Rejoinder to Ana Soage

Abstract

Ana Soage’s response to my article is mostly an unwilling confirmation of my arguments. The main thesis of my article is that there exists a remarkable historical parallel between the rise of Bolshevism (1917), Fascism (1922) and Nazism (from the beginning of the 1920s) on one side and the rise of Islamism (1928) on the other. These four totalitarian movements all became main political actors as a result of World War I and the subsequent fall of four empires. This is a fact and a historical event, not a fiction. Soage’s statement that ‘Hasan al-Bann[ amacr ] ’s ideology had a strong fascist undertone’ is fully correct and goes in exactly the same direction as my argumentation. Soage ‘believes’ that al-Bann[ amacr ] ’s ideology ‘was imported from Europe, and not a spontaneous reaction to the end of the Caliphate’. Everybody is free to ‘believe’ what he/she wants. We are talking about facts and the connection between facts. The Caliphate was abolished in 1924, al-Bann[ amacr ] created the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, Rashid Rida’s book on the Caliphate was published precisely when the institution of the Caliphate was gravely shaken and Mawdudi became engaged in the ‘Caliphate movement’ during the same period. Despite all these facts, Soage ‘believes’ that there is absolutely no relation between these events! Both Rida and Mawdudi are surprisingly omitted in Soage’s comments. Soage is not happy with my statement about Islamists’ dream of the reproduction of the Medina model under the Prophet Muhammad. Instead, she is of the opinion that al-Bann[ amacr ] ‘believed that parliamentary democracy was compatible with Islam – he even argued in one of his epistles that it was the closest to Islam of all modern political systems’. Is this pro-democratic al-Bann[ amacr ] the same al-Bann[ amacr ]