Third World Quarterly

The Revolutionary Thrust of Islamic Political Tradition

Author(s): Mohammed Ayoob
Source: Third World Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Apr., 1981), pp. 269-276
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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THE REVOLUTIONARY THRUST OF ISLAMIC

POLITICAL TRADITION
MohammedAyoob

Although it was not until the success of the Iranian revolution that the
revolutionary potential of political Islam was widely recognised,l a strong
revolutionary component has been inherent (although recently largely dormant)
in the Islamic political tradition from the earliest times. As a leading scholar of
Islamic history, Bernard Lewis, has pointed out, 'In a sense the advent of Islam
itself was a revolution. The new faith, hot from Arabia, overwhelmed existing
doctrines and Churches; its new masters who brought it overthrew an old order
and created a new one. In Islam there was to be neither church nor priest, neither
orthodoxy nor hierarchy, neither kingship nor aristocracy. There were to be no
castes or estates to flaw the unity of the believers;no privileges, save the self-evident
superiority of those who accept to those who wilfully rejectthe true faith.. .2 But,
as Lewis goes on to point out, while 'the Arab conquerors brought their own
religion [they also] created their own State; [and] much of the conflict of early
Islamic times arisesfrom the clash between the two... By a tragic paradox, only the
strengthening of the Islamic State could save the identity and cohesion of the
Islamic community - and the Islamic State, as it grew stronger, moved furtherand
furtheraway from the social and ethical ideals of Islam. Resistance to this process
of change was constant and vigorous, sometimes successful, but always unavailing
- and out of this resistance emerged a series of religious sects, different in their
ideologies and their support, but alike in seeking to restore the radical dynamism
that was being lost .

. It is a striking testimony to the universalist appeal and

surviving revolutionary power of Islam that the great revolutionary movements in

the Islamic Empire were all movements within Islam and not against it.'3
From the earliest times, therefore, there has been present a revolutionary strand
in the Islamic political tradition although, as has been the case with most such
ideologies, it has remained the ideology of the opposition and not that of the
establishment in the Muslim world. This was particularlytrue as long as political
power continued to remain in the hands of Muslim rulers and before the Muslim
world fell under the political subjugation and military domination of European
powers. Movements of social and political protest during the first millennium of
Islam invariablytook on a religious character.The beginnings of Shia Islam can, in
I For example, see William E Griffith, 'The Revival of Islamic Fundamentalism: the case of Iran',

InternationalSecurity Summer 1979 4(1), pp 132-8.

Bernard Lewis, Islam in History. London: Alcove Press. 1973, p 237.
1 ibid, pp 237-9.

April 1981 Volume 3 No. 2

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270

THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY

fact, be traced to such a protest movement which took on the character of a

religious schism.
While on one plane the riftwhich laterled to the Shia-Sunnisplit representedthe
conflicting political ambitions of the Hashemites (the house of the Prophet, peace
be upon him, and particularlyof the Aliids)and those of the Umayyads, on another
plane it representeda clash betweenjustice and order - a perennial conflict in the
realm of politics. However, on yet another and deeper plane it came to represent
the social and economic contradictions that had arisen within Muslim society in
the process of its transformation from the city-state of Medina to a vast empire
stretching from Iranto North Africa. Tensions between and within tribes, between
tribal and nomadic interests on the one hand and sedentary agriculturalinterests
on the other, between urban and ruralpopulations and between the Arabs and the
Mawalis (the non-Arab Muslims) were all representedto a lesser or greaterextent
in the political, and later religious, division between the Sunni establishment and
the Shia opposition. Those elements among the Arab as well as non-Arab Muslim
societies which suffered from the economic and social differentiationthat resulted
from the expansion of the Arab Empire and the more complex organisation of
society that accompanied it found in the claims of the house of the Propheta potent
political vehicle which could be used to end the injustices of the existing order,
thereby leading to the fulfilment of the original promise of Islam. But as these
hopes were dashed and the utopia receded further into the future this faith in the
house of the Prophet was transformed into a Messianic ideology which looked
forward to the advent of a Mahdi, who would overthrow the unjust order and
replace it with one based on justice and equity.
The replacement of the Umayyad dynasty by the Abbasids - descendants ofthe
Prophet's uncle Abbas - while initially viewed by the Aliids as a political triumph
soon turned sour for them when the new Khalifas of Islam not only embraced the
established religious order but became the protectors and defenders of the socioeconomic order as well. Shia Islam, as a form of political protest, tended to go
underground until it reappeared in Iran as the main religio-political force
responsible for the establishment of the Safavid empire. However, soon the
Safavid rulersdid what the Abbasids had done earlieralthough in a ratherdifferent
form. Not only did they import from Baghdad Shia Ulemawho werewell versed in
the Sunni doctrines which had provided political legitimacy to Abbasid rule, but
they changed the official version of Shia Islam beyond recognition in an attempt to
transform it from a protest movement to the religion of the new political
establishment in Persia. While they and their successors, the Qajars, succeeded
remarkably well in this attempt, at the same time they sowed the seeds of religiopolitical dissent in Iran with the mosque emerging as the 'potential opposition'4 to
the throne. This tendencywas furtherreinforcedby the lack of legitimacy accorded
to all temporal authority short of the returnof the hidden Imam - the Mahdi. The
recent events in Iran, therefore, cannot be fully understood in the absence of an
understanding of this religio-political philosophy which has dominated the
4 This term is borrowed from Nikki Keddie, 'Religion and Irreligion in Early Iranian Nationalism',
ComparativeStudies in SocietYand History, Vol 4, 1961-2. p 290.

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THE REVOLUTIONARY THRUST OF ISLAMIC POLITICAL TRADITION

271

thinking of the Shia clergy as well as the psyche of the Iranian masses. Of course,
there were other factors that contributed to the fall of the Shah - the ruthless
suppression of all political dissent, which effectively decimated the secular
opposition, and the critical downturn in the Iranian economy in the last couple of
years of the Shah's reign. However, the ease with which political dissent and
opposition was channelled through the mosque in Iran cannot be understood
without taking into account the unique political evolution of Shia Islam as an
ideology of protest against and dissent from temporal authority, which by
definition was never totally legitimate.
The contrast with those Sunni countries where Islam is an important political
force further demonstrates the validity of this thesis. In these countries the
religious establishment has been traditionally allied to the ruling classes - if it was
not even further to the 'right' of it - and Islam as a political tool has been used to
legitimise existing power structures,however iniquitous they might be, ratherthan
oppose unjust political orders. In the good old tradition of the Khilafat of
Damascus and Baghdad the religious establishments in these countries have
played their assigned and predictable roles.
However, there is yet another dimension of this revolutionary thrust in Islam's
political tradition, namely, its anti-imperial and anti-colonial dimension. This
dimension has been manifested repeatedlyduringthe last two hundredyears ofthe
history of Muslim countries and populations. The nineteenth century was the
heyday of European imperial activity, and the Muslim world from Southeast Asia
to North Africa was forced to fashion responses, intellectually and politically, to
the challenges posed by a technologically and industrially and, therefore,
militarily stronger Europe which had made significant political inroads into Asia
and Africa.
It was in this context that there arose a breed of thinkers and activists, from the
Mahdi in the Sudan to Afghani, born in Iran, but active throughout the Muslim
world, who in their own ways, but from their Islamic moorings, tried to respond
politically, and, on occasion, militarily, to the challenges posed by a Europe now
bent on dominating and subjugating not merely the Muslim countries but the
whole of Asia and Africa. Except for Afghani who was conversant with European
modes of thought and analysis and had lived in Paris (and visited London and
Moscow) almost all the others were steeped in traditional Islam and their
responses to the European threat, therefore, were in intellectual terms 'premodern' in character. However, this did not in any way deter them from taking up
the western political and military challenge and, on occasion, as the Mahdi's
exploits in the Sudan demonstrated, inflicting crushing defeats on the imperial
powers. Afghani's response was more in intellectual and political rather than in
military terms. Acknowledged widely as the first reformist political thinker in
modern Islam, Afghani (although he was also a supporter of territorial
nationalisms wherever they opposed alien rule) was enamoured by his vision of
pan-Islam and to that end even offered his services to the crafty Ottoman Sultan,
Abdul Hamid, who used Afghani for his own ends.
The early part of the twentieth century saw the increasing consolidation of

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272

THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY

European rule in Muslim countries; it also saw strong reactions against foreign
domination in these areas. As often as not, these anti-colonial stirrings were
cloaked in the garb of Islam - either of the pan-Islamic or the Islamic nationalist
variety. It is interesting to note in this context that although Muslim theologians
and religious fundamentalists have argued ad infinitumabout the irreconcilability
of the Islamic concept of ummah (the Muslim brotherhood) with the concept of
territorial and/or ethnic nationalism, such theoretical discourses have had only
marginal effect on Muslim activists, whether clerical or lay, of the anti-colonial
period. If political Islam was harnessed by them for the rather vague and diffuse
cause of pan-Islam (which in modern terms can be considered to be analogous to
the calls for Third World solidarity), it was even more harnessed in the cause of
territorial and ethnic nationalism in countries which were either predominantly
Muslim or - as in India - had substantial Muslim populations. The Ulema of the
Dar-ul-Uloom in Deoband, the most famous theological seminary in the Indian
subcontinent, found no contradiction between their commitment to Islamic
values and the concept of the ummahon the one hand, and their patriotic duty to
oust the foreign ruleron the other. In fact, theircommitment to a composite Indian
nationalism remainedunshakeneven duringthe heyday of the Muslim League and
the Pakistan Movement in the 1940s.
Pan-Islam, therefore, as Afghani had correctly visualised, was not necessarily
antithetical, in political as distinct from theological terms, to the concept of
nationalism in various parts of the Muslim world. In the struggle against colonial
rule, they were two sides of the same coin. The Khilafat Movement in Indiaand the
Sarekat-Islam, and later the Muhammadiya Movement, in Indonesia stand
testimony to this fusion of Islamic and nationalist values and objectives.
This Islamic activity on the anti-colonial plane was, of course, by and large in
exclusively political terms. But it did have a socio-economic dimension which
became increasingly salient with the dawn of independence and the political
decolonisation of the Muslim countries.
In fact, Muslim thinkerslike Muhammad Iqbal had foreseen the issues that were
to increasingly dominate the political and socio-economic scene of the newly
independent countries. They had also predicted the failure of the traditional
political instruments and institutions (borrowed from London or Paris) to solve
the basic social and economic contradictions within the Muslim countries.
Political democracy in the presence of great inequality in wealth and vast gaps in
social status was deemed totally inadequate to resolve the majorproblem, namely
the integration of the demands of social and political orderwith those of social and
economic justice. It was this which led Iqbal to say in his famous poem 'Khizr-iRah':
The democracy of the West is the same old organ,
Which strikes the self-same note of Imperialism;
That which thou regard'stas the Fairy Queen of Freedom,
In reality is the demon of autocracy clothed in
the garb of deception.

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THRUSTOF ISLAMICPOLITICALTRADITION
THE REVOLUTIONARY

273

Legislation, reforms, concessions, rights and privileges,

In the materia medica of the West are but sweet narcotics.
The heated discussions of assemblies
Are the camouflage of the Capitalists.5
This, however, was merely the beginning of the problem. The withdrawal of the
European powers from the colonial and semi-colonial countries of the Muslim
world (as indeed of the rest of the Third World) brought two major developments
in its wake: one was the assumption of power by largely unrepresentative, and what
is more important, unresponsive, ruling cliques in the newly liberated territories;
the second was the heightened competition between the two superpowers in the
context of the Cold War (and indeed of superpower detente) for the political
allegiance and economic domination of the Third World in general (and the
strategically important Muslim Middle East in particular). A major corollary of
this second development was the struggle between the two superpowers, and
indeed between the competing ideologies that they represented, for not only the
body but also the soul of the Muslim countries. This was demonstrated
particularly by the efforts made by the superpowers to 'sell' their models of
economic and political development to their friends, allies and clients in the Third
World. To begin with, the West in general, and the US in particular, was at a great
advantage in this game and for a number of reasons:
a) western cultural and economic influence, in fact domination, over much of
the Muslim world was an established fact;
b) the narrowly-based ruling elites of most Muslim countries were extremely
wary of 'socialist' and 'radical' ideologies which they identified with the Soviet
Union; and
c) initially, the US was the only power with sufficient global reach, in political,
economic and military terms, to be able to influence the course of developments
in these countries as in other parts of the Third World.
However, by the mid- and late- 1950s, certain groups with vague socialist
sympathies had been able to capture power in some important Muslim countries
and the term 'socialism' had started to gain a certain amount of legitimacy in the
Muslim world. Of course, these socialist regimes were not modelled on orthodox
Marxist lines, but since, more often than not, they were virulently anti-West and,
again, since the Soviet Union, for reasons connected with its own geo-strategic
interests, extended support to most such regimes, there was a certain degree of
popular identification of these regimes and the models they represented with the
Soviet Union.
The failure of both these modelsofpoliticalandeconomicdevelopmenttosolve
the major problems facing these countries, particularly those of economic growth
and distribution as well as political participation, forced Muslim intellectuals and
thinkers - both among the Ulema and the secular intelligentsia - to think afresh
about the basic assumptions on which these models had been based and to find
alternatives to them in indigenous. Islamic terms. The failure of these models nius
5 English translation quoted in Riffat Hassan, 'The Development ot Political Philosophy', in lqbal,

Hafeez Malik (ed). New York: Columbia University Press. 1971, p 155.

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274

THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY

the dependence on foreign powers which the application of such models had
fostered led to a serious erosion of the legitimacy of most regimes in Muslim
countries. The relativeease with which the Shah was toppled in Iran was the most
dramatic manifestation of the withdrawal of legitimacy from the 'modernising'
autocrats of the Muslim world. The appeal of political ideologies couched in
indigenous termsa la the Islamic revolution of Iran has correspondingly grown in
geometric progressioneven among those strataof society which aresupposed to be
'modernised' in the westernsense ofthe termand which, paradoxically, had a stake
in the survival of such systems as the one presided over by the Shah.
All this has led to the beginnings of a serious self-examination among the
Muslim intelligentsia. The core of this effort is to find a suitable political and social
ideology which, while explainable in Islamic terms, would be relevantto the social
and economic conditions of the late twentieth century and which would be able to
find satisfactory answers in intellectual terms to the questions and dilemmas
associated with the issues of power, inequality, and oppression which have
dominated all discussion about political and economic structuressince the dawn
of civilisation.
The Iranian experiment is obviously one response to this challenge. While it is
too early to pass judgment on that experiment, the centrality accorded to the
religious establishment in Iran, in the form of the doctrine of the vilayet-i-faqih,
seems to be a landmark in the transformation of Shia Islam from a vehicle of
protest and opposition to one of established order. One wonders whether this is
not the first step in its transformation to Safavid rather than Alawi Shiism.
However, given the fact that the legitimacy of the present Iranian power structure
depends on the support of a politically highly mobilised populace, one can also see
certain checks operating in such a way as to prevent this transformation from
taking place or at least not irrevocably.
In this context, both of Iranand of thegeneral attempt beingmade in the Muslim
world to fashion adequate responses to the challenges of the last quarter of the
twentieth century, one cannot overlook the extremely significant contribution of
that other ideologue of the IranianRevolution, Dr Ali Shariati,to whom Professor
Griffith has referred at some length in his article in International Security
mentioned above. Dr Shariati, in his brief but very active intellectual career as a
sociologist of Islam (trained in Mashad on the one hand and the Sorbonne on the
other) tried to present Islam as an ideology of social revolution. His contributions
are just beginning to be read and analysed outside Iran, but his influence on the
course of the Iranian revolution and particularly on the students and the urban
guerillas who fought the streetbattles in Iraniancities against the Shah's forces has
been tremendous. Without an understanding of Ali Shariati's ideas and their
influence in present day Iran our understanding of the process of that revolution
and its aftermath would remain incomplete.
The central concept in Dr Shariati's exposition of Islam is that of al-Nas, 'the
people'. By referringto the factthat the Qur'anoverand overagain addressesitself
to 'the people' Shariati argues that unlike other ideologies and schools of thought
which addressed themselves to various segments of society - the aristocrats, the

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THE REVOLUTIONARY THRUST OF ISLAMIC POLITICAL TRADITION

275

bourgeoisie, the working class, etcetera- Islam is 'the first school of social thought
that recognises the masses as the basis, the fundamental and conscious factor in
determining history and society - not the elect as Nietzsche thought, not the
aristocracy and nobility as Plato claimed, not great personalities as Carlyle and
Emerson believed, not those of pure blood as Alexis Carrel imagined, not the
priests or the intellectuals, but the masses.'6 He then goes on to argue that 'the
people' when properly conscious of their role can change all existing structuresof
society which condone oppression and militate against the people's fuller
development.
Again, Shariati in his criticisms of Karl Marx points out that what Marxtook to
be the 'structure' of society was really only the 'superstructure'. For, as Shariati
argues, 'there are only two possible structures in human society - the structureof
Cain and the structure of Abel. I don't regard slavery, serfdom, the bourgeoisie,
feudalism and capitalism as constitutingsocial structures.These are all partsof the
superstructureof society ... No more than two structures can exist in society; one
where society is the lord and master of its own destiny, and all men work for it and
its benefit; and another in which individuals are owners, and masters of their own
destinies and the destiny of society.'7The first he terms the 'structureof Abel', the
second 'the structure of Cain'.
And finally, to mention Shariati's most revolutionary conclusion, which one is
sure Ayatollah Khomeini must also be pondering over: 'In the affairs of society,
therefore, in all that concerns the social system ... the words al-Nas and Allah
belong together. Thus, when it is said, "Rule belongs to God", the meaning is that
rule belongs to the people, not to those who present themselves as representatives
of God. . . When it is said, "Propertybelongs to God" the meaning is that capital
belongs to the people as a whole... When it is said, "Religion belongs to God," the
meaning is that the entire structureand content of religion belongs to the people; it
is not a monopoly held by a certaininstitution or certain people known as "clergy"
or "church".'8
I am confident that Dr Shariatiwas not alone in reachingthe conclusions that he
did before he was murdered,presumablyby SAVAK agents, in London. However,
by eloquently describing the evolution of society and polity in terms of the
'oppressor' and the 'oppressed' and by justifying the revolt of the 'oppressed' in
Islamic terms, he has become the symbol of that revolutionary strand in Islamic
political tradition which had been grossly underrated until the outbreak of the
Iranian revolution.
Moreover, the development of this revolutionary thrust ties in well with 'the
Islamic doctrine of the duty to resist impious government, which in early times was
of crucial historical significance.'9In the last two decades of the twentieth century
this concept of 'impious government' can be relativelyeasily translated by Muslim
6 Ali Shariati, On the Sociology of Islam, Tr from the Persian by Hamid Algar. Berkeley, California:

Mizan Press. 1979, p 49.

7ibid. pI1.

Iibid, p 116-7.
9 Bernard Lewis, 'Islamic Concepts of Revolution' in Revolutionin the MiddleEast. P J Vatikiotis (ed).
London: Allen & Unwin. 1972, p 33.

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276

THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY

radicals and/or revolutionariesto encompass not merelythe traditionaldefinition

of that concept but also an unjust order which tolerates huge economic and social
disparities.
This form of radical Islamic populism, particularlyin revolutionary situations,
can often be quite easily reconciled with the Marxist utopia of a classless society
and with the historical inevitability of its establishment. And while, in the Islamic
context, Marx might be forced to defer to the Qur'an, this could prove to be a very
potent and heady mixture, as some Islamic-Marxistgroups in the Muslim world,
and particularly in Iran, have demonstrated.

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