Islamic Awakening and Identity Wars

(Forthcoming)

Abstract

Islamic Awakening and Identity Wars delineates historical factors that amplified the dominance of contemporary religious identities over other social identities and explains why attempts to secularize the Middle East have failed after the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate at the end of World War I. It provides insight into the contemporary socio-economic movement known as the Islamic Awakening, which is presently led by three competing groups of religious fundamentalists: the Salafi-Wahhabi, the Muslim Brotherhood (aka Brothers), and the Shia theocracy known as the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist (Wilayat al-Faqih). It argues that the Islamic Awakening intensified competition among the members of monotheistic belief systems thriving within mutually exclusive social groups. The intense competition was often accompanied by violence because these belief systems lack the conceptual means to contain discord and thereby contain the other groups. Those rival groups could not coexist without conceiving group outsiders as infidels (kuffár), heretics (zanádiqah), or apostates (murtadin), who at best are not worthy of equal social status and at worst deserve execution. That conceptual inability to peacefully contain theological variants was a result of centuries of intellectual decline that culminated in the triumph of religion over philosophy. Moreover, the association of each group or state with a religious identity both reframed conflicts over power and resources along religious lines and recast their motives as religious missions. On the rhetorical level, the emerging new transnational media moved private intra-religious and inter-religious discord to the public sphere, solidified group identities, and paved the way for a transition from openly hostile verbal confrontations to identity wars. Defusing these identity wars requires re-directing identity constructs and group formations in the Middle East towards common elements shared by its inhabitants and away from exclusionary religious identities.

Scope, Objectives, and Contribution

In the Muslim world, religious identity is prioritised over other social identities, and political entrepreneurs tendentiously merge religion and politics in their quests for power and fame; trajectories that have culminated in societal paradigms unique to other regions of the world. Islamic Awakening and Identity Wars chronicles the rise of religiosity during the past five decades among Middle Eastern Muslim populations and expounds on the associated sociopolitical implications for both the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. Using perspectives of Middle Easterners through informal dialogues, among whom the author has lived and interacted for most of his life, this book explicates the Islamic Awakening by analysing social, psychological, and cultural factors that encourage prioritisation of religiosity over other human activities and value religious identity over all other social identities. It also illuminates how those very factors that promote religiosity also reinforce the resilient authoritarian model of governance so prevalent within the various Middle Eastern social structures, thereby perpetuating this reverence for religiosity.

The first three chapters of Islamic Awakening and Identity Wars define the Islamic Awakening and explain its roots by tracing the major contemporary social cleavages in the Middle East back to competing monotheistic belief systems, specifically the prevailing exclusionary religious identities of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The narrative then reveals how this combination of monotheism, evangelism, and state power enabled military campaigns to expand into the territories of non-conformists and appropriate resources under the guise of religious missions. Two great powers emerged from the duelling Christian and Islamic monotheistic philosophies, demarcated their territories, and fought intermittent wars against each other. Although the military incursions and settlements into the opposing territories brought accompanying intellectual interaction, each dominion still experienced different social and political circumstances that launched separate paths of intellectual and political development.

As the European populations advanced through the 17th and 18th centuries’ Age of Reason and Age of Enlightenment, technical and political progress led to an industrial revolution and relative individual freedoms; Islamic Awakening and Identity Wars exemplifies this intellectual activity linked to a similar intellectual trend in the Muslim world between the 9th and 13th centuries. Then, a gradual reversal of this trend in the Middle East began because of Muslim states’ failure to support spontaneous progress in philosophical thought, culminating in the eventual endorsement of literal transmission of religious scriptures over rational thought. Moreover, state support for religious authorities who harboured hostility to rational thought contributed to the eventual triumph of religion over philosophy, which in turn precipitated the decline of science and technology.

On the world’s political stage, having suffered continual, even to the present day, humiliating military defeats against the technologically and organisationally superior Western powers, Muslim clerics struggled to explain the decline of Muslim power. In the absence of rational and empirical thinking, clerics interpreted those repeated defeats, as well as the forceful creation of Israel in the heart of the Muslim world, as divine retribution for straying from strict adherence to God’s laws as laid down in Muslim scriptures. Because those scriptures are believed to have been literally adhered to during the era of the Pious Ancestors in the formative years of Islam that accompanied Muslim military expansion, that era gradually morphed into an ideal that ought to be replicated to regain lost Muslim power. Meanwhile, on the local, social stage, Muslim males saw the return to religiosity as a convenient vehicle to counter growing women’s liberation and to restore threatened male power within the familial and local patriarchal value system.

Chapter four describes how Western technology and improved communication enabled freelance religious authorities educated in the Wahhabi and Muslim Brother’s (aka Brotherhood) traditions to reach a wider audience than they had in the past, thereby accelerating this retreat to the imagined era of Pious Ancestors (al-Salaf al-Saleh) the religious leaders so desired. By circumventing secular state censorship of local media, they could evangelise their literalist religious traditions at the expense of official secular and nationalist ideologies, thus giving birth to the contemporary iteration of the Islamic Awakening. The Internet and social media proved a means for conflicting and mutually offensive private beliefs to cascade through the public realm, consequently distributing hostile attitudes from among the clerical elites to the masses who already identified with their respective religious groups. Chapter five delineates identity wars that ensued under various covers and alleged purposes while super and regional powers sided with factions based on material and security interests. Certain groups were armed by outside actors, such as regional or superpowers, which resulted in conflict between the groups and a further destabilisation of the Middle East, thereby precipitating both a wave of migration and the birth of a security threat to the entire world.

The final chapters discuss both short- and long-term strategies to mitigate the continuing identity wars and rebuild a safer, more secure Middle East. Initially, Islamic Awakening and Identity Wars suggests that state institutions refrain from adopting religious identity symbols and instead promote a focus on the protection of individual rights. The longer-term recommendation necessitates cultivating conditions and concrete plans for states to generate overarching identities based on shared non-aggressive cultural symbols. Such collective identities mitigate the overarching importance of exclusionary religious beliefs and practices that tend to provide persistent fertile ground for intra-group narratives of anger and hate to develop into inter-group violence. In this context of advocating inclusive identity formation in the Middle East, a special chapter is devoted to the creation of the state of Israel, its inadvertent insertion into the prevailing identity wars, and possible solutions for the regional challenges.

Chapter Abstracts

Chapter 1: From Monotheism to Religious Tyranny

When, in 380 CE, Emperor Theodosius issued the Edict of Thessalonica that made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, he effectively made monotheism the state religion. As a result, religious nonconformity began to be increasingly viewed as a challenge against the authority of its emperor and thereby a threat to the security of the entire empire. While the polytheistic Romans had fought and disciplined their rebellious and tax-evading subjects, their Christian monotheistic descendants affixed a religious dimension to the state security apparatus and functions. The emerging clerical class reported only to the emperor, and they were delegated the task of ensuring conformity to the one religious doctrine endorsed by the state, one among the many doctrines which had been inaugurated by the previous belief system. Failure of that clerical class to safeguard conformity prompted the intervention of the emperor, a task undertaken by each successive emperor, especially with his Near Eastern subjects. Yet, religious non-conformity persisted, and when religious policing devolved into violence, non-conformists fled underground, founding separate churches that were administered to by their own hierarchies. These emerging churches devised their own group boundaries with their own ranks patrolling the territories, lest the spontaneous socio-psychological dynamics of exclusion fail to preserve internal group cohesion.

In the ruling empire, the antagonism between the official and splinter churches forced the weaker ones to cluster around their churches for protection and material support, leading to the formation of sects with independent infrastructures. Consequently, sectarian group membership became a means for securing a livelihood, thereby strengthening inclusive sectarian ties at the expense of wider connections. Such sectarian groupings were further strengthened when the Romans in the Near East and North Africa were replaced by the Muslim empire. The latter officially recognised the sectarian monotheistic Christian and Jewish groups and dealt with them as autonomous religious communities, with each group subject to its own religious laws. However, Muslim tolerance of monotheistic non-Muslims depended on their submission to a multitude of repressive social rules. Those statutes regulated social interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims, moderating both mundane interaction and more serious matters, such as taxation, serving in government office, intermarriage, and criminal conduct. Those social regulations marginalised non-Muslims in the urban centres within the Muslim Empire and further estranged them from any larger concept of collective identity, an alienation felt beyond the non-Muslim groups. A religious orthodoxy had emerged in the eleventh-century Muslim empire that denigrated non-conformist Muslims into apostates who, in turn, either migrated to remote and less accessible terrains or secretly held and practised their beliefs. The monotheistic Roman intolerance of non-conformists was replaced in the Middle East and North Africa by Muslim state intolerance of non-conforming Muslims. The notion of one God, one doctrine, one nation, one leader re-invented itself in the Muslim world, causing persistent religious tension amongst the various sects of Muslims, Jews, and Christians that often culminated in violent hostilities, which could best be described today as identity wars. Moreover, the notion of one God, one doctrine, one nation, one leader matched perfectly with the authoritarian model of governance that prevails in the Middle East up to this day, where the top leader in the power structure derives his power from brute force over his subordinates, as opposed to consensual bargaining among various parties of independent source of powers.

Chapter 2: Religion’s Triumph over Philosophy

As Muslims reached majority status in the Middle East and North Africa between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, religious authorities discouraged challenges to religious dogmas, attacked philosophers, disparaged independent judgment in determining morality, and encouraged reliance on clerics for religious interpretation and guidance. To perpetuate this reliance, religious authorities set up new religious schools that excluded study in the logically intensive branches of Muslim theology and the rational sciences, thereby stumping an enlightenment movement in its infancy. Those schools produced the subsequent generation of clerics, who issued religious judgments against heterodox Muslims and non-Muslims and ushered in profound social implications that persist today. The decrease in philosophical thinking coincided with the decline of Muslim Civilization, which, in turn, eventually weakened Muslim power and lead to their military defeats, the subjugation of the land of Islam (Dar al-Islam) under direct West European colonial rule, and the creation of a Jewish state in its midst that continues to remind Muslims of their loss of supremacy.

Chapter 3: The Islamic Awakening

This chapter derives interpretative material from informal conversations between the author and native Middle Easterners from 1975 to 2021. During this period, signs of the Islamic Awakening gradually formed. While the first 1979-82 revolt of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria failed, the Shia theocracy in Iran captured power, and the span culminated in a region-wide outbreak of identity wars across the Middle East in 2011. Various factors contributed to the rise of religiosity across the Arabic-speaking world, spreading later among Muslim communities worldwide. They may be grouped into three categories: (1) reaction to Western scientific and technological progress, (2) failure of secular Arab leaders to secure borders with the Israeli state and reign in its settlement activities, and (3) intra-Muslim competition for leadership of the Muslim world.

Coming to a head, suspicion of official religious authorities clearly linked to the state has led politically conscious but officially unrecognised clerics to found informal networks clustered around places of worship. The revolt led by the Muslim Brotherhood in late seventies Syria revealed the extent to which mosques served as infrastructure for informal delivery of sermons, militant recruitment and training, and the occasional storage of weapons. Today, because the Arab Israeli conflict continues, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood of Hamas and the Lebanese Shia Hezbollah have become internationally known for their establishment of informal resource-sharing networks. Both have developed extremely effective informal organisations that challenge formal institutions and function independently; each leading their own version of the Islamic Awakening.

Chapter 4: Making Private Beliefs Public

By making privately held beliefs public, religious entrepreneurs have used the new satellite-based media and Internet publishing to propagate religious ideology. Through access to widely viewed television channels such as Al-Jazeera, religious authorities have publicly broadcast previously unacknowledged sectarian identifications and induced intra-Muslim sectarian competition. Those religious authorities, in turn, transmitted their appearances and messages over online media. Consequently, public acknowledgment of private beliefs and attitudes towards symbols of rival sects eased the transition from the formal secular discourse of state-controlled media to a new, informal sectarian discourse of the modern media. Sectarian identification, which had traditionally been seen as shameful to acknowledge in public discourse, became acceptable; this overt sectarian identification legitimised and fuelled religious ideology at the expense of the secular nationalist ideologies that had dominated Middle Eastern politics since the end of World War II.

Chapter 5: Identity Wars

This chapter characterises one major dimension of the current Middle Eastern conflicts as a form of identity wars. Analysing the substance of religious cleavages that have persisted to the present time illuminates how the group conflicts that form periodically then explode into full-fledged wars. Larger or more powerful groups demanded that smaller or weaker ones conform to symbolic representations of their identities, associated beliefs, and social values. Those demands were reinforced by prejudicial attitudes and transmitted through intra- and inter-group contact. Nonconformists were viewed as heretics, apostates, or infidels, clearly inhibiting assimilation, and cultivating fertile grounds for secular conflicts to be recast along religious and sectarian fault lines. As a result, power conflicts between political entrepreneurs or group conflicts over resources often mutate into violent sectarian conflicts that draw upon foundational aspects of society, such as religious identity and the historical formation of that identity. As new media broadened popular awareness of religious history and its associated identities, perceived identification with the nation-state weakened, and people were severed from their local identities. People then related to the world through their religions, which identified with rival metaphysical beliefs; rival historical characters were perceived to have antagonised each other since the formative years of those identity-sharing groups. While the ongoing identity wars are multi-dimensional and range among groups, participants reveal a hierarchy of antagonism between groups, reflecting temporally shifting priorities of transitionally fluid opponents and allies. The chapter concludes by arguing that, given the prevailing knowledge structures and strong religious identification, current regional alliances reflect short-term regime security concerns as opposed to common strategic objectives, thereby predicting the persistence of identity wars in the future.

Chapter 6: Israel’s Prospects as a Jewish State

Following the military defeat that accompanied the violent Arab reaction to the 1948 creation of the Israeli state as a national homeland for people worldwide claiming Jewish identity, the influx of Palestinian refugees into Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq led to hostilities towards Jews at both official and popular levels. Local Muslim populations no longer viewed Jews as “dhimmis” who merited physical protection under Muslim Law but as internal enemies, while long-held anti-Jewish sentiments persisted in the religious Christian milieu. These hostilities made it easier for underground Zionist networks to encourage and organise the exodus of Jews from Arabic-speaking countries, subsequently almost reducing the Jewish presence in the Arabic-speaking world outside of Israel to none. For the Muslim masses worldwide, the legitimacy of Israel remains questionable even though Israel has managed to sign peace treaties with the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, and Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain with Saudi Arabia and Oman currently prepared to officially recognise Israel as a Jewish homeland, but as part of a two state solution to the conflict. Indeed, notwithstanding the increased Arab-Israeli state to state normalisation, anti-Israeli sentiments have been persistently rising among citizenry since the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The First Gulf War, in which the US ousted the Iraqi army from Kuwait and placed Iraq under siege, followed in 1991-92, and another war in 2003 toppled its ruling regime. Despite Gulf Arab and other official state media mirroring the US media narrative of framing those wars against individuals, such as Yasser Arafat or Saddam Hussein, Arab masses nonetheless saw them along religious lines, as warfare waged by Christians against Muslims on behalf of Israel. As discussed in “Chapter 5: Identity Wars,” the Arab-Israeli conflict that had been viewed as a conflict over property rights transformed from a secular conflict into one that is now widely viewed as a religious conflict between Muslims and Jews. As each side claims the divine right to rule the same land for its respective people, the Islamic Awakening sharpens the contrast between the elements constituting the Muslim and Jewish identities. As members further gravitate to and rigidly define their corresponding religious identity-sharing groups, Islamists confront the Zionist project more credibly than previous Arab nationalists did. These categorical identities and related challenges open a new horizon for waves of violent conflicts to continue unabated and further complicated by the current intra-Jewish conflict we are currently witnessing in Israel.

Chapter 7: Islam’s Prospects in the Non-Muslim World

Paradoxically, the Islamic Awakening was accompanied by a wave of Muslim migration to the West. While this wave was part of a global trend of movement from less to more developed regions, admittedly not all immigrants were Islamists, so explaining why Islamist immigrants who view the western world from a hostile religious lens would migrate to the West poses a special challenge. This chapter argues that western secular societal norms, higher standards of living, and relative tolerance of non-conformity outweighed the Islamists’ loss of power in their own local public sphere, thus prompting their voluntary migration to western countries. Yet, Islamists’ expectations for their value system to be accommodated by western societies, as opposed to their accommodation of western liberal values, potentially clashes with certain western political forces that see Islamists’ value system as a threat to their liberal values. On both sides of the North Atlantic, we are already witnessing the rise of right-wing political forces whose political campaigns have moved the centre of political life to the far right, ushering in an era where extreme political action can potentially be deployed. A key battleground on the value conflict spectrum is the place of women in society. The significant gains that western women have accomplished in the past century will not be easily reversed to accommodate the male-dominated value system promoted by the Islamist immigrants. Secular western societies, both liberal and conservative, will eventually realise that assimilating the Islamists in a manner compatible with secular humanist principles benefits all involved.

Chapter 8: Rising Out of Religious Nationalism

The final chapter outlines mechanisms by which socio-psychological processes transformed the metaphysical beliefs and tribal emotions of Middle Eastern communities into varieties of nationalism. Despite persistent attempts to diagnose the nature of today’s conflicts in the Middle East with superficial notions of a struggle against dictatorship or terrorism, or a fight for democracy or national independence, the religious and sectarian dimensions of most current conflicts cannot be ignored. In contemporary times, the Islamic Awakening has sharpened the religious and sectarian lines along which Middle Easterners divide themselves; these figurative boundaries have inspired them to build their imagined nations based on elements of their religious and sectarian identities. Direct or proxy wars have ensued to project those imagined nations’ power and expand territories they control. After the decline of the last minor stronghold of Middle Eastern Christianity in Lebanon, today’s discord is relegated to a struggle between a non-evangelical Jewish identity and various Muslim sectarian identities. Three competing evangelical religious-political forces lead Middle Eastern Muslim masses today: Salafi-Wahhabi, Muslim Brotherhood, and the Rule of the Jurist (Wilayat al-Faqih) of the Shia theocracy, all of whom are still hostile to the notion of accepting Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people on the land of Palestine, a land that they still view as the Muslim land. The chapter argues that if we were to leave intact the knowledge structures that have perpetuated those competing monotheistic traditions, each perceiving itself as a nation with a divinely inspired mission to lead humankind, the Middle East will never live in peace. By virtue of its geostrategic location linking three continents, as well as its financial and intellectual connections with superpowers, most importantly the USA, persistent Middle Eastern conflicts are bound to destabilise the world in numerous ways. The chapter also argues that identity reconstruction to the exclusion of traditional Abrahamic identities would separate religion from nationhood and build ties around common humanistic cultural elements, freeing people from the exclusionary religious traps in which they currently live.