Islam has been historically a political force, which, unlike every other religion, created its own polity under the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) instead of waiting to be adopted by some state or kingdom. Since that classical period, there has been a steady idealism as well as an enduring activism to recreate that ultimate Mohammadan utopia across the Muslim world combining secular and the sacred for a better life here and thereafter. Over the successive centuries, through a continued salience of Islamic laws without obliterating the plural and other mundane prerequisites, Muslim monarchs and caliphs, such as in Spain, Ottoman Turkey and Mughal India, usually portrayed themselves as the defenders of faith without marginalising their non-Muslim citizens. These powerful empires largely consisted of Muslim-minority regions and resisted efforts to Islamicise their non-Muslim majorities, who, in several cases were better off than their Muslim counterparts. Metropolitan centres such as Constantinople, Toledo, Lahore, Delhi and Baghdad, amazingly, remained Muslim minority cities until very recently only when refugee influx, demarcation of national boundaries, ethnic cleansing and such other events radically changed their demography.¹

The growing intellectual stagnation, made more explicit by a colonising West largely perceived and experienced as a revived Christendom, awakened many Muslims to their own dismay. Recourse to puritanical Islam, a synthesis with the West-led modernity, or even dilly-dallying with the colonial masters mainly characterised the three respective Muslim responses to this colonial encounter. The emergence of sovereign Muslim states in the last century reignited the erstwhile tussle between the revivalists and the modernists which-given the external interference, discretionary policies and pervasive underdevelopment-has now entered a crucial stage. Reading into this fissure merely as a clash of civilisations is fallacious though the fact remains that all over Africa, Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans, Islam has continuously enthused its followers to confront colonisation or other hegemonic onslaughts. The emergence of the Ikhwanal Muslimeen (Muslim Brotherhood), Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Hind, Jama'at-i-Islami and several other religio-Islamic parties and the subsequent evolution of Muslim countries with a pronounced Islamic identity such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and others amidst decolonisation reflected an ever-growing duality in the emerging Muslim world. Soon it turned into an intense ideological polarity between the revivalists espousing a 'back-to-roots' approach contrasted with the nationalists who offered modernist strategies. A growing quest for identity, extensive politico-economic disempowerment and a continued dependence upon the Western largesse largely weakened the ruling elite, who were increasingly seen as the lackeys of the foreign and 'alien' powers. Amidst harrowing poverty and unchecked corruption, the revivalists assertively disputed the authenticity and legitimacy of the ruling elite in almost all the Muslim countries, though several other post-colonial polities also faced similar schisms.

The ruling elite-irrespective of dynast monarchs, military dictators or pseudo-democrats-presently confront the reinvigorated groups of bearded and turbaned activists, commanding the angry, unemployed youthful millions of have-nots. Their version of Islam offers a simplistic mixture of utopianism anchored on a glorious past and an ascendant abhorrence of alien hegemonies, which largely means `the immoral West'. The West is an insensitive enemy per se because it props the enemy from within the corrupt regimes--besides it symbolises exploitation and immorality.² Thus, the case for a pervasive anti-Americanism! The continued humiliation and anger on issues such as The Satanic Verses, Bosnia, Kashmir, Palestine, Chechnya, the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq crisis and a confrontation with the oppressive regimes propped up by their outside backers have intensified the recourse to Islam. Ballot and bullet are the two strategies to obtain centrestage for these Islamicists. In between lie the moderate voices from amongst infantile Muslim civil societies, marginalised both by the pro-west despots and totalitarian obscurantists. Thus, political Islam is not simply a confrontation between Islam and the West; it is an intra-Muslim engagement.

The contemporary spectre of this political activism as spearheaded by the turbaned groups-following the early two phases of the colonial and post-independence phases-is characterised by a greater self-assertion and an all-out strategy to acquire power, no matter through bullet or ballot. The Khomeinites, Hizbollah, Hamas, Jamiats, the Taliban and the various constellations such as Jama'at-i-Islami or Gema'a Islam espousing a more scripturalist and anti-hegemonic version of a 'trans-territorial, classless and non-racial Islam', embody a gradual and ascendant salience of Islam in Muslim political affairs. This kind of political Islam promises the return of the lost glory; stipulates holistic answers to socio-economic stratification; and is mostly subscribed by a huge underclass of the underprivileged whose unfulfilled mundane needs and desires converge with a yearning for a collective come-back.

Thus Islam is the healer, panacea and also a retort to an arrogant West and its surrogates across the Muslim world. This form of political Islam, based on simplicity, shared brotherhood, a devotion to austere lifestyles is imbued with a Caliphal vision of trans-territorial ummah. It combines scripturalist and syncretic visions of the literalists and sufis. It is vehemently anti-colonial, anti-elitist and displays an impressive mix of class and creed, never seen before in human history. It does not enjoy a single consensual platform or a central leadership hierarchy though its proponents across the lands share an impressive aura of commonalties and convergence in ideals and trajectories. Thus, without being trans-regional, it is trans-territorial as it promises a Muslim globalism among the brothers-in-faith. To its proponents,³ it is a redeemer; to its detractors it is self-immolation; and to the superficial observers it is the new enemy or sheer terrorism.⁴Undoubtedly, it is a masculanisation of Muslim identity to retrieve a lost turf from other masculanised opponents. Averse to Huntingtonian reductionist view of seeing in it merely a clash of cultures, political Islam is mainly arrayed against its own ruling hierarchies, though it deeply resents their external backers. Hypothetically, if one removes the fulcrum of ideology from this activism, it is simply a class conflict.

Jama'at-i-Islami, since its inception in Lahore in 1941 to its bifurcation in 1947 accompanying the partition, and its subsequent political career in Pakistan, India, Kashmir and Afghanistan, offers an interesting and revealing perspective on this leading Islamist party that likes to be called a movement--tehreek. The centrality of Syed Abul ala Maudoodi, the founder of the Jama'at, his views on the West, nationalism, two-nation theory, the concept of ummah, Jama'at's relationship with the Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and its own affinities with movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, is a vast arena of diverse activities.⁵While Maudoodi's own views regarding the West reflected a serious unease with its 'immoral' cultural artifacts, his suspicion of westernised Muslim leaders remained undiminished. He questioned their credentials to liberate and then lead the emerging Muslim states, which according to the pre-eminent South Asian Islamist, owed to their lack of immersion in the pristine Islamic ethos. Like many other Muslim observers of the West, Maudoodi failed to see anything positive and constructive in the Western heritage, which is ironic.

Contrasted with the apologists, whose eulogy for the West remains un-critiqued, Maudoodi, more like Syed Qutb and present-day Muhajiroon, was a persistent rejectionist. Similarly, Maudoodi's own discomfort with the idea of nationalism was reflected in his early criticism of demand for Pakistan, though the Jama'at and the other religio-political organisations in British India failed to offer a tangible succour to Muslim minoritarian apprehensions. The idea of a separate Muslim state leaving several millions back in a Hindu-dominated India was as much an uncertain path as the creation of a distinct Muslim majoritarian state. Deriding modernity and its major components such as nationalism, democracy, inter-gender equity and, of course, western education created serious anxieties among the small-town emerging Muslim bourgeoisie, compared to a more cosmopolitan Muslim elite such as Jinnah, Iqbal or Suhrawardy. Such fears held by the Islamists understandably represented the global Muslim alienation especially since colonisation, when a smaller yet technologically powerful West overran the vast Afro-Asian Muslim regions so conveniently!

However, once Pakistan had come into being, the Jama'at busied itself towards its total Islamisation in a scripturalist mode. Given the secular tenacity of the state and a pervasive Sufi view of Islam amongst the populace at large, the Jama'at could not make any major popular inroads in Pakistan, though it still remained a powerful factor. However, its demand for Shariah, greater links with the Muslim world and specific views on women, language and economy offered a rather interesting phase in its 'nationalisation', quite in contrast to its counterparts in India and the Indian Kashmir. The Jama'at in Pakistan has remained a vanguard movement while in India, Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Hind, Jama'at-i-Islami and the Muslim League all assumed a low-key profile by emphasizing the cultural and local well being of the Muslim minorities. They have been sensitive to the accusations from the various Indian trajectories of being the ‘fifth column’ for Pakistan.

The Jama'at's collaboration with the military junta under General Yahya Khan and then General Zia in Pakistan, despite its erstwhile opposition to Ayub Khan's martial law, signalled a major shift in its policies. A pronounced role in Afghanistan during the 1980s strengthened its funds and activities though within Pakistan, the Jama'at still lacked a populist electoral bank. To many observers, such dilly-dallying with the power(s) only compromised the Jama'at and its long-time tradition of resistance to statist authority. Maudoodi's death in 1979 left a major intellectual vacuum because the subsequent leaders such as Mian Tufail and Hafiz Hussein Ahmad have been more of activist mould. .The Islamic Foundation in Leicester, largely funded by Rabita and Jama'at's own moneyed sections, remains a Jama'at-specific organisation with a major focus on South Asian Muslim Diaspora. It has been gradually expanding its publications and related activities though jobs, fellowships and all the important positions are reserved only for Jama'at members. In that sense, it is not different from any other Muslim group where group and personal loyalties override every other consideration.

Some recent studies offer interesting insight on the Jama'at-ISI and Jama'at-Saudi interface over regional issues.⁶ These studies usually found Jama'at to be electorally insignificant, though the elections in Pakistan in 2002 reveal a rather different and startling picture. The post 9/11 imprints, growing anti-Americanism across the Muslim world, the Anglo-American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the Muslim ruling elite siding with Washington and London averse to an antagonistic populism, have resuscitated Islamists including the Jama'at. The Jama'at has equally established formidable linkage with other Deobandi and Brelvi organisations that it shunned earlier on, but all these crucial developments are yet to be researched. The Pakistani Jama'at's attitude towards the Taliban, its ambivalence towards the Iranian revolution, its own unexplained relationship with its counterparts in India, Bangladesh or the Indian-controlled Kashmir are the areas waiting for a fresher perspective. In the elections of 2002 in Pakistan, the religio-political parties captured overwhelming majority in the two border provinces of the North-Western Frontier and Balochistan besides obtaining a sizeable presence in the federal parliament. More than the mainstream politicians, it is these parties which, for a time, confronted Pakistan's General Musharraf on domestic and foreign policy issues.⁷

Their ascendance, despite clipped by his arbitrary Legal Framework Order (LFO), is no less astounding to those analysts who, while aware of their street power, simply underrated their electoral potentials. The entire generation of Pakistani political observers, who had essentialised a peripheral performance of these elements, is now interpreting their salience as just one-off. This misperception is no different from that of their Indian counterparts who, in the early 1990s, considered the rise of BJP espousing a uniformist Hinduised India, and the Ayodhya Mosque/Temple issue merely an aberration with polity soon settling back to its Nehruvian secular moorings. One may differ with the dictum of such religio-political parties, but to write them off merely as the beneficiaries of anti-Americanism or anti-modernity is fallacious.

In the post-Second World War decades of optimism and polarised realism, religion was considered to be less of a unifying force and more of a nuisance in nation building. Nationalism, despite its racist and fascist undertones in Europe, was perceived by scholars such as Eli Kedourie and Hans Kohn to be a liberationist ideology with secular elite homogenising the emerging post-colonial states. ‘Modernisation’, not just to these liberals but also to sociologists such as Ernest Gellner, Carl Deutsch and Benedict Anderson, after all, was a mundane project where its Western prototypes could hold truth for all. (Gellner was an exception in a sense, as he saw no clash between Islamic civil society and democracy).⁸Jinnah, Nehru, Kenyatta, Fannon, Mao, Gandhi, Soekarno and Nkrumah were all modernists-nationalists in their own ways, though most of this generation were soon to give way-in several cases-to the 'men on the horse-back' being welcomed as the new, post-colonial modernisers. Simultaneously, the embryonic mediatory discourse on Islam and modernity as spearheaded by 'moderate' scholar-activists--including Al-Afghani, Abduh, Syed Ahmed, Muhamamd Iqbal, Maulana Azad, Fazlur Rahman and Allama Shariati--was left asunder. The shining armour, inflated chests full of jingling medals and their associations with the Sandhurst and West Point were sufficient credentials of these generals, adored by Professor Samuel Huntington and the others of his Harvard clan. Instead of activists and intellectuals interfacing across diverse traditions, Muslims were bequeathed to the simplistic and autocratic whims of uniformed harbingers of modernisation and development. The role of feudal intermediaries of the colonial days was now taken over by these khaki bureaucrats, submissive to their patrons yet regressive to their own peoples.

However by the 1980s and especially after the dissolution of the Cold War, these modernisers were found seriously lacking in proper representative, professional and accountable wherewithal. They were devoid of competence and conviction to run these plural societies and in the process invariably turned out to be unpopular tin-pot dictators, proving liability to their Western backers. Despite their serious shortcomings, the Western powers, for their own partisan interests, had steadily used these generals as surrogates-Ayub, Yahya, Pincohet, Numeiri, Saddam, Zia, Suharto, Barre, Ershad and the list goes on. But the current mantra resounds with the desirability of empowerment of civil society, pre-eminence of democratic universalism and the reconstruction of a non-hegemonic modernity. Thus, the khaki leaders, like their other monarchical counterparts, largely stay exposed of their inherent weaknesses and inadequacies and if they are still in power it is largely due to external backing and internal divisions. In some cases such as General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, they are expeditiously needed to fight the ‘turbaned and bearded hordes’, no matter at what cost to the democratic prerogatives in that country.

While the post-colonial world has reasons to be cynical of being used as guinea pigs for all the run-away ideologies and neo-colonial facades, it is equally bewildered at the pre-eminence of `traditional’ conglomerates. In the case of political Islam, while several scholars are mindful of the impossibility of an Islamic state to the viability of a Muslim state (espousing redefined secular characteristics⁹), Islamists such as the Ikhawan, Jama'at, Jamiats, Nadwas, the Khomeinities and other Salafiaya groups fervently hope and aspire for a theocracy. This kind of intellectual debate urgently needs to reach some consensus as otherwise, Muslim people while getting out of a simmering pan may simply fall into a raging fire. Replacing one kind of unilateral oppression with another type of dictatorship, however koshered it may be, is totally unacceptable. These differing intellectual groups need to focus on the areas of agreement as well as divergences but in a tolerant and civic manner without dishing out rancour and fatwas. While the Muslim states are seriously lacking in many areas their substitutions must offer something tangible and all encompassing, rather than adding on to anarchy and violence. A simplistic view of Muslim past-both for idealisation or for dismissal-is not a healthy way forward. It is a complex world and requires rigorous, well-planned strategies but it is equally a rational world seeking logical solutions and not the emotive outbursts.

Concurrently, the relegation of Islam to a mere dogma is both a Muslim and non-Muslim preoccupation where its reformative, mundane and egalitarian portents have been side-tracked by dismissive obscurantists as well as abrasive modernists. Both of them fell into the trap of Orientalists, who saw the East mainly inhabited by emotional and half-cultured mobs, whose Westernisation was a fait accompli and equally a White Man's burden. The leading contemporary proponent of such a premise is Professor Bernard Lewis at Princeton, to whose Eurocentric outlook Islam is still lost in a medieval time gap earnestly awaiting a renaissance. To Lewis, a widely read British academic on Islam in America, Islam's resuscitation has to come from the West; otherwise its centuries-old crisis intermeshed with a severe inferiority complex remains unbridgeable and prone to terrorist outbursts.¹⁰ This hypothesis has been greatly energised in the West after 9/11 though scholars such as Edward Said, the late Albert Hourani, Fred Halliday, John Esposito and Karen Armstrong have been wary of it. While one may find several problems with the neo-orientalists like Lewis or Daniel Pipes, Fouad Ajami, Frank Graham, Pat Roberston, Ann Coulter and Oriana Fallaci, it is still fair to suggest that political Islam has yet to mature into a workable and just order.¹¹

So far, as forcefully posited by Professor Khalid B. Sayeed, the models of political Islam varying from Saudi Arabia to Ziaist Pakistan, Khomeinite Iran to the Talibanised Afghanistan, severely lack accommodation for pluralism, a universal empowerment, an egalitarian economic order and a dynamic self-confidence.¹²
In all the above cases, it has been a familiar story of repression, unilateralism and intolerance. Millions were mobilised in the name of Islam, Sharia and Nizam-i-Mustafwi (Prophet Muhammad's system) soon to abysmally fall victims to the unnecessary and unworthy causes whereas the problems kept on compounding. No wonder Muslim masses are not only the victims of violence from the ‘outside’; they are also the sufferers from within.¹³Just using West and the Rest as an alibi for the entire Muslim predicament may be a convenient strategy for the Muslim autocrats and surrogates, but for how long! The pervasive Muslim disempowerment is mainly owed to their own leaders, and likewise their internal schisms are due to the vicious clericalisation of this otherwise holistic civilisation, which, in its pristine form, had broken loose from such bondage.

While violence amongst Muslims or directed against their countries and communities may not be that unique, but its intensification in post-September period has definitely increased to a harrowing extent. Just in the United States, 82,000 Muslim immigrants have been registered and finger printed, and 12,000 out of them have been deported so far. The plight of undefined Guantanamo Bay internees is a great question mark for the champions of human rights amidst a growing accent on neo-orientalism, or its newer manifestation in the form of neo-conservatism. Their external pressures and unilateral policies at the expense of civic rights, only exacerbate intolerance besides strengthening the authoritarian regimes. Consequently, Muslim moderate and democratic forces find themselves sandwiched between a proverbial rock and a hard place. This sad situation is not to undervalue the role of Islam as a mobiliser, aggregator and de-hegemoniser. Muslim literalists and syncretists have been vanguards in the Afro-Asian decolonisation but the tradition of resistance and sacrifice predictably more often falls victim to waywardness and schisms.

Thus, like the modernists, if Islamists of today are unable to radically improve the quality of life and fail to enthuse and lead their societies to a better, peaceful and prosperous future, their fate will not be different from the others. They must realise that the contemporary problems are too complex to be resolved through mere emotional rhetoric and plain dismissal. In a plural and highly interdependent world, the way forward is through innovative cooption and coexistence rather than a permanent state of antagonism or introversion. After all, undisputedly this is a world of knowledge, science, universal human rights and sustained democratic institutions. The denial of science, democracy, gender rights, lack of clarity on economic issues and sheer muzzling of ijtihaad (innovation) and tanqid (critique) have to be shunned for a fresh start. Obscurantism has to give way to forward looking dynamism and the romanticisation of bullet has to give way to ballot where civic forces celebrating the best in humanity rule the roost. Ritualistic and selective implementation of rather coercive measures in the name of an uncritiqued Shariah will only further divide the Muslim world. After all, these societies have already suffered for centuries and do not deserve any more collective punishment even if it is in divine name.

The proponents of political Islam need to trust, protect and celebrate their masses and a radical redirection of energy and resources on the eradication of poverty away from militarisation and violence begs prioritisation. It is only through the people's power and prosperity that political Islam may become a balm instead of a taxing and perplexing ideology. Simultaneously, there is a greater need to understand the pangs and pains of the Muslim world as the mundane realities of an unenviable existence where, instead of militarist and unilateral stratagem, the West needs to win over the hearts and souls. Rather than denigrating these regions and peoples as eternally conflict-prone, the United States, the European Union and other powers need to adopt substantive, egalitarian and non-partisan policies, away from the monolithic paradigm of markets and profit/loss.

An unrestrained and honest commitment to democracy, human rights and development need prioritisation over partisan interests such as the extraction of natural resources and arms sales. The West needs to come clean on these issues, if we really desire a peaceful, plural and inter-dependent world. In the meantime, regions such as South Asia need to prioritise peace and regional co-operation over wars, conflicts and mutual denigration. The inter-state co-operation will further inter-communal harmony, helping the civil societies establish transparent and accountable democratic institutions. For South Asia, that is the only way forward and its past, unlike elsewhere, has glorious precedents to bank upon.

(Dr. Iftikhar H. Malik, is an Oxford based academic with several books and papers on South Asia, Muslim politics and the Western world. Affiliated with Wolfson College, Dr. Malik teaches at Bath Spa University College, Bath, England).

References

1.	As suggested above, these demographic changes took place mostly during the nineteenth century when modernity, geared up with full force and nationalism, started redefining communities, earlier coexisting in a plural setting. A cosmopolitan city like Constantinople was a Muslim minority city until the 1890s when the uprooted Balkan Muslim refugees started filtering in. See Philip Mansel, Constantinople: A City of World Desire (London, 1993). Even Baghdad was a Muslim minority city with a sizeable number of Jews and Christian holding important positions until the 1940s.
2.	The JI and Ikhwan were the earliest proponents of this view, which was put into practice by the Saudis and the Taliban. Both Iran and Pakistan followed a similar official model of Islam which was suspicious of the West and which considered secularism to be a threat. The problemisation of religion and secularism was both genuine and opportunistic. Saudi Arabia, in the recent decades had poured in 72 billion dollars in the various Muslim countries to support puritanical Islamic parties and movement among the Afghan, Pakistani, Central Asian and other Diaspora Muslim groups. Some of the former protegees, including Osama bin Laden or JI as seen in Iraq-Kuwait episode, turned against their patron. See Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, (London, 2003) and Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, (London, 2003)
3.	The proponents are highly politicised and populist. Even in Diaspora groups such as Al-Muhajiroon seek redress through an implantation of caliphal Islam.
4.	Such a view is not merely confined to tabloid press, as there are an ever-increasing number of books and articles even in scholarly journals linking Islam with terrorism. For instance, see Patrick J. Buchannan, Death of the West (New York, 2001) and for his columns see www.townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/pb20020327.shtml
5.	One may refer to a number of useful studies on the subject though the best source-material can be gleamed from the books of the founder and those of Professor Khurshid Ahmad. However, studies by Syed Vali Reza Nasr and Frederic Grare are equally illuminating.
6.	For instance, see Frederic Grare, Political Islam in the Indian Subcontinent: The Jamaat-i-Islami (Delhi, 2002). The French author largely supports Olivier Roy's framework on Political Islam. See, Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (Cambridge, 1994)
7.	The military+mullah axis was created under a former military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq which seems to have broken down under General Musharraf though, to some observers, both the conservative and power-seeking forces may reestablish the old alliance much at the expense of forward looking democratic forces. The religio-political forces know that it is only through the marginalisation of mainstream parties that they can acquire a majority. The intelligence agencies also prefer them to the broad-based parties, which may be difficult to manage. By July 2003 it appeared as if both military and mullahs were reestablishing a closer relationship at the expense of country's long-term civic and democratic prerogatives.
8.	See Ernest Gellner Muslim Society (Cambridge, 1993)
9.	Such scholars are in growing numbers. Ashgar Ali Engineer has done extensive work in this area. For his views see, Mohammad Shehzad, ‘It's all about pluralism’, Dawn Magazine, (13 July 2003).
10.	See Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (London, 2003)
11.	For further details see, Angus Roxburgh, Preaching of Hate: The Rise of the Far Right (London, 2002), Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows (London, 2002) and Noam Chomsky, 9/11 (London, 2002)
12.	Khalid B. Sayeed, Western Dominance and Political Islam: Challenge and Response (Albany, 1995)
13.	Sectarianism not only leads to recurrent violence amongst Muslims; it equally fortifies the case for preemptive strike against Muslim regions. The Taliban manhandling of the Hazara Shias, Saudi marginalisation of Shias, Iranian peripheralisation of their Sunni minority and Sunni-Shia feuds in Pakistan largely in the name of a Sunni state have been causing serious bloodshed. After committing heinous murder of 53 Shias in a mosque on 4 July 2003, the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, an underground militant Sunni outfit, sent a cassette carrying the messages of the three perpetrators to the BBC. (www.bbc.co.uk/southasia) Not just the majority sects, even the majority ethnic communities deny equality to fellow ethnic minorities. Though it is true that this malady is not merely confined to the Muslim world since democracies such as India have been frequently experiencing majoritarian fascism, yet Political Islam as a homogenising project utterly fails, when it comes to pluralism unless Muslims are able to establish their own ‘third way’