9.2 The Islamic Revival

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From the course by Tel Aviv University

The Emergence of the Modern Middle East - Part II

290 ratings

Tel Aviv University

The Emergence of the Modern Middle East - Part II

290 ratings

This course will discuss the developments in the Middle East from the early 20th century to the present. It will discuss the rise and retreat of Arab nationalism, the problems of internal cohesion of the Arab states, issues of religion and state, and the evolution of Islamist politics. It will also focus on the evolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its impact on the region and will conclude with an in depth analysis of the “Arab Spring” by placing these contemporary revolutionary events in their historical context. Please note that this course builds upon a previous course - The Emergence of the Modern Middle East - Part I (https://www.coursera.org/learn/modern-middle-east-1/home/welcome) Learn about the history of the Middle East for a deeper understanding of current regional developments!

From the lesson

WEEK 5

The Middle East from 1967 to the present including the Arab Spring

9.1.1 The Post-1967 Middle East: The Victory of State Interest - Part 110:02

9.1.2 The Post-1967 Middle East: The Victory of State Interest - Part 27:59

9.2 The Islamic Revival8:35

9.2.1.1 The Islamic Revival in Egypt, Syria and Iraq - Part 14:52

9.2.1.2 The Islamic Revival in Egypt, Syria and Iraq - Part 26:34

9.2.2 The Examples of Jordan, Algeria and the Palestinians8:04

9.3.1.1 The "Arab Spring": Modernity and Tradition - Part 15:22

9.3.1.2 The "Arab Spring": Modernity and Tradition - Part 211:30

9.3.2.1 The "Arab Spring": Egypt and Tunisia - Part 15:54

9.3.2.2 The "Arab Spring": Syria, Jordan, Yemen and Libya - Part 211:49

9.4.1 The Non-Arab Countries - The Republic of Turkey : From WWII to the Present11:42

9.4.2.1 The Non-Arab Countries - Iran: From the Pahlavi Dynasty to the Islamic Republic - Part 16:38

9.4.2.2 The Non-Arab Countries - Iran: From the Pahlavi Dynasty to the Islamic Republic - Part 26:45

9.5 Concluding Overview3:40

Meet the Instructors

Professor Asher Susser
Senior Research Fellow
Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies

The disappointment with Arab Nationalism that lent its impetus to

the emergence of territorial identities and their promotion in some

of the Arab states, was also the background for a

very different development and that is the revival of Islamic qualities.

The disappointment with secular nationalism and of Nasser's defeat was

also the background for the emergence of the Islamic political revival.

The panacea that Nasser's improved not to be the

huge political setback as a result of the war in 1967.

If added to the economic Malays, that developing the

Arab country as a result of the process of development

and modernization, population grows and massive urbanization were all

at the background to these rise of the political Islam.

As James Piscatori has mentioned, most rural migrants

to the Arab cities, quickly became the urban

poor, victims of their own hope, swallowed by

the very process which they believed would liberate them.

This sense of not belonging, was clearly connected to the turn to religion.

Migration from the countryside generally help to spread rule attitudes in the

cities and this meant particularly the greater emphasis on religious

tradition amongst other classes too religious instinct ran deep.

And this was especially so after the second

ideologies like Nasserism and Baathism had failed to deliver.

The ideological Underpinnings of the Islamist Trend were related, first and

foremost, to the opposition to secularist

modernization and secular nationalism and territorialism.

What it was that they were after it was not against modernity and

nationalism, but modernity and nationalism without their secularist thrust.

The Islamist sought modernity, raft in the preservation of traditional identities,

norms, and values, the need to base society on Islamic law.

Since the late 19th century, there were three main theories that came to

explain the relative weakness of Muslim societies in comparison to the west.

The one was that the decline was the result of the deviation from true Islam.

And that true Islam correctly interpreted did not

conflict with Western ideas, and rationalism, and science.

These were the Islamic reformers of the late 19th century.

Like [UNKNOWN], and Mohammed Abdu.

Those to whom we referred at great length earlier on in our course.

A second explanation was that the relative weakness of the Muslim world was the fault

of Islam, itself, and that Islam, itself, was

used as an obstacle to change and revival.

This is the attitude we could directly relate to secularists

like Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of secular Republic of Turkey.

And then there was the third school, those who argued that the

retreat of the Muslim world was because of the intoxication with the West.

That is not because they were not western enough

but that the Muslims have gone too far in the

process of westernization as Hasan al-Banna the founding father of

the Muslim Brethren or the revolutionaries in Iran would argue.

In their view, the Islamic modernists had failed because they themselves

were too Western-oriented, seeking to

establish Islamic justifications for Western-inspired reform.

These new critics of Westernization thought in

terms of a return to the idea of

Islamic self-sufficiency, that which the modernists like

of Ani and Abdu have begun to doubt.

Islam is the solution claimed Hasan al-Banna,

the founder of the Muslim Brethren 1928.

But it was perhaps the key ideological Muslim

Brethren in Egypt Sayyid Qutb who lived from 1906 to 1966.

The year in which he was hanged by the Nazarite regime in Europe.

Qutb wrote considerably more than Hassan al-Banna, and it was he who became the

main ideologue of the Muslim Brethren in the second part of the 20th century.

Qutb expanded on the theme of the new Jahiliyya.

The new Jahiliyya was a term that was coined by the

Pakistani Muslim thinker, Abu al-Ala Mawdudi, who lived from 1903 to 1979.

And it is he who developed the concept of what was called a Jahiliyya society.

And what did all this mean?

The Jahiliyya is that period of barbarism and ignorance

in the Muslim belief that preceded the advent of Islam.

Therefore, societies that were described in the

present as Jahiliyya societies were societies that

were un-Islamic, societies that were not governed

by the Sharia, by Islamic religious law.

The new Jahiliyya therefore, was about the present

not the past that preceded the advent of Islam.

Jahiliyya therefore according to Mawdudi and followed

by Kudu was not a period of history

but a condition, a state of affairs which could apply to the present as well.

They could be no coalescence and compromise with western thought.

But the west should be rejected because

of it's secular permissive and materialistic ways.

Cotum went through a process of radicalization during

his imprisonment before his execution by the Nasserite regime.

And according to Cotum's more radical thinking,

he justified the use of jihad, holy war

and revolution, to overthrow these infidel regimes, that

is, regimes that did not implement the Sharia.

They were jihadi regimes or infidel regimes, those that

because of their unbelief should be overthrown even by revolution.

And Cotum therefore, for these beliefs, was imprisoned under the

Nasserite regime, and as we have mentioned, hanged in 1966.

According to James Gelvin, these new radical Islamists

were able to counterpose their own brand of cultural authenticity as represented by

Islam to the imported secular nationals: creeds, which, they argued,

brought nothing but oppression, economic stagnation, and defeat to the region.

So what were the specific complaints of these new radical Islamists?

They argued against the marginalization of religion, politics, law, and society.

They dismissed and disagreed with what they called

the cult of the nation-state and its leadership.

Nothing less than a form of heresy that is the cult and the

belief in the leadership of the state rather than belief in religion and God.

The state monopoly over education was unacceptable

because it was devoid of Islamic values.

The mass media that were controlled by the

state spread permissiveness and generally on Islamic valued

the countries like Egypt and others were

open to the Western Economy and globalization.

Leading to corruption and to a consumer society that began to look like

the dismissive societies of the west, that they referred to as Coca-Cola societies.

The real enemy, they argued, was from within.

That is, the regime itself.

This infidel regime that had to be removed even before the struggle against Israel.

And these new radical Islamists had an ever increasing influence on the

Islamization of Arab societies in the latter part of the 20th century.

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