Ma Bitar, Ruba Mansour:
The Muhammadan religious awakening in recent decades was accompanied by a relatively widespread spread of fundamentalist movements, These movements were not, as some imagine, the product of an external conspiracy, but rather the result of a structural flaw in the minds of these societies, a result of a culture based on a particular reading of the one religious text, but jurisprudentially multiple (Islam is one and multiple). The awakening of fundamentalism is not due to its intellectual strength and historical record of failure, but rather to the failure of its opposing force, namely the nationalist forces, which, beginning in the 1950s, adopted the emasculated Arabism. Arabism failed to achieve a society of justice, democracy, and progress, and its failure created a vacuum that it would have logically been filled with something better.
As a result of the assassination of forces that could have served as an alternative to Arabism, fundamentalism advanced the Greatest Failure Program, known under the slogan “Islam is the Solution.” Thus, the region developed backwards according to the rules of Arab development, i.e., from bad to worse. The cultural counterpart to the political also evolved according to a methodology that went from bad to worse. Instead of an alternative culture promising success, a culture imposed failure emerged. It is no surprise that a culture rooted in religion became active in societies where religion constitutes one of their fundamental components.
The marginal, shallow, superstitious religious culture was unable to dominate the scene alone. Therefore, it united with the remnants of Arab nationalism, forming a quota-based authority based on the principle of “whatever you can get, whatever you need.” Religious culture gave the authority its religious legitimacy, and Arab nationalism retained a portion of its privileges, thus fulfilling Aflaq’s statement: “Arabism is Islam, and Islam is Arabism.” The alliance of Arabism-Islam, and Islam-Arabism, led the country for nearly a century, bringing the entire region to the state we see today, characterized by complete collapse on all levels and in all circumstances.
The various and diverse fundamentalist forces can be called activist Islam, embracing a multitude of currents and groups that differ from one another in many ways… some are armed, others unarmed, some have slaughtered, and others have not yet, but are qualified to practice slaughter. The intellectual background is the same for all of them, represented by the comprehensive view of religion as a program of salvation in this world and the hereafter,Salvation on earth is mostly political, and is represented by the establishment of a religious state, regardless of whether it is a caliphate or an imamate,
Since the activist Islam is comprehensive, this activist Islam had to interfere in the affairs of life from small to large. It had to interfere in inventing slogans, including that crises are a result of distancing from religion, including also the consecration of the inferiority of women and the depreciation of their value, as we learned about this point through many events, for example, regarding the slaughter of the Mansouriya girl, who deserved to be slaughtered because she was not veiled, and after a short period, the Jordanian girl who was veiled was assassinated, which confused the Brotherhood’s theories regarding the veil with more contradiction, all of that in addition to what is known about the issue of preventing work and not qualifying women for education (Sheikh Al-Huwaini), then the emphasis on establishing memorization schools and religious institutes, then the consecration of hostility to Western civilization accompanied by the consecration of asylum to the West and the defense of the presence of millions in the West, then the incitement of these refugees to practice isolation and isolation and evasion of practices related to respecting democratic life and denying the diversity that their presence in the West created, as if they imagine The Islamization of nearly 800 million Westerners overnight, without them noticing that their asylum, parasitism, poverty, and backwardness do not represent a role model for anyone. Why would Europe convert to Islam when Europeans see and experience what religion has done to the Arabs? Are their lives, fates, backwardness, and violence a role model for anyone?
It is important to understand activist Islam and the objective factors that led to its revival in Arab societies, then to understand the essence of the causal relationship between the crises in these societies and the political-religious conditions these peoples have been experiencing for centuries. Active Islam is not a solution to any problem; rather, it is one of the manifestations and expressions of the problem. Active Islam, in addition, represents a disastrous escalation of backwardness.
The mere imagining of the Islam of the Taliban, the Islam of the Somali youth, the Islam of ISIS, or the regressions of the Brotherhood is alarming. The Arabists’ partnership with the Brotherhood has helped prolong the lives of each of them, yet life has deteriorated significantly under their leadership. How would it have been if it had ascended to power alone?