence are identical and its goals too. The first reason for its emergence was the reaction to the liberalization of Muslim society and elites, and an attempt to Westernize them. This meant the abolition of national culture, the loss of the status of Islam as a religion that determines the way of life of the indigenous population and the gradual displacement of the Arabic language by the languages of the colonial countries or countries of intervention, Turkish, Russian, French and English. After the departure of the colonial authorities, Islamic fundamentalists were unable to take power, so their struggle was directed against the national governments, which were often military elites with close ties to the Western world. Later, Islamic fundamentalism went on the attack by moving its emissaries to the countries of the Western world, gaining a foothold in new territories, denying Western values, preaching anti-Western ideas and a radical version of Islam. Thus, Islamic fundamentalism poses a threat to the security of not only the nation-states of the Islamic world, but also the security and way of life of European content and the United States.

References

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3. Angio F.S. Islamic State's Qutbist statehood: a systemic threat to the concept of sovereignty as a primary institution in the English school of international relations. Paix et Securite Internationales. Num. 5, janvier-decembre. 2017. С.295.

4. Kamran T. The Genesis, Evolution and Impact of “Deobandi” Islam on the Punjab: An Overview. Faith-Based Violence and Deobandi Militancy in Pakistan. Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. C. 546.

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