Keywords

Now, there are opposing voices against research such as we are aiming at here. I do not need to list all the press commentaries on this topic in a collection of quotations, even in such respected media as the “NZZ”, the “Süddeutsche” and the “Welt”. Today, as a European “normal citizen”, as it should be in the model case, I first turn to the exemplary, best-practice European authority responsible for “political education” in Europe, namely the Federal Agency for Civic Education in Bonn, FRG, which is subordinate to the German Federal Ministry of the Interior in Berlin, I receive a downright devastating answer. In the relevant publication of the “Bundeszentrale”, Christian Meier, Islamic scholar and historian and since 2016 also editor of the Frankfurt F.A.Z., warnsFootnote 1 with final and ultimate clarity against using the term “political Islam” at all, and whoever uses this term nevertheless, is committing to alarmist thinking, placing Muslims under a “general suspicion”, fishing in the right-wing voters’ pond and using a term that has incitement potential. The original quote of the corresponding article of the Federal Agency for Civic Education reads as follows, and dozens of press articles have repeated these arguments:

“In any case, it is certain that the term “political Islam” has become a fighting term. Its vagueness and openness make it suitable as a collective term for the political activities of Muslims. At the same time, however, this makes it a projection surface for enemy images and anti-Muslim fears—in other words, potentially an instrument of populism. It remains questionable whether all those who use the term are aware of this. […] Political Islam has become a term of art for Islam haters. […] An evaluation of the four national daily newspapers F.A.Z., “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, “Tageszeitung” and “Welt” shows that the term “political Islam” has been used more and more frequently over the past decade. And not only in absolute numbers, but also in comparison to the frequency with which the term “Islamism” is used (which, however, is still much more common).

“Political Islam” is now usually used in a much more focused way: as a phenomenon that primarily affects Germany and Europe. And it is often linked to the activities of institutionally organised Muslims in these countries—the so-called Islamic associations. The thrust is—unsurprisingly given the polarisation of any kind of debate about Islam—strongly critical to alarmist. This line can be traced back at least to November 2016, when the CSU adopted the guiding motion “Political Islam” at its party conference, which began with the sentence: “Political Islam is the greatest challenge of our time.

Criticism of the use of the term has not been absent. It is mainly aimed at the lack of or inadequate definition of what “political Islam” is supposed to be. Instead, Muslims are placed under “general suspicion”, it is said. Politicians would take advantage of the unclear term and its proximity to “Islam” and in this way “fish in the right-wing voters’ pond”. […] In Germany, meanwhile, the president of the Central Committee of German Catholics, Thomas Sternberg, stated that he was critical of the term: It has incitement potential because it confuses politics with violence.”

The internationally renowned younger Austrian political scientist Farid Hafez (Bayraklı, & Hafez, 2018; Hafez, 2014), together with the IGGÖ (Islamic Religious Community of Austria), is one of the harshest critics of the use of the term “political Islam”.Footnote 2 Under the title “Are France and Austria waging a war against ‘political Islam’ - or a war against Muslims?”, Farid Hafez concisely summarised his arguments in the left-liberal Israeli daily Haaretz on 4 April 2021.Footnote 3 Farid Hafez says there is a loud controversy about a law drafted by the French government that aims to combat Islamic “separatism” and violent radicalism, but which critics, according to Hafez, accuse of being a clear example of the assumption of collective guilt of all French Muslims for murder, of the denial of individual rights and of state-supported Islamophobia. But at least there is a vigorous national debate about it in France and beyond. According to Hafez, a similar campaign is being waged against the Muslim community in Austria, but with far less media amplification or public solidarity. After 9/11, Hafez said, Austria’s political elite used its Muslim population as an example of “good, domesticated Muslims”.Footnote 4

2.1 The Scientific GPS for the Analysis of Politics in the Middle East

Our coordinate system of Middle Eastern political forces is based, and we are happy to put this bluntly, exclusively on the annual report of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, Israel (INSS, 2020), known as the “Strategic Survey for Israel 2019”. With the INSS, one of the Jewish state’s leading security think tanks, we see the following political forces at work in the Gulf region and the greater Middle East, and we supplement this general coordinate system of the region with our own empirical data and background information, as we have worked up in particular in Tausch (2021).

  • The radical Shiite axis: This cluster is led by Iran and includes Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, the Shiite militias operating in various arenas in the Middle East and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (despite its Sunni identity). A direct estimate of the strength of support for this camp among the Arab public can be derived from the latest version of the Arab Opinion Index (2020) produced by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (ACPRS) in Doha, Qatar. 25% of all residents surveyed in thirteen Arab countries and territories (= West Bank + Gaza) are behind this current. Supporters view Iranian foreign policy (very) positively. The resistance of the Arab public to this camp is now really considerable. 58% see Iranian foreign policy negatively, and 12% believe that Iran is the greatest security threat to the Arab world today.

  • The pragmatic Sunni states: This bloc includes Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Arab Gulf states. The author of this study very clearly advocates improved cooperation between Europe and these countries, including in more sensitive areas of foreign and security policy. These actors promote a pro-Western, anti-Iranian, anti-Islamist and nationalist vision. Using data from the Arab Barometer, we find that population-weighted 41% of all Arabs now view the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the strongest and most coherent force in political Islam, negatively or very negatively. When weighted by the total population in Arab countries, only 7% of people in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Gaza and the West Bank, Sudan, Tunisia and Yemen now have a high level of confidence in their country’s Islamist movement (source of summary; both by Arab Barometer), while 14% have some confidence, 19% little confidence but 60% no confidence.

  • The Sunni Islamists: This group includes adherents of Muslim Brotherhood-style “political Islam”Footnote 5: Turkey and certainly Hamas and the remnants of the Muslim Brotherhood and its derivative movements throughout the region, such as Ennahda, the political party in Tunisia, belong to this camp (see also Solomon & Tausch, 2020, 2021). Data from the Arab Barometer suggest that 49% of all Arabs still view the leader of contemporary Sunni Islamism, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, favourably. However, general support for the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist political forces has declined sharply in recent years: Support for Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas has fallen in public opinion in the years since the Arab uprisings, research by BBC News Arabic has found. The English-language newspaper The National (UAE), writes about this with unparalleled clarity: “More than 25,000 Arabs in 11 states and territories - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Yemen, Jordan, Iraq, Sudan and Lebanon - were asked their views on everything from religion to mental health and homosexuality to the role of women in society. A sharp decline in trust for groups espousing political and radical Islam was among the key findings. There has been a marked overall decline in trust in political Islam. […] This pattern continues a general trend of loss of trust for Islamists in Mena states that has taken place across the region since the Arab uprisings. […] Despite the initial success of Islamist movements in Egypt and Tunisia, there is growing evidence that Islamism has been in decline over the past eight years.” The National (UAE), 24 June 2019, available at https://www.thenationalnews.com/trust-in-radical-islamist-movements-plummets-major-survey-finds-1.878578

  • The jihadists: This camp includes the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda, as well as their associated terrorist organisations. According to the latest Arab Opinion Index by the ACPSR in Qatar, 3% of all Arabs now openly and strongly support ISIL (Daesh), and 2% support it to some extent. Support for ISIL (Daesh) has been declining since 2014, when 4% of all residents of the Arab world viewed ISIL (Daesh) very positively and another 7% viewed ISIL (Daesh) somewhat positively.

2.2 Political Islam

John L. Esposito, Professor of Religion and International Affairs and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and Founding Director of the Prince Alwaleed Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown Jesuit University, wrote in 2012 with crystal clarity that the phenomenon known as political Islam has its roots in a contemporary religious resurgence in private and public life. Esposito, in 2012, also gave a list of political movements that he called political Islamic movements, which is clear and still relevant today, and is used congruently by a wide range of other authors cited in this study. Far from using a purely “fighting term”, Esposito referred to the following movements as representing “political Islam”:

  • The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Sudan and Jordan

  • Jamaat-i-Islami in South Asia

  • The Refah Party in Turkey

  • The Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria

  • al Nahda in Tunisia

  • Hizballah in Lebanon

  • Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories and

  • Gamaa Islamiyya and Jihad in Egypt.

Esposito (2012) added at the time that the causes of the resurgence were religious-cultural, political and socio-economic. Issues of faith, politics and social justice—authoritarianism, oppression, unemployment, housing, social services, distribution of wealth and corruption—would intertwine as catalysts.

In the Arab public political debate, the term “political Islam” is of course used just as frequently. For reasons of space, our presentation can probably only be like an express train. Especially the media and academic institutions in the Gulf states, including Qatar, frequently use the term “political Islam”. Under the title “Where is political Islam headed?”, for example, Khalil al-Anani, Associate Professor of political science at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar (https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/12/24/whither-political-islam) writes on al Jazeera that the demise of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) has brought political Islam to a crossroad. It has shown not only that ideology in itself is no guarantee of political success, but also that Islamists need to rethink their strategy and tactics to cope with the new post-Arab Spring environment. However, the debate about the end of political Islam in the Middle East is not only premature, but also irrelevant and certainly misleading. Instead, it would be more effective to discuss the ideological and political changes that might occur within Islamist movements during the crisis period.

Crystal clear, al-Anani also sees that the majority of Islamist movements in the Arab world maintain a conservative and outdated vision that could not live up to the aspirations and dreams that fuelled the Arab Spring years ago.

Al Jazeera spoke on 21 May 2016, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/5/21/tunisias-ennahda-distances-itself-from-political-islam also about Tunisia, for example, and says Tunisia’s conservative Ennahda party says it has “severed ties” with any “political Islam”. Khaled Abou El Fadl, Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law and Chair of the Interdepartmental Programme in Islamic Studies at UCLA, in his commentary on al Jazeera, which is still readable today (https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/7/8/egypt-is-political-islam-dead), says, among other things, that after the military coup in Egypt, many commentators concluded that “political Islam has been dealt a death blow” from which such movements will never recover.

Under the title “Hard times for the “champion” of political Islam. Erdogan’s failures should not bring back crude clichés about the incompatibility of political Islam with democracy”, respected Turkish Analyst Cengiz Aktar, Senior Scholar at the Istanbul Policy Center, also on al Jazeera (https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/1/30/hard-times-for-champion-of-political-islam), says that Turkey and its ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have been going through hard times for some time. As the “champion” of political Islam among Muslim countries, Turkey is a “model” for some.

In no uncertain terms, Aktar is almost prophetic in naming the crises on the horizon of “political Islam” in Turkey, which have indeed deepened since the publication of his commentary: a triple discrepancy between, as Aktar puts it, foreign activism, democratic credentials at home and shortcomings in economic recovery; a lack of experience in balancing great values with real politics; a mere confessionalism that jeopardises relations with neighbouring countries; an overconfidence, which quickly shifts the focus from strategic ties (membership in the European Union and NATO) to “global delusions” such as the dream of becoming a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Council and buying NATO-incompatible Chinese missile systems, unlimited power, the steady erosion of remaining checks and balances at all levels of government. In the aforementioned article, Cengiz Aktar also identifies the basic problems of “political Islam” in Turkey today: firstly, the AKP has remained in power for far too long, especially Erdogan, who has fallen prey to the corruption of power that Lord Acton has brought to bear, secondly the overconfidence that came from early successes in the economy, democratic reforms and diplomatic activism and thirdly a growing incompetence resulting from Erdogan’s one-man show and lack of teamwork. Aktar also speaks of the dismal state of political Islam after the Arab Awakening and that the intellectuals who give credit to the ruling AKP are actually useful idiots for the ruling party.

Confronted with this view in the leading medium of the Arab world, which broadcasts from Qatar, we therefore want to try to present objective and comprehensible data on the topic of “political Islam”. In doing so, we refer to proven and trustworthy, freely available international opinion polls and want to use them to gain new perspectives on the topic of “political Islam” in the Arab world and in Western Europe. In particular, we use the “Arab Barometer Survey”, which was co-designed by Qatar University, among others.

2.3 “Political Islam” and Its Open Supporters

Perhaps one of the great surprises for the current debate on “political Islam” in Europe is that it can be demonstrated that there were and are indeed voices in the “security establishment” and in the think tanks and research centres of Western countries concerned with the problem who, in the face of the terrorist challenge posed by jihadism, have advocated and continued to advocate working with forces of “political Islam” if they embrace democracy and reject terrorist jihadism. In Arena (2017) and Tausch (2021), it was shown that none other than, for example, Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces 2009 to 2017 and 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Obama himself, advocated such a perspective. It is irrelevant whether it could be historically proven that his predecessors in office did not also advocate such a position. A report in the newspaper “Gulf News”, which is published in the United Arab Emirates, was a leading piece of journalism in this context and was widely commented on in other global media.Footnote 6 It was also dealt with accordingly in a hearing in the American Congress.Footnote 7 These reports, which were never questioned by the Democratic Party, said that in the last decade two successive US administrations had close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in the United Arab Emirates, in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Libya. As it was summarised in Tausch, 2021, the Obama administration conducted a new assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2010 and 2011, even before the events known as the “Arab Spring” erupted in Tunisia and Egypt. The president personally issued Presidential Study Directive 11 (PSD-11) in 2010, in which he ordered a new assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood and other (literally) “political Islamist” movements (“political Islamist movements”), including the ruling AKP in Turkey (Tausch, 2021) and ultimately concluded that the USA should abandon its long-standing policy of supporting “stability” in the Middle East and North Africa (i.e. supporting “stable regimes” even if they were authoritarian) to a policy of supporting “moderate” Islamist political movements.

To date, Presidential Study Directive PSD-11 has remained secret, because it reveals an embarrassingly naive and uninformed view of developments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.Footnote 8

There are also other weighty voices in the West that advocate “political Islam”. In contrast to the uptight discussion, especially in German-speaking countries, however, these voices make no secret of calling the phenomenon by its name—political Islam. The shades of academic advocacy of a “political Islam” range from the hope for a “political Islam” as a partner of the West and in the West’s own interest, entirely in the sense of US President Barack Obama’s Study Directive PSD-11, to the vision of the overthrow of the capitalist world order, perceived as unjust, by the global political left in explicit alliance with political Islam.

The first, politically more moderate position is advocated by the distinguished Canadian political science professor Nader Hashemi, who researches and teaches in Denver, Colorado, in his study “Political Islam: A 40 Year Retrospective” (Hashemi, 2021). Nader Hashemi attempts to present a summa summarum quite informed analysis of “political Islam” and believes that the Western world—in line with President Obama’s analysis—should nevertheless see “political Islam” as a democratic movement, despite all the failures and undesirable developments that could have been observed in particular in Egypt under President Morsi and in Turkey under President Erdogan with “political Islam in power”.

The radical vision of the overthrow of the capitalist, world order by the political left in alliance with political Islam has been vehemently advocated by, among others, the respected French social scientist Francois Burgat, most recently in Burgat, 2019 (Understanding Political Islam).

2.3.1 Political Islam—Not a Gateway Drug to Islamist Terror (Hashemi Study, 2021)

For Hashemi, political Islam emerged as a reaction to the decline of Muslim civilisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Second, according to Hashemi, political Islamists (Hashemi, 2021) gradually developed a political theory for a just society based on a critique of secular paradigms and anchored in an argument about Islamic authenticity. Its appeal, according to the aforementioned study, grew over time in direct proportion to the failure of Muslim ruling elites to advance political and economic development. Third, political Islam has been an opposition movement for most of its history. Forty years ago, Hashemi argues, political Islam had no direct experience of political power or control over state institutions. On this last point, Hashemi says, 2021, much has changed in recent decades, with significant consequences for the future development, attractiveness and orientation of political Islam. Looking back over the last 40 years, the study says, political Islam’s experience of political power stands out as an important development.

In his study (2021), Hashemi clarifies where social scientists can study the participation in power of currents and movements of “political Islam” in the future—without ifs and buts. In

  • Afghanistan

  • Egypt

  • Gaza

  • Iraq

  • Iran

  • Jordan

  • Kuwait

  • Malaysia

  • Morocco

  • Sudan

  • Tunisia

  • Turkey

had all, according to Hashemi, experienced religiously based political movements contesting political power and gaining control of the state to varying degrees. Without mincing words, Hashemi also names the leading ideologues—without asterisk spelling because they were all men—of “political Islam”, namely Hasan Al-Banna (1906–1949), Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), Abul A’la Maududi (1903–1979) as well as Hasan al-Turabi (1932–2016)Footnote 9 (see also Euben and Zaman, 2009).

The Hashemi Study, 2021, makes clear: the reputation of political Islam among the population, whose ideology goes back to Hasan Al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, Abul A’la Maududi as well as Hasan al-Turabi, has been tarnished by his experiences with state power. As an opposition movement, he had once held a high moral position. Its critique of secular ideologies, the political status quo and Western policies towards the Middle East would have appealed to many sections of society. According to Hashemi, in 2021, the Islamist vision of a new political order enjoyed the benefit of the doubt among those who sympathised with its narrative. This has changed markedly since 1980, he said, especially with the interplay and takeover of state power by political Islamist movements. According to Hashemi, the waning appeal of political Islam is most evident in Iran. Decades of military rule in Sudan, supported by the forces of political Islam, Hashemi said, led to similar results. Hashemi, 2021, also argues that political Islam’s various experiments in attaining state power have, all in all, cast a negative light on this sociopolitical movement. This claim, the study argues, is particularly true for those cases in which Islamists came to power through revolution (Iran), a military coup (Sudan) or military conquest (Afghanistan). According to Hashemi, in the wake of the Arab Spring, several Arab countries (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates) officially banned the Muslim Brotherhood or declared it a terrorist organisation in 2021. But is the Muslim Brotherhood a “gateway drug” to radicalisation or does it act as a firewall by limiting violent activities? The latter claim is made by Hashemi, 2021. He argues that proponents of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “gateway drug” to terror rarely cite empirical studies to support their claim. The Muslim Brotherhood, Hashemi 2021 argues, is thus criticised not because it is a proponent of violence, but because it is fundamentally opposed to the regional status quo and the political regimes that seek to maintain it. Many of the most prominent proponents of violent revolution in the Arab-Islamic world, from Sayyid Qutb to Abu Musab al-Zarkawi to Ayman al-Zawahiri, were products of prison systems in the Arab-Islamic world where they spent years in prison and were subjected to unspeakable cruelty. It is therefore not surprising that people who have been subjected to prolonged torture and extreme interrogation conclude that violence is a legitimate political tool.

2.3.2 For an Explicit Alliance of the Global Left and Political Islam: Francois Burgat (2019)

The French social scientist and Arabist Francois Burgat, who is respected far beyond the borders of France, has turned the entire debate in the German-speaking countries upside down in his publications and says explicitly, militantly and with brilliant rhetoric that “political Islam” should be the ally of the political left of the West in the struggle against the capitalist world order. Jihadism only represents a “counter-violence” against the unjust world order. Islamism and jihadism are above all mass protests by self-confident political, often revolutionary actors. This would all have to do with post-colonial suffering, the identification of youth with the “Palestinian cause”, the rejection of Western interventions in the Middle East and the rejection of France, which Burgat describes as racist and Islamophobic.

Francois Burgat, who has lived in the region for more than four decades and who cannot be accused of not knowing the Middle East, has in many of his publications, which have been very widely received internationally, among others in Burgat, 2003 (Face to face with political Islam), Burgat, 2016 (Comprendre l’islam politique: une trajectoire de recherche sur l’altérité islamiste, 1973–2016) and most recently in Burgat, 2019 (Understanding Political Islam), he not only explicitly uses the term “political Islam” with a positive connotation, but he vehemently pleads for a global alliance of the political left with “political Islam” in order to overcome the capitalist world order, which he perceives as corrupted. For him, “political Islam” is a tremendously important bearer of hope for overturning this unjust world order and the most important voice of protest today from the Global South.Footnote 10 With all the force of his language, Burgat says completely unapologetically that he is for “political Islam” and that the global and also the European left should enter into an alliance with it.

For Burgat, the spectrum of political Islam includes violent terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) as well as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and such parties as Tunisia’s Ennahda. Burgat, in sharp contrast to the internationally equally high-profile French Islam researcher Gilles Kepel (cf. Kepel, 2002), is in favour of a qualitatively different explanation of Islamism and jihadism. Burgat’s starting point is what he calls Western imperialism, the legacy of colonialism and neo-colonialism and the persistent racism and discrimination against Muslims in European societies. Burgat wants to recontextualise Islamism and jihadism. Much of the Western approach to Islamism and jihadism is like “trees hiding the political forest” and misleadingly substitutes religious, ideological, psychological or psychosocial causes for fundamentally political ones. Francois Burgat’s core demand: the West must end its support for Israel. The radical nature of Burgat’s thinking is also evident in an article he published in “Middle East Eye”,Footnote 11 a platform close to the Muslim Brotherhood, according to the UAE-based daily newspaper “The National”. Burgat identifies with the basic direction of political Islam in Iran and Sudan under Bashir’s military rule. He also finds words of praise for opposition groups like the FIS in Algeria and Islamist currents in Lebanon and Tunisia.

Supporters and opponents of Burgat’s analysis must be aware that Burgat also identifies with Hamas, which, as we know, is classified as a terrorist organisation by the European Union.Footnote 12

In the following, we will concentrate on what the international empirical social science sources have to say about the whole complex of problems.