Response to Mehdi Mozaffari’s “The Rise of Islamism in the Light of European Totalitarianism”

Mehdi Mozaffari’s article advances the hypothesis that Islamism, like the European interwar totalitarianisms, was an indirect consequence of the First World War and the collapse of the great empires. An intriguing hypothesis, if rather deterministic and reductionist. Unfortunately, I believe, the facts do not support Mozaffari’s conclusions. Although I agree that Hasan al-Bann[ amacr ] ’s ideology had a strong fascist undertone, I believe that it was imported from Europe, and not a spontaneous reaction to the end of the Caliphate. As I have shown elsewhere,1 the Muslim Brothers’ Society was not set up as a political organisation but became gradually politicised in the 1930s. Fascism was considered the revitalising ideology Egypt needed, and both the palace and other political organisations – notably Misr al-Fatat – were admirers of the Italian and German regimes, which were perceived as having successfully restored their nations’ honour and international standing. I also disagree with some of the author’s factual claims. I am not a sociologist, but I believe that Weber’s quote on the ‘disenchantment of the world’ (pp. 4–5) referred to the fact that science and rationalism had become able to explain the world, which therefore was not ‘a mystery’ anymore. Can the term really be understood as ‘an observation of the anomic conditions of post-1918 modernity’? On the other hand, when did Hasan al-Bann[ amacr ] study Spengler, Spencer and Toynbee? (p. 5) He trained to be a primary schoolteacher, and mentions Spencer’s “Essays on Education” in one of his epistles (Risalat al-‘aqa’id), but that does not mean that he knew about Spencer’s other works. In addition, as far as I am aware, he never referred to Spengler and Toynbee, who are the authors Mozaffari actually quotes to make his point. I do not agree that for Islamists ‘the future is nothing but the reproduction in modern conditions of the sublime model which must be re-constructed as close to the original model as possible’ (p. 8). Most Islamists, including al-Bann[ amacr ] , believe that although the texts – the Koran and the Sunna – are eternally valid, Muslims must use ijtihad (independent reasoning) for their adaptation to specific circumstances.2 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.3 Only some marginal groups – notably the small and sect-like al-Takfir wa-l-Hijra – sought to literally reproduce the state established by the prophet.