The Role of the Rentier Intellectuals
Under colonial duress, Muslim public intellectuals were thus the principal agents of changing their own ancestral faith into an unrecognizable site of ideological contestation with what they categorically identified as “the West”—the self-designated code with which the hegemony of colonial modernity faced and stared down the world at large. Factual relation of power between colonial modernity and Islam eventually gave rise to fictive terms of opposition between European colonial ideologues and Muslim public intellectuals. At the threshold of the twenty-first century, and in the immediate aftermath of the cataclysmic events of 9/11, enough remnants of this binary supposition were resuscitated for us to see the psychopathological origin of its formulation, and the political potency of its appeal.
To see how this dialectic of generating and sustaining a fabricated hostility between “Islam and the West” has worked over the last two hundred years, we can take a look at our own time when a handful of US public strategists, feeding on the previous generation of Orientalists, began to bank on this projected binary opposition. It was a strategy predicated on a very intellectual universe that operated on the assumption that “Islam” was defeated and bitter, and thus Muslims were terrorizing “the West.” The argument was very simple; it was also very lucrative. It fit the lowest and most common denominator of a frightened and mentally paralyzed public.
A few names in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 became instantly identified with the bellicose and violent reading of an already tense and terrorized condition. Bernard Lewis, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Friedman, Fouad Ajami, Michael Ignatieff, Farid Zakariya, Christopher Hitchens, and Dinesh D’Souza” “were chief among many others who each in his own way (they were mostly men, though Oriana Fallaci may be added to the list) was to join Samuel Huntington and posit the emerging geopolitics of the matter on an “Islam and the West” axis. These people are products of power—symptoms of a social disease that any bloated accumulation of power can generate in any society, in any culture, and at any point in history. It is crucial for us to look at these characters closely and examine the pathology they represent carefully. In them we can fairly accurately identify the original virus that infected the moral imagination of the generation that saw the political benefit of fabricating a center for colonial modernity and naming it “the West”—casting the rest of the world to its periphery.
The rentier intellectuals were squarely at the service of the empire with their propagation of “Islam and the West.”
The End of Islamism
The end of Islamism as a mode of ideological mobilization caused and conditioned by the “Western” colonial imaginary was evident precisely at the moment of its global recognition in a massive revolutionary uprising three-quarters into the twentieth century. By far the most spectacular—that last and longest flame of a dying candle—manifestation of Islamism was in the course of the 1977–1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. After more than half a century of persistent ideological articulation and political action, Islamism finally succeeded where both nationalism and socialism had failed—the national liberation of a people from a corrupt monarchy and its US support. The culmination of Iranian nationalism was in the figure and phenomenon of Prime Minister Muhammad Mosaddeq (1881–1967), and when his democratically elected government was toppled by a CIA-sponsored coup d’état in August 1953, the moral and political prowess of the ideology behind it fell too. The Iranian experiment with socialism ultimately came to its most successful institutional achievement in the Tudeh Party, and so did its demise when in the course of the same coup it was at once ideologically discredited and politically dismantled. A decade into the successful return of the Shah back to power with the full support of the United States, neither the post-Mosaddeq Iranian nationalism nor the post-Tudeh socialism was able to stage a successful comeback. While the Muslim activists, inspired by the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, managed to startle the Pahlavi regime in a major uprising in June 1963, the ruling monarch managed to brutally suppress the uprising. But again, about a decade later, as the Shah was celebrating the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, Khomeini came back with a vengeance and, in a crescendo of revolutionary zeal, toppled the Shah. This was the beginning of the end of militant Islamism in political power.
The success of the Islamic Revolution was its failure. Khomeini used the smokescreen of the hostage crisis of 1979–1980 to have a theocratic Islamist constitution drafted and ratified and to establish an Islamic Republic against all sorts of ideological and political resistance to it. When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in September 1980, Khomeini took advantage of the catastrophic war that followed, 1980–1988, to consolidate his power. In the process, he demolished the economic infrastructure of the country and destroyed its revolutionary disposition. Once again, toward the end of his life, when the crisis of succession to his charismatic terror was in jeopardy, Khomeini manufactured yet another diversionary incident in the Salman Rushdie affair and orchestrated a revision of the Islamist constitution to sustain the rule of the Shi’i clergy. By the time he died in 1989, Khomeini had at once achieved and discredited the highest aspirations of an Islamist revolution. The post-Khomeini decade of the 1990s further consolidated the historical evidence of how “Islamic ideology” came to a crescendo with the rise of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and then came to an end with the fall of the Islamic Republic from the grace of legitimacy. Today, the office and institution of Velayat-e faqih—supreme and absolutist authority of the Shi’i Jurist—continues to reign supreme with no regard for any democratic principles, and the fragile steps of democratic institutionalization of the collective will of the nation, expressed in the successive presidential elections of Mohammad Khatami and other parliamentary and city council elections, are thwarted by a relentless succession of domestic and global quandaries. Militant Islamism, as the doppelgänger of “the West,” came to its zenith and fell flat on its face with the Islamic Revolution of 1977–1979.
Excerpt From The End of Two Illusions by Hamid Dabashi
Comments