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| By Nadia Yassine |
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| Introduction |
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| I thank “ ZMO”, Mrs. Ulrike Freitag, Mrs. Gudrun Kramer and Mrs. Sonja Hegasy. I thank all those who in Goethe’s tradition deign to go beyond the cliché and refrain from seeing the Islamic world through the ambient mist of disinformation. If we are here today, it’s precisely to go against the current of the self-fulfilling prophecy.In order to avoid a major misunderstanding and by way of introduction, let’s tackle this concept of “Islamism” since it is on this account that the public present here is interested in our movement. |
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| We accept the appellation “Islamism” under the one condition that two major remarks are to be taken into consideration : |
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| 1) The negative connotation of this reality has certainly been exacerbated by the 9/11 tragedy. But we must keep in mind the temporal distrust in regard to Islam, even a hatred that takes root in the historical confrontation between the Judeo-Christian world and the new comer that was Islam. Orientalism would then take over to legitimize what was latent, making way for the colonizer with quite a clear conscience. Modern media are today the worthy heirs of that orientalism, except that the effectiveness of the tool and its shallowness and expansion makes it even more insidious than its predecessor. |
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| 2) It is a great deception to present Islamism as being an aberration engendered by the contemporary reality, a malady of Islam. Islamism or in other words, the instinctive return of an Islamic society in crisis, to its fundamental referential to draw vigor and vitality out of, is absolutely not a new phenomenon. What is new is the emergence of media that allows an extensive manipulation of the public opinion in favor of governments whose geostrategic interests are pretty obvious. Any ideology that advocates a return to the sources requires a voluntarism that considerably hinders the eager urge for domination of a hardly disguised neocolonialism. Let’s remember, without going too far back in time, that every opposition to the invader in Muslim countries was usually practiced in the name of this same return to the original sources of Islam. |
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| Islamism is then a recurrence that , let’s say it , is lived by certain movements in great rigidity even in systematic violence, as a retort to the violence of an unjust globalization that took it upon itself to perpetuate colonial conflicts that are still not so well digested. A certain Islamism may suffer from the illness of modernity-inequity, but Islamism is definitely not an ailment of Islam. Islamism is mostly as varied as it is complicated. Introducing the movement “Justice and spirituality” will permit the illustration of this complexity that couldn’t possibly elude a public as informed as this. |
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| The complexity and richness of our movement’s thought prevent an exhaustive presentation in such a restrained amount of time, but I pruned it down to the maximum and only highlighted some key concepts to the detriment of others just as vital. I deem this introduction to be a conditioning that would hopefully usher further readings of our thinking and observation of our political action. |
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| The movement has of course been founded by Abdessalam Yassine on two accounts. He is the author of the basis theory that governs the foremost options of the movement, but he also is the author of the “open letter to the king of Morocco” which was written in the 70’s to the late king Hassan II and was the founder act that rallied all people of good will. |
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| First part : the theory |
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| Islamism is therefore a recurrence of regeneration from the sources. The movement justice and spirituality places itself in the continuity of this recurrence. We have a specific term in our Islamic referential for this phenomenon: the Tajdid. |
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| Tajdid mean the renewal (by going back to the sources).Hence, It is automatically opposed to the concept of Taqlid (blind imitation of previous jurisprudence), but it is also reliant on Ejtihad (continuous adaptation of texts to contexts). |
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| This Tajdid concerns the two poles of Islam: social justice and the spirituality of the individual. We believe that these two are the founder measures of the Islamic faith insofar as God in the koranic revelation never did give a direct order except in the following two verses: |
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| “God orders you to pursue Justice and spiritual perfection”“God orders you to give back due to their proprietors” |
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| It’s thus about renewing spirituality at the level of the individual and struggling to institute a more egalitarian and just society. |
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| - The renewal at the level of spirituality was somehow made easy ever since the early Hegira centuries by a certain secularity that was practiced by the growing autocracy. The latter kept the prerogative of political matters for the Prince, and left the affairs of religious emotions and personal status to the society. The spreading out of Sufism was someway due to this denaturation of powers.- The renewal at the societal level is distinctly a more intricate matter, inasmuch as the power which is the major instrument in the process of institution of social justice has become the private hunting ground for Princes. Any attempt to revival resulted either in violence or recovery. |
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| In our thinking, the political blockage of our societies that makes some believe that we’re genetically inept to practice democracy, takes root in a bolting situated all the way upstream from History. Islam having triggered a remarkable process of liberation enjoyed by dozens of people at its dawn was taken hostage by the Umayyad who did a great job inversing its dynamic and locking its systems in an exceptionally well-thought and structured fashion. |
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| They inversed the dynamic that says the power should be at the service of the Message and made the Message subservient to that power. The Koran and Sunna were guarantors of the sacred nature of the communities’ sovereignty but since the time of the Umayyad what has become sacred is the person of the Prince. They bolted this inversing by means of three ingredients : |
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| - Terror - The ideological manipulation thanks to a conscious or unconscious complicity of some clerics and to a sustained propaganda.- The setting up of a network of influences based on nepotism but also on financing. |
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| A formidable machine was launched, a one that was to undermine the egalitarian foundations and the real dynamism of a message of sense, essentially. This epistemological rupture is hardly ever done, not even by Muslims themselves. This rupture consists in putting at the center of the historical analysis this radical change in the nature of power, a change that undermined the universalistic basics of Islam. |
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| Today, keeping up with this disorientation provoked by caricatures, an Islamic French association overbids by condemning a movie called “a caliph in place of the caliph”, a French movie tackling the foolishness and outrageous opulence of Princes and viziers. we easily thus identify ,in our politically emasculated Muslim world, to that Abbasid period which, though is a symbol of great prestige, still is the epitome of unspeakable despotism. In the schema of thought that we’ve integrated into our Islamic societies, no distinction is made between the period of guided caliphs: rulers chosen by the people, and the Umayyad, rulers imposed upon the people. |
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| In our thought, understanding this mutation is decisive in the process of making sense of our current blockages. That is what we call “Al inkissar attareekhi” or “the historical break”. A break that is vital to understand but to surpass in our project of Tajdid. Because releasing our societies and unblock it will allow everyone of us to blossom in their spiritual channeling, and will also permit us to take up again with our role as depositories of a crucial and vital information: that of “sense”. |
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