4

Heralds of Renewal

And We cause springs to erupt therein …

QUR’AN 36:34

ISLAM’S “River of Life” fed subterranean springs that sustained oases across Dar al Islam (the Islamic world).¹ During the repressive decades of the 1950s and 1960s, these nurturing springs created improbable islands of green in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and countless other sites in Islamic lands. Such sites provided refuge for a wounded Islam and kept the prospect of renewal alive. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, heralds of the Islamic Renewal burst on the scene from each of these oases. The heralds only seemed to come out of nowhere. Oases in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and more distant Islamic lands had allowed these figures to repair, gather strength, and act for Islam. By their example, they called forth unexpected mass energy in a fourth great historic surge of Islamic resistance and reform in the early 1970s, inspiring millions across Dar al Islam. Islam did more than survive: It experienced a dramatic revitalization to become once again a major player in human history.

Muhammad al Ghazzali was one such herald. He himself did not see clearly the signs of the great Renewal to come. A deep despair and fear for Islam run through his early writings. In his Notes from Prison Alija Izetbegovic writes, “Is there anything more beautiful than a rainbow? But the man who is inside it, cannot see it.”² A rainbow in so parched and desolate a landscape was just too improbable. Like Ghazzali, Izetbegovic contributed to the coming of the Renewal with his bold and insightful Islamic Declaration, issued from the 500-year-old community of Bosnian Muslims. Izetbegovic called Muslims across Dar al Islam to action. He, too, could not foresee the impact of his work. He, too, was in the rainbow.

The messages of figures like Muhammad al Ghazzali and Alija Izetbegovic as well were precisely the signs that ordinary Muslims were looking for. They responded in the millions. Muhammad al Ghazzali sounded his compelling call for revival from Egypt, the land of al Azhar and Muhammad Abduh. Ghazzali and the other Egyptian New Islamic intellectuals were joined in their efforts for renewal by Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah in Lebanon, Necmettin Erbakan in Turkey, Ali Shariati in Iran, and Alija Izetbegovic in Bosnia. These men were not alone. Heralds of Islamic Renewal appeared in all quarters of Dar al Islam. They rallied the masses to act for Islam. Few in the West understood the importance of these heralds of Islamic Renewal or even took note of the collective character of their work. Rare are the ordinary Western citizens, or even intellectuals, who will have read any of the prolific works of such figures. Western cultural imperialism seeks not only to project its own culture but also to discourage exposure of its citizens to the world’s intellectual currents.

Conventional Western analysts insistently pointed to a secular future. An unchallenged certainty reigned that all religions faced inevitable decline and marginalization. God was dying, if not already dead. Creativity of distinctly Islamic inspiration gave the lie to these false certainties. Each of the figures who contributed to al Tagdid al Islami (the Islamic Renewal) did so in highly inventive ways. It proved impossible to force them into existing categories of understanding and classification, although the effort was endlessly made. The heralds of the Islamic Renewal simply did not fit. Western scholars were ill equipped to take their measure. They have yet to grasp the nature of their collective role in shaping the character of al Tagdid al Islami.

Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the Poetic Voice of the Fourth Wave

Understanding unanticipated events of such extraordinary emotional energy and density of meaning may well exceed the descriptive and analytical capability of the prosaic prose of the social scientist. Poets have a better chance of capturing their import. The fourth Islamic wave found such an interpreter in an Iraqi-born Lebanese grand ayatollah. Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah (1935–2010) was a poet as well as a religious scholar and himself a force for renewal. Fadlallah held the rank of marja’ (the highest rank among Shi’i scholars). All Shi’a must choose a marja’. They seek his guidance on religious matters. His teachings guide their life decisions. They financially support his scholarship and community social work. From the Shi’a arc, Fadlallah defined as no other the call to freedom at the heart of the spirit of the Islamic Renewal.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was so dramatic and influential an event that it overshadowed the many other important contributions that came to the Islamic Renewal from Shi’i communities. Lebanese and Iraqi Shi’i scholars, like Fadlallah from Lebanon and Muhammad Baqir Badr (1935–1980) from Iraq, rose alongside the Iranians. They had central but now rarely noted roles in defining al Tagdid al Islami. Given the long shadows that the Iranian Revolution and Ayatollah Ruhollah Mostafavi Khomeini (1902–1989), in particular, have cast, it is especially important to bring them into view. For many who know little of the Shi’a and their rich historical legacy, Ayatollah Khomeini, and the repressive theocracy he established in the wake of the Iranian “earthquake,” has become the definitive face of Shi’a Islam. Close attention to the lifework of Fadlallah will help cultivate a more accurate sense of the richness of the contributions of the Shi’i tradition to the Renewal. It will also act as an antidote to the common perception that there was something inherent in Shi’ism that explains the authoritarian character that Khomeini gave the Iranian Revolution.

The second voice of the Shi’a, less poetic and more philosophical, sounded a parallel call to resistance, social justice, and Islamic reform. Badr came from a distinguished family of scholars. He was a prolific writer and a deep thinker on contemporary issues. Today he goes unread and rarely even mentioned in the West. It was Saddam Hussein who silenced that voice. He did so with unimaginable brutality. Arrested and tortured by Saddam’s henchmen, Badr’s torment ended with a nail driven through his skull. Part of the appeal of figures like Fadlallah and Badr is quite simply that they were men of great personal courage and deep conviction. They took unimaginable risks for the causes they advocated. Even without the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the work of figures like Fadlallah and Badr guaranteed that the diverse Shi’i communities of the ummah would have a powerful role in shaping the inclusive Islamic Renewal.

It is Fadlallah’s voice that most effectively breaks through cultural barriers to reach the widest audience. In “To Be Human” Ayatollah Fadlallah identifies resistance as the heart of the broader Renewal aimed for the assertion of one’s humanity:

Freedom comes from the will to freedom within oneself.

Freedom cannot be issued by a decree,

Nor can it be given by others.

Freedom is exactly like a spring that erupts from the depths of the earth.

It imposes itself.

When a spring erupts,

It doesn’t seek the approval of this and it doesn’t ask the opinion of that.

And it does not accept refusals

Because giving is the secret essence of the spring.

Fadlallah continues:

Only a freedom that erupts from within can give a man his humanity:

The freedom to say “NO”

When “NO” is your thought,

Even if the whole world says “YES!”

The issue is not being self-centered.

The issue is simply being human.³

Fadlallah uses the metaphor of erupting springs to suggest how only freedom can bring forth the thinking individual as a free human being. He links the freedom to develop and express one’s own thoughts to the attainment of a full humanity. He does not speak of movements or parties. Rather, Fadlallah addresses politics in its broadest sense of the relationship of individuals to the community of Muslims. Politics understood in this way addresses large issues that concern all Muslims. He connects the individual freedom of Muslims to the inclusionary struggle for the transcendence of sectarian divides that fracture the unity of the ummah. It demands resistance to all manner of colonial and imperial intrusions into the body of the ummah. It calls for the realization of a free Palestine. To experience this freedom and to fulfill the responsibilities it entails, Fadlallah calls ordinary Muslims to recapture their capacity for independent thought and action from the tyrannies of persons and enthrallment with things.

As a Shi’i marja’, Fadlallah commanded a massive following that extended well beyond Lebanon to Shi’i communities in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, the Gulf, and central Asia. Many Sunnis, too, responded to his call and looked to him for guidance. Both Western and regional media outlets regularly identified Fadlallah as a Shi’i religious leader, but the ayatollah himself never accepted the designation. He quite deliberately sought to address all Muslims. He appealed to an inclusive “true Islam” that “wants us to base our lives on reason and to elevate it by means of knowledge, so as to enrich it and be enriched by it.”⁴ Fadlallah’s many contributions to the renewal of Islamic thought and legal reasoning aimed to strengthen a modern and nonsectarian Islam.

Fadlallah did speak from Lebanon, and that grounding did make a difference. The American-backed Israeli invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and in 1982 gave Fadlallah’s work a clear focus, although never an exclusive one. Throughout his long and productive life, he never lost his conviction of the threat to Islam posed by Israel and the United States. Fadlallah took for granted the necessity of resisting the 18-year Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon (1982–2000). He understood that the United States consistently defended Israeli positions in all international forums. Hope rested with resistance mounted from Lebanese soil and by the Lebanese people, notably the Shi’a of occupied southern Lebanon. Fadlallah’s unequivocal advocacy of that position was fully in accord with international law and in no way criminal. In parallel fashion, Fadlallah remained all his life a staunch supporter of those Palestinians who struggled with justice on their side to establish a Palestinian state.

Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah was always more than a political figure. He took great pains to elaborate both the moral basis and the logic of resistance. There can be no doubt that his calls for resistance against occupation did inspire the fighters of Hizbullah. His message of social justice and concrete social projects did uplift the repressed and degraded community of Shi’i Lebanese. It is out of that community that Hizbullah as a national resistance movement emerged. In his Islam and the Logic of Force Fadlallah called upon Shi’a to reject their traditional passivity in the face of injustice and foreign domination. He called on them to reject centuries of quiescence. He did so from within Shi’i traditions. He urged the freedom fighters to seek inspiration in the behavior of the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali and his grandson Hussein. Both heroic figures martyred themselves in struggles against tyranny.⁵

Fadlallah’s call for resistance earned the profound animosity of both Israel and the United States. Israeli and Western intelligence agencies held Fadlallah responsible for all attacks against Western targets in Lebanon, including the kidnapping of foreigners and the 1983 bombings of the barracks of the multinational force in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. Marines and 58 French paratroopers. However, neither the Israeli nor the American authorities ever produced any persuasive evidence linking the ayatollah to these attacks, although he clearly believed that Lebanese had the right to oppose military occupiers who intervened in their affairs.

Fadlallah refused outright the Israeli–American narrative on Palestine. He explained that, in his view, Palestine is for the Palestinians who used to live there as the overwhelmingly majority population. Fadlallah, like most Arab intellectuals, rejected the Israeli claim to Palestine because their ancestors had lived there thousands of years ago. He asked if any people would recognize such a claim as the basis for the displacement of the contemporary population who lived on the land for generations. Fadlallah faced squarely the dilemmas of resistance to an overwhelmingly powerful occupying power in both his Lebanese homeland and in Palestine. He reminded Muslims that the Qur’an rejects passivism and legitimizes the resort to force by those violently oppressed and “driven from their homes.”⁶ As an Islamic scholar, Fadlallah reasoned that since Israel used the terrible violence of its American-supplied advanced weaponry, Islam permitted the defensive use of the classic weapons of the weak by resistance fighters. Since Palestinians had neither a regular army, nor an air force, nor a navy, Fadlallah defended the use by Palestinian fighters of their own bodies as weapons to defend their land, their way of life, and their faith. When Israel deployed F16 aircraft against civilians in 2002, Fadlallah pronounced that “they have had their land stolen, their families killed, their homes destroyed, and the Israelis are using weapons, such as the F16 aircraft, which are meant only for major wars. There is no other way for the Palestinians to push back those mountains, apart from martyrdom operations.”⁷

The ayatollah refused to call such operations “suicide bombings.” Fadlallah explained that “I was not the one who launched the idea of so-called suicide bombings, but I have certainly argued in favour of them. I do, though, make a distinction between them and attacks that target people in a state of peace—which was why I opposed what happened on September 11.” Fadlallah explained that “the situation of the Palestinians is quite different, because they are in a state of war with Israel. They are not aiming to kill civilians but in war civilians do get killed. Don’t forget, the Palestinians are living under mountains of pressure.” Fadlallah did encourage the pragmatic discussion of how effective such attacks were in advancing the Palestinian cause. He expressed no doubt, however, that they were justifiable in Islamic terms.⁸

Fadlallah would have none of the hollow rhetoric and hypocrisy of the West. Violence, he argued, began with occupation and dispossession, not with the resistance to them. All violent resistance struggles inevitably find innocent civilians caught in the crossfire. However, Fadlallah would not tolerate the suggestion that this deplorable outcome was somehow restricted to the Palestinian resistance fighters. He asked Americans a simple question: “During the Second World War, how many civilians did the West kill? Were the bombs which fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki dropped on civilians or not?” Fadlallah dismissed out of hand the endless Western attempts to establish a link between Islam and fanaticism. He reasoned that, “of course, there are extremists and fanatics in Islam, just as there are extremists and fanatics in the West. For example, you have people who are fanatical about the race issue. In Muslim countries, there are even fanatics against other Muslims, but that doesn’t prove that Islam creates them, any more than that Christianity creates fanatics in your society.” With unfailing logic, Fadlallah exposed how double standards and sheer hypocrisy had compromised the West. He appealed to universal standards, applicable to all, and he did so to great effect.⁹

It is quite impossible to take accurate measure of Fadlallah and his contribution to the Renewal from the point of view of his sharp criticisms of Israeli and Western policies only. Such an approach overlooks the ayatollah’s frequent attention to shortcomings closer to home. He did so with equal bluntness and the same moral clarity. Above all, the grand ayatollah was a lifelong advocate for the unity of the Islamic ummah. He warned presciently of the dangers of sectarianism to the ummah. Fadlallah regularly used his Friday sermons to call for the unity of the ummah. Over and over again he emphasized: “O Muslims: The Shi’as are not the Sunnis’ problem and the Sunnis are not the Shi’as’ problem.” Sectarian strife, he insisted, was deliberately stirred up by hostile outside powers to weaken the ummah.¹⁰ Fadlallah did not hesitate to challenge those among the Shi’a who saw the imamate as the foundation of irreconcilable differences between Sunni and Shi’a. Ali’s legacy as a man of great wisdom and a revolutionary in his view transcended the sectarian divide:

When there are outside threats, the leadership and the whole Ummah should freeze their differences and unite in preserving Islam and the Muslims. Therefore, all those who incite sectarian strife are in reality acting against Ali, because his principles, teachings and practice have always called for preventing the arrogant and disbelievers from exploiting our sectarian, religious and national differences in order to destroy Islam.¹¹

Fadlallah argued, in short, that the beloved Imam Ali was a champion of the unity of all Muslims.

Fadlallah also did not hesitate to denounce violent Islamic extremists who imagined that their indiscriminately violent means somehow defended Islam. He charged that, on the contrary, they did clear and lasting damage with their fanaticism. Fadlallah issued especially harsh condemnations of the extremist resort to takfir (declaring Muslims to be unbelievers). He found it shameful that

at a time where the Muslim Ummah faces severe challenges from the outside, a fanatic takfiri group from within continues its war on Muslims inside their mosques, armed with an alienating sectarian mindset and a murderous mentality that violates the sacredness of mosques, and eventually ends up killing groups of believers and worshippers in a brutal and criminal manner that has nothing to do with Islam and its principles.¹²

The grand ayatollah insisted on a sharp distinction between freedom fighters and criminal extremists. Fadlallah was among the first of the Islamic scholars to condemn the horrific 9/11 attacks as a violation of Shari’ah (the provisions from Qur’an and Sunnah to regulate human behavior). The ayatollah likewise sharply condemned all such operations that deliberately killed civilians, such as the murders that took place in the Moscow subway in 2010.

Fadlallah’s stature as a revered marja’ al-taqlid allowed him to go further in Shi’i self-criticism. He called for an end of Shi’i blood-shedding ceremonies at Ashura (the day of mourning for the martyrdom of the Prophet’s grandson in Shi’i Islam). More remarkably, he did the unthinkable for a Shi’i religious scholar of his time. Enormous prestige flowed to Iran in the wake of the revolution of 1979 that overthrew the Western-backed shah’s regime. Yet the grand ayatollah consistently and quite deliberately made himself a thorn in the side of Iran’s theocratic regime. In Lebanon, Fadlallah criticized Hizbullah’s dependence on Iran. Western critics, unaware of the dynamics of political life in Lebanon, consistently missed the fact that Fadlallah’s enormous following provided one of the few obstacles to the complete dominance by Hizbullah and their Iranian mentors of Lebanese Shi’a.

Efforts to silence the grand ayatollah’s defiant and uncompromising voice remained a constant threat throughout his life. They consistently failed, with a regularity that suggested miraculous protection to Fadlallah’s followers. In 1985 a massive assassination attempt was engineered against him. A 440-lb. car bomb was placed along the road from his apartment to his mosque. The ayatollah just barely escaped the explosion. The huge bomb destroyed an apartment block, killing more than eighty and wounding several hundred, including large numbers of women and children. The United States denied any responsibility. However, Bob Woodward, the American investigative journalist, connected the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the operation. There were contrary indications that right-wing Lebanese Christian extremists were behind the attempt. In any case, to date no credible investigation to establish the identity of the perpetrators has been undertaken. We do know with certainty that the Israelis made a second serious attempt to kill Fadlallah in 2006 by bombing his house in south Beirut. They did not disguise their intent. Fadlallah’s house was demolished, but the ayatollah was not there.¹³

American and Israeli intelligence agencies and Christian extremists were not the only enemies of Lebanon’s most distinguished Islamic scholar. Profiles of this complex figure rarely note that he was also attacked and threatened for his modernist and progressive social views. Conservative Islamic scholars and their activist supporters denounced Fadlallah’s stance on a wide range of social issues. Foreign occupiers, in Fadlallah’s view, were not the only enemies of human freedom. Fadlallah regularly described men and women as equals and consistently argued for women’s rights. Freedom for him was not the preserve of males alone. In 2007 the grand ayatollah issued a fatwa (religious opinion by an Islamic scholar) condemning domestic violence against women. The ruling defended the right of a woman to defend herself in such situations. In subsequent fatwas Fadlallah banned female circumcision and “honor killings.” The ayatollah openly discussed issues of female sexuality, including masturbation and the right of a woman to an abortion when her health was at risk.

Following the pathway to social justice charted by Hassan al Banna, Fadlallah registered exemplary charitable and welfare achievements that many judge as far more advanced than Banna’s. He founded a public library, a women’s cultural center, and medical clinics, as well as an extensive network of eighteen schools, nine orphanages, and a large number of religious and cultural centers in the Shi’i suburbs of Beirut and in southern Lebanon. All of his work was suffused with a personal kindness and gentleness that was itself an inspiration for spiritual regeneration.

Inevitably, Israel and Western governments placed Hizbullah on their arbitrarily compiled lists of terrorist organizations. Routinely, Fadlallah was described in Western scholarship and journalism as the spiritual advisor of Hizbullah, irresponsibly exposing the ayatollah to attacks in the “War on Terror.” Such arbitrary pronouncements aside, there is no credible evidence that Fadlallah was directly affiliated with Hizbullah in any institutional capacity. Hizbullah looked to Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor Ayatollah Khamenei in Tehran. Fadlallah had, in fact, distanced himself ideologically from Hizbullah when the group accepted Ayatollah Khamenei, the successor to Khomeini, as their marja’.

Undeterred by these inconvenient facts, the corporate international media endlessly repeated the myth of Fadlallah’s role as spiritual advisor to Hizbullah. The independent journalist Robert Fisk, personally acquainted with Fadlallah and in a class by himself for his direct knowledge of Lebanon, knew otherwise. He said so, simply and convincingly. In a defiant tribute to the ayatollah at the time of his death, Fisk pronounced that “Fadlallah was a very serious and very important man whose constant sermons on the need for spiritual regeneration and kindness did more good than most in a country constantly flooded in a rhetoric bath.” Fisk reported that “hundreds of thousands attended his funeral in Beirut … I am not surprised.”¹⁴

The Iranian Earthquake

Attention to the important work for the Renewal by Shi’i scholars in other sites does not diminish in any way the importance of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Out of the suffering of the Iranian people, one of the greatest mass movements in human history erupted. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 sent tremors felt around the world. It galvanized Muslims everywhere, and not just those of the Shi’a arc. These voices of millions could not be silenced at Iran’s revolutionary moment. Like other such momentous developments, the nature of the revolution’s long-term effects was far from clear. What was clear was that the Iranian people had launched the first genuine mass revolution of our time, not inspired by Western ideologies.

As Iran’s cities exploded, the glowering image of the black-turbaned grand ayatollah inevitably became the face of the Iranian Revolution. Khomeini’s character and background tell a great deal about the nature of the Iranian Revolution and the regime that emerged from it, but they obscure even more. When Khomeini stepped from his plane to return triumphantly from exile to an Iran in revolution, a young reporter asked the ayatollah what he felt at just that moment. “Nothing” was Khomeini’s chilling reply. Within a year, that young man had been executed, along with thousands of others, as the cruel and dictatorial features of the new regime took shape.¹⁵ There are many examples of brutal authoritarian and theocratic rulers in the history of the Islamic world. However, they were interpreted as contraventions of Islam. Khomeini, in contrast, had crafted an elaborate theological justification for his theocratic rule. Such a justification in Islamic terms was unknown to Islam in all its centuries. Although sharply contested on Islamic ground, he succeeded in imposing it by force. The new regime concentrated power in the hands of one man, and that man felt nothing. Rivers of blood flowed. The screams of those tortured and killed under the watchful gaze of the “Imam,” as his followers called him, were as frequent and as wrenching as those from the time of the shah.

The temptation is overwhelming to see this authoritarian outcome, engineered by Khomeini, as inevitable, but it should be avoided. Whatever came later, it is undeniable that Iran did experience a revolution. It was genuine. The revolution removed the American-imposed shah. It fundamentally transformed state structures. It called for their rebuilding on new foundations of Islamic inspiration. These momentous events inspired ordinary Muslims across Dar al Islam. The Iranian people did register a signal victory in the human struggle for freedom. They did so in Islam’s name. It was al Nas, the people, who poured into the streets to make the revolution. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands did so, carrying the banner of Islam. In the end, their cries for freedom and social justice went unrealized, as the new regime degenerated into a theocratic autocracy. Yet that degeneration should not obscure the importance of the event itself. The liberating promise of the revolution did not take Iranians further than the elimination of the shah. Yet that accomplishment was in itself a gain for freedom. A close look at events in Iran makes the further point that there is no iron code that Shi’i Islam inevitably generates theocratic despotism. There were contingencies, both internal and external, that ultimately shaped developments in Iran. There were power struggles within the ranks of Shi’i scholars. The outcomes were not preordained. They were resolved, for the time being, in ways adverse to the more liberating outcome for which the Iranian people had launched their revolution. The pathways not taken remain to shadow the current authoritarian structures.

From the very outset, the unfolding of the revolution harbored contradictions. They defined alternatives to Khomeini’s brand of authoritarianism that centered on his commitment to wilayet al faqih (rule of the faqih; the system of government in which a leading Shi’i religious leader exercises absolute authority). It is now almost forgotten that even among Iran’s senior religious scholars there were staunch opponents to the rule of “the faqih.” Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari took the lead. In Qom, the center of Islamic learning in Iran, Shariatmadari was generally considered to be the highest-ranked and most influential of the grand ayatollahs. Earlier, Shariatmadari had intervened to rescue Khomeini. Khomeini’s outspoken political criticism had brought him to the attention of the shah’s security apparatus. Shariatmadari supported Khomeini’s elevation to the rank of grand ayatollah, thus placing him out of reach of the shah’s security forces. Shariatmadari’s support carried great weight with the palace. He belonged to the quiescent school of Shi’a scholars and had provided important support for the shah’s rule.

As Iran moved toward revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made his bid for leadership. He advanced his radically revisionist conception of wilayet al faqih that would concentrate absolute power in the hands of the faqih. Ayatollah Shariatmadari forcefully opposed Khomeini’s innovation. He saw it as a dangerous and unprecedented break with tradition that opened the way to theocracy. Shariatmadari was no democrat, as his unwavering support for the shah had made clear. Yet the grand ayatollah concluded that a far greater danger than even the shah’s rule lay in dictatorial rule with theological underpinnings. Khomeini responded fiercely to Shariatmadari’s criticisms, recognizing just how high the stakes were. The grand ayatollah’s supporters were killed in street clashes, and his family was harassed. “Death to the detractors of wilayet al faqih” became a street chant of Khomeini’s minions. Shariatmadari himself was arrested. Shockingly, the elderly ayatollah, a man of immense learning and great dignity, was physically abused. He was forced to recant publicly his opposition. He did so but in a way that left no doubt that the confession had been extracted by brute force. Many read that signal as the final act of defiance of a brave man. Not long after his public confession, Shariatmadari fell seriously ill. He was diagnosed with cancer. The grand ayatollah, the leading religious figure of Qom and the man who had rescued Khomeini, was denied the medical treatment his condition required. In a final vindictive act of disrespect, Shariatmadari was buried near the toilets on the grounds of the hospital where he had languished untreated.

Given the vocal opposition of very senior figures like Shariatmadari, it is unlikely that Khomeini would have prevailed without the support of other senior scholars to offset the opposition of figures like Shariatmadari. The support for Khomeini of Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri (1922–2009), in particular, proved critical. Montazeri had impeccable credentials for resistance to the shah, having been jailed and tortured more than once. At the same time, his scholarly work would earn him the rank of grand ayatollah and the status of a marja’. Although he was from a modest background and was a simple man in habits and speech, Montazeri was regarded as among the most learned of his contemporaries, with significant works on mysticism, ethics, and legal reasoning. Khomeini recognized how indispensable his distinguished former teacher was to his rise. He designated Montazeri as his successor.

Khomeini proceeded to consolidate his hold on power with Montazeri at his side. In time, the scale of the postrevolutionary bloodletting exceeded all expectations. It proceeded more and more recklessly. Estimates of those killed in the revolutionary struggle itself number some 2,000. During Khomeini’s postrevolutionary consolidation of power, it is likely that close to three times that number perished. For Montazeri, a turning point came with Khomeini’s decision to execute approximately 3,000 political prisoners who had opposed his rule. Already jailed and therefore no immediate threat to the regime, Khomeini nevertheless ordered their slaughter. Montazeri dared to speak out publicly against this outrage. Friends and associates asked later why he had not just kept silent; with Khomeini’s passing, he would assume the leadership and could have righted the wrongs into which the revolution had fallen. Montazeri expressed himself plainly: “I could not sleep knowing that people were being killed.” Khomeini would not tolerate the open break. In his letter removing Montazeri from his official position and the succession, Khomeini’s earlier regard for the man he called “the fruit of my life” lingered.¹⁶ Described as a brilliant exponent of legal reasoning, the ayatollah was ordered to retire to Qom and resume his teaching and research. Montazeri ended his years engaged fully in his scholarly work while at the same time acting as the spiritual mentor of all those who opposed the tyranny of Iran’s theocrats. Montazeri produced path-breaking works that extended the legal tradition from protection of the rights of the faithful to protecting the rights of all Iranian citizens, notably including the Baha’is in Iran.¹⁷ Periodically, he issued ringing criticisms of the Iranian religious establishment, not sparing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader. His former protégé, Montazeri pronounced bluntly, was unqualified for the position. Moreover, he lacked the standing of a senior religious scholar, entitled to issue fatwas.¹⁸ Iran’s most prominent human rights advocate, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, issued a statement of gratitude to him at the time of the ayatollah’s death in 2009: “I call you Father because I learned from you how to defend the oppressed without using violence against the oppressor. I learned from you that being silent is helping the oppressor. Father, I learned much from you, although I never (got the chance to) show my appreciation for being your child and student. Father, forgive us.”¹⁹

Many other leading Shi’i scholars, despite serious reservations about Khomeini’s claim, choose silence over overt opposition. That position was very much in line with the traditional stance of Shi’i religious scholars. But not all took this path. Among Shi’a grand ayatollahs, Shariatmadari and Montazeri were not alone in registering courageous opposition to the doctrine of wilayet al faqih. The Lebanese grand ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah lent his powerful voice to augment that of Shariatmadari and Montazeri. Fadlallah had enthusiastically welcomed the Iranian Revolution. Initially, he expressed support for Khomeini’s leadership as well. However, as the authoritarian and arbitrary character of Khomeini’s rule became clear, Fadlallah mounted a sharply critical attack. He did so on Islamic grounds, pointedly challenging Khomeini’s notion of wilayet al faqih as an unacceptable innovation of Shi’i doctrine.

Fadlallah refused outright Khomeini’s claim that he, like the Shi’a imams, should be regarded as offering an interpretation of Shi’a doctrine that was beyond challenge. Fadlallah’s dissent was clear and forceful. It carried the imprimatur of one of the most respected and beloved of the Shi’a maraji’. His critique of the Iranians had broader implications. Fadlallah found the Iranian Islamic scholars loyal to Khomeini arrogant and over-reaching. He said so bluntly. In his view Iran under Khomeini, whatever the initial successes of the revolution, should not be allowed to set itself up as the epicenter of Shi’i Islam. Fadlallah believed that the Iranian marja‘iyya (collective of maraji’) dominated the upper echelon of Shi’i thought to its detriment. He rejected outright the fact that “the Iranian theologians believe that Iran is the only Shi’ite Islamic authority, because they consider Iran as the headquarters of Shi’ite influence. The Iranians believe that all decisions regarding Shi’ite Islam must come from Iran.”²⁰ Fadlallah positioned himself quite purposefully as an Arab Shi’i marja’, whose standing in the Shi’i hierarchy equaled or surpassed that of the Iranian clerics. He forcefully made it clear that he did not consider the Iranian religious establishment beyond criticism. Fadlallah rejected outright the Iranian claim that Khomeini and his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had a monopoly on truth. “Like all other believers,” Fadlallah pronounced categorically, “leaders are fallible and open to criticism.”²¹

The opposition of these dissenting ayatollahs was not the only challenge Khomeini faced. The story of the left and liberal opponents of the Iranian theocracy is better known and can therefore be treated in brief. They represented the unrealized progressive possibilities of freedom, democracy, and universal human rights that were all part of the Iranian constitutional tradition. Khomeini, as a senior Shi’a scholar and the symbol of resistance to the regime of the shah, did stir millions in Iran. Nevertheless, he was acutely aware that the possibility of revolution did not belong to him and his followers alone. Khomeini’s rise was shadowed by the challenge from the Iranian left and the legions of young people who responded to its appeal. Khomeini’s successful crushing of the secular opposition has pushed them out of view. Their significance is now forgotten. Yet none of the cold realists who were players in prerevolutionary Iran had the slightest inclination to underplay the role of the left, not the shah and his brutal SAVAK, not the CIA and its army of paid informers and Iranian co-conspirators, and not Khomeini and his most trusted advisors. They all, rightly, took the challenge from the liberals and the left seriously.

Iran had a strong liberal and constitutional tradition. The country experienced a constitutional revolution in 1906 and that tradition remains very much alive in the Iranian political imagination. The Iranians had a long history of struggle for democracy. They had registered some notable successes, despite the power of those arrayed against a democratic Iran. That prospect shined brightly again in the 1950s under an extraordinary Iranian nationalist, Prime Minister Mosaddegh, who successfully nationalized Iranian oil. In the face of such assertiveness with overwhelming popular support, the United States played its classic, antidemocratic role. A CIA-engineered coup against the constitutional government installed the shah’s regime. Iranians were subjected to decades of his brutally repressive rule. Liberals and leftists were targeted with particular viciousness that aimed for their elimination from public life.

Khomeini was aware that the left and the liberals constituted a serious force. The grand ayatollah was too astute a political figure to ignore them. He took note of those forces and individuals who exerted influence on those hostile segments of the population. Ali Shariati was the most influential of such figures. Shariati appealed to the Iranian left and liberals alike, using an innovative Islamic political discourse with modernist and progressive shadings. We know that Khomeini read Shariati’s work, although the grand ayatollah kept his assessment to himself. He must have grasped how different was the revolution Shariati imagined. Yet he also understood how useful Shariati’s charismatic appeal, cast in an Islamic idiom, could be to his movement. Shariati died in London in 1977 before the outbreak of revolution. Most believe he was assassinated by the shah’s secret police, but, however he died, this charismatic Iranian intellectual had already left his mark. His influence in Iran has endured and now runs through subterranean channels. It remains important for ongoing efforts to conceive of an Islamic alternative to the repressive theocracy Khomeini established.

When al Nas (the common people) first erupted onto the streets of Tehran and other major Iranian cities in October 1978 until October 1979, when the shah left the country, Khomeini’s was not the only name they chanted. Shariati’s name was also on their lips. Today, however, this charismatic figure known to millions of Iranians, especially the youth, is almost always left out of the most influential accounts of the Iranian Revolution. In parallel fashion, Shariati is almost never engaged critically in any of the major works on the broader Islamic Renewal, whether by Western or Muslim authors. At best, there are passing references, sometimes laudatory but more frequently hostile. The misguided message in either case is that Shariati had only marginal influence on the revolution and has had no continuing relevance.

While Khomeini emerged from the conflicted heart of Shi’i Islam, Ali Shariati came from its permeable margins. That difference was not the only one between Shariati and the grand ayatollah who felt nothing. Shariati was a man who felt deeply the suffering of the least of the Iranians, a man whose empathy for the dispossessed gave him an appeal that rivaled that of Khomeini. Shariati himself explained in words that could be taken as a self-description that “the enlightened soul is a person who is self-conscious of his ‘human condition’ in his time and historical and social setting, and whose awareness inevitably and necessarily gives him a sense of social responsibility.”²² Shariati was not primarily a religious scholar. Nor was he an ideologue of fundamentalist Islam, nor a philosopher in the mold of Sartre or Fanon. He eluded all these categories. For Iranian youth, in particular, Shariati was much more. He was a Shi’i storyteller who, in the guise of a university lecturer, gave them access to the emotional energy and spiritual power of the most progressive strands of their distinctive Islamic heritage. In his writings and lectures Shariati regularly invoked Abu Dharr al Ghifari, Islam’s “first socialist” and a companion of the Prophet. In his influential “Where Shall We Begin” Shariati explains that “in the tradition of Abudhar [sic], who is my mentor, whose thought, whose understanding of Islam and Shi’ism, and whose ideals, wants, and rage I emulate … I begin my talk with the name of the God of the oppressed (mustad’afan).”²³

All too often we neglect the power of emotions and feelings when assessing the factors that explain the Islamic Renewal. The reduction of matters to intellectual formulations, political impulses, and movement manipulations misses a great deal. Remarks made by Shariati about a visit to Egypt illustrate just how much. At the pyramids, Shariati marveled at the enormity of the stones used as walls and ceiling for the base of the pyramids. He was entranced by his guide’s description of the way in which the countless blocks of stone for the construction were brought to Cairo from Aswan 980 miles away. At a short distance from the site, Shariati noticed scattered mounds of stones. He learned that of the 35,000 slaves who carried stones, uncounted hundreds were crushed to death under the weight of their loads. The site he had noticed was a collective grave. The slaves were buried in a ditch near the pyramids, the guide reported, so their souls could be employed as slaves just as their bodies were.

Shariati asked the guide to leave him alone at the site. He went to the graves and sat down. He reports feeling very close to the people buried in that mass grave, recalling that “it was as if we were of the same race … I had nothing but warm feelings and sympathy toward these oppressed souls.” Shariati reports that, when leaving the site, he “looked back to the Pyramids and realized that despite their magnificence, they were so strange to and distant from me! In other words, I felt so much hatred towards the great monuments of civilization which throughout history were raised upon the bones of my predecessors!” Broadening his lens, Shariati concludes that “my predecessors also built the great walls of China. Those who could not carry the loads were crushed under the heavy stones and put into the walls with the stones. This was how all the great monuments of civilization were constructed—at the expense of the flesh and blood of my predecessors!”²⁴

Shariati elaborated the theoretical and political implications of these intensely personal reflections in his sociological writings. His scholarly work opened new pathways. He aimed for nothing less than to craft a revolutionary Islam. All of his intellectual work reflected that goal. Shariati aimed to turn inherited Shi’i commitments in the direction of radical change. The task was a daunting one. Shariati registered far greater success than one could reasonably expect, given the long history of the Shi’a as a quiescent minority community. The messianic Shi’i doctrine promising the reign of justice with the return of the hidden imam had for centuries rationalized inaction in the face of suffering. Shariati’s boldest move was the sundering of the conventional link between waiting for the return of the hidden imam and his reign of justice with patient tolerance of injustice and tyranny. Shariati instead tied the future reign of justice to present revolutionary struggles. He advocated mass action in the now and in the name of the triumph of justice to come. Shariati pointed to the experience of redemption in action that comes with struggles for justice rather than as a consequence of them. Acting for the revolution could advance today that ultimate victory of age-old Shi’i dreams.

Shariati was trained in sociology at the Sorbonne. In his scholarly work, Shariati reasons that an Islamic sociology would be based on the distinctive Qur’anic understanding of the major force that drives historical change. He comments on the two major Western approaches to explain the drivers of large-scale social change. On the one hand, there are those that point to uniquely gifted individuals like Buddha, Jesus, or the Prophet Muhammad. Others look to elites of exceptional skills or gifts, such as clergy or intellectuals. Shariati argued that neither approach has a place in Islam. The Qur’an, he explains, does not recognize the Prophet Muhammad as the active cause of development. He is rather the bearer of the Message that shows the people the school and path of the truth. Shariati points out that the Qur’an most often addresses its message to al Nas. The Prophet himself is sent to al Nas. Al Nas, as Shariati sees it, are the motivating force of both spiritual and worldly progress. As a trained sociologist, Shariati concludes that Islam is the first school of social thought that recognizes the masses as the driving factor in shaping history and society. That essential role does not belong to the elect, as Nietzsche thought; nor the aristocracy and nobility, as Plato claimed; nor great personalities, as Carlyle and Emerson believed; nor those of pure blood, as Alexis Carrel imagined; nor the priests or intellectuals; nor the workers alone, as Marx envisioned. For Shariati it is ordinary people, the masses, al Nas, who drive history forward. In Religion against Religion Shariati points out that the Qur’an opens with God and ends with al Nas. He goes further. Speaking in a sociological rather than theological sense, Shariati boldly declares that one can substitute al Nas for God in the whole of the Qur’an without altering its meaning.²⁵

Revolutions, unlike coups, succeed through mass action. Shariati was no democrat. He embraced al Nas but paid little attention to the mechanics of how the popular will would be expressed. These unaddressed considerations, however important, did not diminish Shariati’s ability to bring segments of the left and the liberals into a mass movement under an Islamic banner. Ali Shariati never wore the turban. He never spoke for the religious establishment. The man who did most to bring the people, especially the urban and educated youth, to Iran’s revolutionary moment was not an ayatollah, not an Islamic scholar of standing. Inconsistencies and scholarly inadequacies are everywhere apparent in the body of Shariati’s writings. They mattered little. What we have are for the most part lecture notes, rather than sustained and polished works. They reflect the status of his thought at the time of delivery, rather than his considered, scholarly views. The coherence of Shariati’s work flows from the extraordinary boldness of his project itself and the eloquence of its articulation. Iranians revere their poets, as I do. The way thoughts are expressed matters greatly. Shariati used his rhetorical skills to craft nothing less than a revolutionary Islam. Ultimately, what made it possible for Shariati to play this role had less to do with his familiarity with the left-leaning thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, his study of the Third World leftism of Frantz Fanon, or his graduate training in Western sociology under such luminaries as Jacques Berque. More important than all of these undoubted influences was the sheer magic of Shariati as a storyteller who took his materials from his heritage.

Abdulkarim Soroush, a leading Iranian philosopher and public intellectual, has best described Shariati’s inimitable contribution:

Shariati’s master stroke was to bring to life the tale of Ashura and Imam Hussain, Zainab’s captivity and the captivity of Imam Hussain’s kith and kin, and the events of Karbala as a whole. He was, in all fairness, an expert—with a magical touch—when it came to cultivating this story and bringing Shi’a’s blood to the boil; no one has been able to surpass him in this.²⁶

Boldness made Shariati a brilliant and irresistible force for revolution, no matter the inconsistencies in his thought, the disinterest in democracy, and the selective treatment of the history of the Shi’a. Revolutions require blood brought to a boil. Shariati had that magic touch.

Necmettin Erbakan and the Spirit of Islam in Turkey

Turkey is now a destination. For decades, in the wake of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the new Turkish state was generally viewed as a bridge between East and West. The secular elite fashioned by Kemal Atatürk embraced this bridge metaphor with misplaced pride. They made it part of their emerging Turkish national identity. In this formulation, the East and the West were real places. Turkey, by implication, was not. It was simply a passageway from one real place to another. Turkey itself had an insecure and fragmented identity. Turkish identity was presumed to be fractured between the identities of those others who walked over it. Samuel Huntington famously pronounced Turkey a “torn country,” with an elite that yearned to be Western and masses who knew they belonged to the Islamic world.²⁷ The description stuck. A Western political scientist innocent of any deep understanding of Turkey or the Islamic world to which it belonged should be forgiven for not noticing that the Turkish elite was not nearly as monolithic as his observation suggested. An Islamic alternative, grounded in the Ottoman experience, shadowed the secular Turkish republic. It drew its greatest strength from mass support, as Huntington understood. Yet from that mass base emerged an impressive counter-elite with an Islamic orientation that had deep roots in the Ottoman age and a rich tradition of Turkish mysticism. It survived despite Atatürk’s assault on all things Islamic. That Islamic counter-elite not only grew in strength but also developed its own distinctive understanding of Turkish national identity and the capacity to repair the tears.

Said Nursi had done the essential intellectual heavy lifting that yielded an Islamic strategy to make post-Ottoman Turkey whole. Nursi and the Nurcu movement prepared Turkey as no other to make a distinctive contribution to the success of the Islamic Renewal and to ensure Turkey’s key role in it. “The Wonder of the Age” cast nationalism in Islamic terms. Nursi and the Nurcu movement that he founded made substantial progress in developing a body of Islamic political thought. They also carried out a program of pragmatic social activism of Islamic inspiration that reinforced connections to the masses of Turks, especially those in the countryside. It was Nursi and his followers who forged the critical link among Islam, democracy, and nationalism in Turkey. He moderated all three elements of this potent synthesis. He blended the three to give Turkey its distinctive contemporary character. Such would be the banner of the Islamic counter-elite. For decades the Islamic nationalism of Nursi’s inspiration had remained a subterranean current. It was not until 1950 that the Turkish polity opened to multiparty competition. Only then could political ideas and practices with a clear Islamic character emerge from the shadows. When that time came, the Islamic current demonstrated its impressive strength.

The seemingly absolute ascendency of an extreme secular authoritarianism, fervently backed by the West, had delayed but not derailed the effects of Said Nursi’s work. It took several decades to realize his vision. The man who did most to make that possible was Necmettin Erbakan (1926–2011). He rarely receives the recognition his contributions merit. The full scope of his achievements is almost never registered, not even in Turkey. Turkish analysts note that “there are no extensive studies today that deal with the contribution of Erbakan to our political life.”²⁸ At best, Erbakan is regarded as having laid the foundations for “political Islam” in Turkey. At worst, he is denounced as a reactionary fundamentalist.

Nursi envisioned. Erbakan did a great deal to realize the vision. The very notion of political Islam was alien to Nursi and his legions of followers. For them, Islam was a comprehensive system. Nursi was far from a backward-looking fundamentalist. Nursi’s complex vision blended a comprehensive and centrist Islam with nationalism and democracy. Erbakan took the crucial steps that made the realization of that larger vision possible by planting the first seeds of a politics that would give it practical expression. Turkey today is a unique place where Islam, democracy, and a robust economic and political nationalism all flourish. That outcome owes much more than is generally acknowledged to Necmettin Erbakan.

Erbakan’s story is usually told as the confrontation of an extremist religious ideologue with the Turkish military that is cast as the vigilant guardian of secularism. The high point of his political career is the post of prime minister, which he held for a period of just under a year. The denouement is always the “soft” military coup that unceremoniously pushed him off center stage in February 1997. The tale ends with a marginalized Erbakan lapsing into a paranoid politics of frustrated impotence and shrill rhetoric.

This conventional history is little more than a caricature of the man and his historic role in Turkish political life. It obscures all of the really significant dimensions of a career that made Erbakan not only a major figure in the shaping of modern Turkish nationalism but also a genuine herald of the Islamic Renewal. The portrait of the irrational ideologue begins to blur when we know that Erbakan was a highly educated and accomplished engineer. He studied mechanical engineering in Istanbul Technical University, one of Turkey’s most respected universities. He received his Ph.D. in Germany from RWTH Aachen University, renowned for its world-class mechanical engineering program. Returning to Turkey, Erbakan proved himself as an engineer with several important inventions. He went on to success in business. It was his role as a university professor of mechanical engineering, however, that seemed to suit him best. Erbakan’s manner was above all professorial, down to his emphatic pointing gestures to drive home a point. Throughout his active political life, Erbakan was known affectionately to his followers as Hodja, “the teacher.” Yet even the professorial image only went so far. Erbakan contradicted it on the lighter side with a sartorial taste that found its signature statement in Versace ties. He also undermined the reassuring image of the thoughtful professor with a propensity for hyperbolic attacks on perceived enemies. At various times, the list included Zionists, communists, leftists, secularists, and even former protégés like the current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan incurred his mentor’s wrath when he bolted from his camp to found the Justice and Development Party (AK) that today dominates Turkish politics.

These details of the highly successful and deeply contradictory life of a real human being do spoil the simple lines caricature requires. However, they also point in revealing ways to the balance of impressive talents and serious flaws of a larger-than-life political figure. Erbakan was a major political figure in Turkish public life for decades. On that score alone, he deserves attention. When the field of vision is broadened beyond Turkey to take in all of Dar al Islam, the point has even greater force. Erbakan staked an explicit claim very early as a champion of the worldwide ummah rather than simply as a defender of Islam in Turkey. In 1969 he published a manifesto, Milli Gorus or the National View. Turks read the title correctly as the Islamic View. They understood that all direct references to Islam were banned at the time the document was first published. Erbakan’s manifesto blended Islamic Ottoman influences with Turkish nationalist commitments. He addressed to transnational Islam a call for the solidarity of all Muslim peoples) in order to face what he saw as the unrelenting hostility of Israel and the West. Milli Gorus, in short, was a defensive call to Islamic Renewal, addressed to Muslims worldwide.

Based on this program, Erbakan in 1970 founded the first of a series of five Islamic parties. They all had the same general Islamic orientation that challenged the reigning secularism. He faced all manner of obstructions. His party suffered a series of closures, only to have the resolute and remarkably irrepressible Erbakan reconstitute his Islamic party under yet another different name. The Turkish military seized power through coups in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997. Erbakan was a preferred and frequent target. He was imprisoned once, banned from political life for an extended period, and exiled for several years to Switzerland. Given these daunting obstacles, his political successes as an Islamic political figure are even more impressive. They were not confined to Turkey but had a transnational reach. He was the founding father in 1969 of Millî Görüş, the leading Turkish diaspora organization in Europe. Reasonable estimates in 2005 placed membership across Europe at close to 90,000, with some 50,000 in Germany alone.

In the Turkish political arena, Erbakan rose to the pinnacle of power, although he was unable to consolidate that position. In the 1970s, Turkey’s most prominent Islamic political figure served twice as deputy prime minister. Finally, for almost a year in 1996–1997, Erbakan served as Turkish prime minister. As prime minister, Erbakan immediately sought to reorient Turkish policies. He advanced a bold vision for the new direction. In the domestic arena, he challenged extreme secularists and sought accommodation with moderates. In foreign affairs, he outlined an alternative to dependence on the West. The actual steps taken were modest and practical but they pointed to a bold, new direction.

There was nothing conspiratorial or extremist about Erbakan’s Islamic sympathies and the ways he sought to translate them into policies. He was forthright and honest with the Turkish public in the way he presented himself and his party. His policy initiatives lay fully within the range of reasonable actions for a new prime minister with a distinctive electoral mandate. At home, he advanced a program of modest social reforms, designed to reclaim a reasonable space for Islam in public life. Typical of his program of small steps was lifting the ban on Islamic dress for women in governmental offices, universities, and other public spaces as well as adjusting working hours to accommodate Islamic worship practices.

The prime minister’s foreign policy measures were more dramatic, and especially disconcerting to both Israel and the United States. Erbakan’s first foreign trip in office was to the Islamic Republic of Iran rather than either Europe or the United States. Erbakan signaled clearly that he intended to use his office to reposition Turkey in the global arena. Erbakan’s pain at the suffering of the Islamic world at the hands of the West was heartfelt. It prompted a search for ways of connecting in more meaningful ways to Islamic countries. To that end, he took the lead in founding the Developing Eight (D-8), an international organization of eight Muslim-majority countries focused on socioeconomic development. The members were Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Turkey. The organization’s program implicitly criticized the American-dominated world order. It embraced peace rather than conflict, dialogue rather than confrontation, cooperation rather than exploitation, justice rather than double standards, equality rather than discrimination, and democracy rather than oppression. In a parallel track, Erbakan set in motion a series of measures designed to improve relations with Arab countries. When Erbakan was pushed out of office by the military, the mainstream American press reported that the case against him centered on his moving Turkey away from its pro-Western orientation, as though such a reorientation was a crime sufficient to warrant a military coup.

Through his political party experiments, Erbakan succeeded in creating a space for Islam in Turkish public life. The opportunities he created allowed promising young people with Islamic commitments to gain practical political experience. Erbakan’s political campaigns were consistently marked by successful grassroots networking across class, gender, and ethnic lines. The fact that important electoral victories were registered gave added weight to this critical political training of a whole generation of politically experienced, Islamic activists. Erbakan created a model of effective grassroots organization. He showed how to combine a revolt against the establishment’s injustice, cruelty, and cultural alienation with historical and emotional connection to the people’s heritage and sentiments. It is this ability to connect with the masses in culturally meaningful ways that gives Islamic movements an edge over other political trends, notably the Marxists.

Erbakan’s practice of a pragmatic politics, suffused with the ethos of centrist Islam, had set strong roots. The Islam for which Erbakan spoke had a modern character that diminished the appeal of Turkish extremists. It is now often forgotten that there were alternative extremist Islamic strategies and militants to implement them during his years of active political work. Erbakan’s presence pushed them to the margins, although this signal achievement is rarely noted. Extremists never gained a foothold in the politicized Turkish Islam that Erbakan dominated. On social and religious practice issues, Erbakan was demonstrably a conservative. This stance had its advantages. For years Erbakan provided a centrist political home for socially conservative Turks, thus further diminishing the appeal of the militants.

Erbakan’s brief for a centrist, if conservative, Islam in public life had as its corollary a commitment to democratic politics. He understood that the overwhelming majority of Turks had deep attachments to Islam. Democracy would provide the rightful vehicle for the ascendency of Turkish Islam. There is no evidence at all that Erbakan ever seriously considered any other pathway to power for the Islamic trend other than the ballot box. His success in electoral politics validated the soundness of his judgment. Erbakan made perhaps his most important political contribution in accepting the outcomes of a democratic political process, even one at times highly circumscribed and frequently short-circuited by the military.

Erbakan’s achievements are to this day overshadowed by charges that he was an erratic and even irrational fundamentalist. Without doubt, Erbakan as prime minister broke all the rules for those days. He was and behaved as the representative of an alternative political orientation. He expressed an identity for Turkey other than that of a bridge to the West. He moved in new ways. He generated new ideas. Americans, Israelis, and secular Turks all felt, quite rightly, that they had no friend in Erbakan. Quite clearly, Erbakan opposed Western policies in the Middle East. Just as clearly and certainly more forcefully, Erbakan was anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian, although with few consequences on the ground. At the same time, he did not hesitate to challenge the uncontested reign of secularism in Turkey. The label of moderation consistently eluded Erbakan, despite his democratic commitments and importance in containing Islamic extremists. To earn the moderate label a leader must be 100 percent pro-Western and deferential to Israeli power and influence. Erbakan failed both tests. His accomplishments for the Islamic Renewal all flow from those “shortcomings.”

Like Ghazzali and like all of the heralds of the Renewal, Erbakan understood contemporary conditions through an unforgiving historical lens. To understand Erbakan, it is essential to grasp first that his core motivations went beyond narrow Turkish interests. His worldview was shaped by a sense of the profound injustice of a predatory Western imperialism that assaulted Dar al Islam. Moreover, he regarded as illegitimate the postcolonial regimes that were the stepchildren of imperialism. They most often arose from the military and imposed their rule through coups. For Erbakan, developments in Turkey under a pro-Western, secular, and military-dominated regime were part of a much larger pattern of destructive Western dominance and distorted political development.

Erbakan viewed Israel from this same perspective. Zionism in his view was a virulent settler colonialism ideology, spawned in the West and very much like the colonizing ideology of the French in Algeria. In parallel with leftist and secular trends, Erbakan saw the Israeli occupation and colonization of the remnants of historic Palestine as an extension of the West’s colonizing past. The extreme harshness of the Israeli occupation and the systematic repression of Palestinians outraged Erbakan. His language was at times intemperate and un-Islamic, notably when he lapsed into condemnatory language that blamed Jews in general for the actions of the Israeli state in violation of international law. However, you do not need the template of Western anti-Semitism to understand his distaste for the triumphant Zionist state of Israel. The French deserved exactly the same condemnations for their horrific record in Algeria. Erbakan stood with the Palestinians. He suffered with them the pain and loss of displacement and humiliation at the hands of arrogant European immigrants who occupied their country and appropriated their land and natural resources. Erbakan correctly judged that, rhetoric aside, the United States had embraced the project of a greater Israel and lent the expansionist Israeli state extraordinary levels of aid of all kinds.

Erbakan had made it possible to formulate an Islamic political program and organize an Islamic party within a parliamentary democracy. The military eventually moved against Erbakan. The event that pushed them into action appears to be the support of his party for protests against Israeli human rights violations and overt support for Arab national liberation movements: Hamas in the occupied Palestinian territories and Hizbullah in Lebanon. The military leadership prepared an elaborate indictment and forced the prime minister to sign a bill of particulars that included restricting Islam once more in public life, such as a ban on headscarves in universities, the shuttering of Qur’anic schools, and the closing of Sufi orders. Erbakan acquiesced. He refused to resort to violence in response to the military intervention. The prime minister resigned, accepting a five-year ban on all political activity. Erbakan’s acquiescence in disabling military interventions in politics is at times characterized in deprecating terms, even by sympathetic observers. One well-informed observer of the Turkish scene comments that when faced with a military ultimatum in 1997 Erbakan “sheepishly left office … and accepted a withdrawal from political activity for a period of five years in what amounted to a bloodless coup prompted by his alleged Islamic agenda.”²⁹ This characterization misses an important point. Like Nursi, Erbakan worked for the long term. He sought to accommodate the superior power of the secular forces, while at the same time building a popular base that would eventually make a successful and lawful democratic victory possible. In retrospect, there is more statesmanship than sheepishness in that judgment. The action is a testament to Erbakan’s moderation among the Islamic groups. He clearly saved Turkey from unproductive, violent clashes between Islamic and secular forces. Erbakan absorbed the blows, without the resort to violence. However, he also refused to disappear from the political arena and encouraged Islamic political activists to stay the course and take advantage of whatever political possibilities remained open. In so doing, Erbakan secured the banner of democracy for the Islamic trend.

Ultimately, it was an offshoot of Erbakan’s party that devised the formula that Said Nursi and Necmettin Erbakan had anticipated. There were no shortfalls in Erbakan’s principled resoluteness. However, there were serious limits to the practical course he adopted. Erbakan’s Welfare Party was disbanded by a ruling of the constitutional court in 1998. True to form, Erbakan managed its reemergence as the Virtue Party that entered general elections in 1999, but, it too, was banned in 2001. Party activists came to believe they were trapped in a cul-de-sac. Leadership elements from the Virtue Party bolted. Led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, these young and savvy activists broke with Erbakan to form the Justice and Development Party with a distinctive new approach. The Justice and Development Party presented itself as a secular party, although one with Islamic roots. Erdogan argued for a more inclusive political formula. He sought to combine a respect for religious belief with commitments to democracy, capitalism, and the continuance of Western alliances. More traditional elements continued with the old politics under Erbakan’s leadership. They were pushed to the margins and drifted into irrelevance.

Erdogan had found the pragmatic formula, essentially a refined and amended version of the one that Erbakan had pioneered, that eventually brought him to power and has kept him there for over a decade. He was able to consolidate that power in a way that Erbakan had never achieved. Once that power was secure, Erdogan could move legally against the military conspirators. He did so with great effect. Leading members of the military opposition were tried for conspiracy, found guilty, and received lengthy sentences in August 2013. The hold of the military over Turkish political life was broken. It is clear that the formula that produced this dramatic success for the Islamic trend was not one that Erbakan could have invented or embraced. However, it is just as clear that no formula at all could have taken shape without Erbakan’s indispensable preparatory work.

Alija Izetbegovic and the Islamic Renewal in Europe

Alija Izetbegovic heralded al Tagdid al Islami as a midstream Islamic intellectual and reluctant nationalist. Throughout his career, a strong and consistent commitment to a political project of pluralism and democracy within an Islamic framework informed his intellectual and political work. Yet, despite his very visible public presence and extensive writings, a reasonable appraisal of Izetbegovic emerges only with great difficulty. Portraits abound of Izetbegovic as a radical Bosnian nationalist. They alternate with even more misleading characterizations as an Islamic extremist. He was neither. A very public and easily verifiable record of impressive consistency as a centrist Islamic intellectual and activist defines the main outlines of Izetbegovic’s political career and of all his important writings.

For the world, the most enduring image of Alija Izetbegovic will undoubtedly be that of the besieged leader, governing Bosnia-Herzegovina from his sandbagged offices in Sarajevo. Izetbegovic, as the first president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, led his people in the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. After Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence, the Bosnian Serbs laid siege to the capital with a force of 13,000, stationed in the hills overlooking the city. For almost four years, the world watched as Serbian forces pounded the city with heavy artillery from the surrounding hills. The building housing the presidential office was continuously targeted. Some fifty people were killed in and around that one building alone. An international arms embargo prevented the Bosnian government from acquiring heavy weaponry to match the more advanced Serbian arsenal. Residents of multiethnic Sarajevo included Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. All those who remained in the city opposed Serbian aspirations for a greater Serbia. They paid a terrible price for their resistance. The prolonged siege denied them adequate food, utilities, and communication, Throughout Bosnia, Serb nationalist forces conducted a campaign of brutal ethnic cleansing to “purify” the land of non-Serbs. Entire towns and villages were destroyed and their inhabitants, predominantly Muslim, expelled, imprisoned in detention camps, raped, tortured, or killed. Muslim women were systematically raped as an act of war. Lives lost in the Bosnian war exceeded a quarter-million, with over 11,000 killed in the siege of Sarajevo alone. The single most shocking incident was the cold-blooded massacre of an estimated 8,000 unarmed Muslim boys and men at Srebrenica in 1995.

Izetbegovic refused to surrender. He remained at his desk in beleaguered Sarajevo for three and a half years, the duration of the siege. A sober and unshakable Izetbegovic rallied the forces of resistance while giving blunt and truthful assessments of Bosnia’s dire situation. While the West stood aside, Bosnians drowned in a river of blood that ran through their capital and across their countryside. As president of a people facing genocide, Izetbegovic did what he could to find the means to stave off destruction. He turned for assistance to the Muslim world, receiving support from Saudi Arabia and Turkey. A grateful people recognized that Izetbegovic’s inspiring leadership and their own incalculable sacrifices made possible Bosnia’s survival as a pluralistic, Muslim-majority state.

Alongside his nationalist commitments and achievements, Izetbegovic registered an even greater historical importance as one of the major Islamic intellectuals and activists of the twentieth century. He was an early and insightful champion of the Islamic Renewal. Yet most see only the impressive political role of national leadership. Alija Izetbegovic began his political rise as an anticommunist in Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia. He was imprisoned twice by the government. With the weakening of the Yugoslav state, Izetbegovic, along with scores of other political prisoners, was released, after serving just over five years on his second imprisonment. He immediately organized a political party to participate in the emerging constitutional order. His Party of Democratic Action (SDA) proved to be the most effective in Bosnia. It became known in Bosnia, as well as internationally, as the representative of Bosnian Muslims. As party leader, Izetbegovic was elected head of the Bosnian joint presidency in 1990. The Bosnia-Herzegovina that Izetbegovic headed differed from the other Yugoslav successor states in that no single cultural community dominated. Bosnia came into statehood with a volatile mix of Muslims (44 percent), Eastern Orthodox Serbs (31 percent), and Catholic Croats (17 percent). Power-driven elites in the neighboring republics exploited the latent communal hostilities within Bosnia. Serbia and Croatia schemed openly to divide Bosnia-Herzegovina between them. They looked to their respective co-religionists in Bosnia to support these plans to dismember the country. Their aim, as Izetbegovic described it, was no less than “to wipe our country off the map.” In March 1994, Bosnian Muslims and Croats managed to form a joint federation that reduced the combatants to two, a Muslim–Croat alliance versus the Serbs. The war that ensued took some 250,000 lives. The fighting did not subside until NATO, after a long delay, stepped in to bomb Serbian positions in Bosnia in August and September 1995. Izetbegovic signed the Dayton Peace Accord in November 1995, although he did not believe Bosnian Muslims had received full justice by its terms.

In 1996, Izetbegovic was reelected to the three-member collective presidency. He remained in office despite the great difficulties of dealing with a war-torn country. Well-documented fraud and corruption plagued the president’s efforts to build a democratic Bosnia. Izetbegovic did not deny the existence of corruption. Yet, for all the limitations of what Bosnia accomplished during the short period of Izetbegovic’s postwar leadership, the country reasserted the commitment to a tolerant pluralism that was the hallmark of the Bosnian capital city of Sarajevo. Far from a fundamentalist Islamic state, Bosnia preserved its open and progressive character. Women were prominent in all occupations. No attempts were made to implement a strict interpretation of Shari’ah. Non-Muslim Bosnians worshipped freely in Muslim-majority areas. Churches in Sarajevo were protected, in contrast to the mosques in Serbian-held territories, which were systematically destroyed by Serb and Croat armed forces. Dayton did not end the travail of the Bosnians; the accords terminated the overt violence but not the conflict between the three antagonistic communities. The ultranationalist former president Radovan Karadzic remained in de facto control of the Serbian enclave. Under his leadership, the Bosnian Serbs largely ignored the terms of the accords. Large numbers of refugees were not able to return to their homes in Serbian-controlled areas. Serious reconstruction and development efforts were delayed. A greatly discouraged Izetbegovic resigned the presidency in 2000. He announced that he could not live with the unworkable arrangements imposed on Bosnia by the international community.

It is understandable that the high-profile political career in an area that attracted global attention has overwhelmed all else. Yet, from the first, Alija Izetbegovic himself had placed his commitments to a Bosnian state in a larger Islamic framework. By his own measure, it was the revival of Islam and the renewal of the ummah that defined his most important lifework. The battle to protect vulnerable Bosnians was always part of this larger transnational struggle for an Islamic renaissance. At heart, Izetbegovic’s life struggle was a spiritual one. Izetbegovic had great success as a political figure, yet the trappings of power and privilege left him unmoved. The Egyptian journalist and Islamic intellectual Fahmi Huwaidi reports on his visit to Izetbegovic. He was struck that Bosnia’s president continued to live in his very ordinary Sarajevo apartment, without any special guards or ceremonial markings for a president’s residence.³⁰

A crisis of faith, rather than a political event, precipitated this lifetime journey. Izetbegovic was born near Sarajevo and educated in the city’s elite gymnasium that boasted a traditional European education, with a curriculum that included classical Greek. At an early age, Izetbegovic established a degree of personal autonomy from his parents, making his own life choices, including in matters of faith. As a teenager in communist Yugoslavia, Izetbegovic was bombarded with official atheist propaganda. Religion was cast as a villain in the human struggle for freedom and dignity. At age fifteen, he reports, “I began to waiver in my faith.” It was easy, he acknowledges, to fall for the line that “placed God on the side of injustice.” However, after a year or two of anxious vacillation, Izetbegovic’s faith in Islam returned, although in a different fashion. The Islam that he reclaimed was “no longer merely the religion I had inherited: it was a newly adopted faith. I never lost it again.”³¹ From that time on, Alija was a Muslim by conviction and conscious choice. He remained a committed and practicing Muslim all his life. Izetbegovic always refused to join the Yugoslav communist party, despite great pressure to do so. He was equally repelled by fascism as ideology. From his early manhood, Izetbegovic chose Islam as a third way. That decision proved to be a fateful one. It set the course of his life. The very bookish young man read prodigiously. In his late teens and early twenties, Izetbegovic built on his excellent secondary education, devouring major Western works of philosophy, social thought, and history. Izetbegovic acquired familiarity with the best of the European intellectual tradition, from the Vienna Circle to Marxism. Such diverse key figures as Kant, Bergson, and Spengler left a visible imprint on his intellectual and moral development.

Izetbegovic read this Western literature against the backdrop of his heightened commitment to Islam. He saw clearly the weaknesses of the Islamic world. Yet the shortcomings of Muslims did not diminish his sense of the contribution that Islam had made to human progress and its continued promise for humanity. Izetbegovic judged that, under the leadership of the West, the world had gone terribly wrong. The disasters of the twentieth century, he concluded, had intellectual roots in the shortcomings of Western thought and moral roots in the limitations of Christianity. Izetbegovic was neither anti-Western nor anti-Christian; he was pro-Islam. At the same time, Izetbegovic was deeply dismayed by what he saw as the degradation of Muslims. “Islam,” wrote Izetbegovic in a much-quoted passage, “is the best. But we Muslims are not the best.”³² These were the key ideas that lay behind Izetbegovic’s momentous Islamic Declaration, written and circulated in 1970.

It was the Islamic Declaration that placed Izetbegovic in the company of Ghazzali, Erbakan, and Shariati as a herald of the Renewal. The Declaration also positioned Izetbegovic squarely in the sights of the security authorities. Izetbegovic was accused and tried as an Islamic fundamentalist. The charges opened with his role while no more than sixteen years old in founding the Muslim Youth organization. They closed with extensive references to the Islamic Declaration that the prosecutors used as evidence of his subversive fundamentalism. Izetbegovic defended the work and refused to disavow any of his ideas and commitments.

Izetbegovic’s manifesto is very much a committed Muslim’s cri de coeur. It sounds the alarm for an Islam vulnerable and under assault. The Islamic Declaration, despite all the misrepresentation to which it has been subject, makes a strong case for a spiritual revival on the basis of centrist Islam. The work cautions against the excesses to which nationalism is prone. It is no less wary of the extremisms to which religion can succumb. Izetbegovic calls on Muslims in the shattered and dangerous world of the Balkans to find the strength and resources to rebuild their lives on the foundation of an inclusive Islamic identity, as part of the worldwide ummah.³³ The case for Izetbegovic as a radical nationalist requires overlooking the fact that Bosnia is not mentioned even once in the entire document. The characterization of Izetbegovic as an Islamic extremist is typically made by a tendentious reading, supported by the selective use of quotations taken out of context. Both sets of distortions effortlessly disappear when the complete text is read.

The Islamic Declaration seeks to “Islamize Muslims.” Izetbegovic’s is a work of severe Muslim self-criticism. The harshness of judgments is all self-directed. The portrait of contemporary Muslims and their failings is unsparing. The moral state of the Muslim world, Izetbegovic writes, is one “of depravity, the rule of corruption and superstition, indolence and hypocrisy, the reign of un-Islamic customs and habits, a callous materialism and a disturbing absence of enthusiasm and hope.”³⁴ Equally harsh is the judgment that the postcolonial secular regimes throughout the area are incompatible with Islam and are destined to pass from the scene. Turkey, as shaped by Atatürk, is taken as the most egregious example. Such imposed un-Islamic systems that imitate the worst of Western structures contradict the values and beliefs of Muslim peoples. In forceful terms, Izetbegovic judges that “there can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic social and political institutions.”³⁵ This sentence is endlessly quoted to make the point that Izetbegovic opposes accommodation between Muslims and non-Muslims or between Islamic states and non-Islamic states. In fact, the reference is purely internal: It refers to non-Islamic regimes imposed on Muslims in the postcolonial era. Izetbegovic argues that such alien postcolonial regimes imposed on countries throughout the ummah should not be tolerated. Centrist Islamic intellectuals across Dar al Islam share that judgment.

Although often mistaken as essentially a radical nationalist, Izetbegovic is quite clear that the preferred way forward is the path of Islam rather than nationalism. Moreover, his Islamic vision and mission is a broad one that is not confined to the Balkans. It is a common misreading to see Izetbegovic’s lifework as centered on forging a sense of identity for Bosnia’s Muslim community. Many Bosnian Muslims were nonpracticing, while others identified themselves as either Serbs or Croats. Izetbegovic clearly did encourage, not least by his own example, stronger commitment to the practice of the faith. However, from the outset Izetbegovic’s own Bosnian nationalism and Islamic commitments developed within the much larger framework of the ummah as a moral community for Muslims everywhere. Izetbegovic, like other heralds of the Renewal, insisted that the Islamic notion of community was inherently pluralistic. Islamic civilization was not the product of Muslims alone. Islam was never alone in God’s world. An Islamic identity was not an exclusionary one.

In Izetbegovic’s own mind there was never any confusion as to where his priorities resided. He regularly explained his reservations about all varieties of nationalism and his unbounded commitment to the worldwide Islamic community. Islam generated large dreams. Izetbegovic shuns local nationalisms and looks to the strengthening of the universal ummah that extends as a spiritual community from Morocco to Indonesia.³⁶ Izetbegovic does know the history of political disunity that has characterized the Islamic world. It is perfectly clear that he did not aim, in any practical way, for the political unity of the ummah. Rather, he explains how the spiritual trumps the political to preserve a higher form of unity. Historically, Izetbegovic records, such has been the case since the Middle Ages. The political divisions that shattered the early Islamic empires “did not lead to the breaking of cultural links, and that was characteristic for the entire Islamic Middle Ages.”³⁷ From these facts of history, Izetbegovic concludes that Islamic culture was unified in the spiritual values of Islam. There are no political boundaries that impede the value connections. Spiritually, Muslims are a single, supranational community, despite all the variations in their political conditions.

Like Ghazzali, Erbakan, and Shariati, Izetbegovic understood that global Islam’s most important reserves of unifying cultural and spiritual ties had taken root in the hearts of millions of ordinary people rather than in state structures. These figures are great inasmuch as they represented the unarticulated sentiments and aspirations of Muslims around the world, as much as Nasser was an expression of the longings of Arabs throughout history for social justice, independence, and progress. The Islamic Declaration explains:

the real support which a Muslim people gives to the regime in power is in direct proportion to the Islamic character of that power. The further the regime is from Islam, the less support it will receive. Un-Islamic regimes remain almost totally deprived of this support and therefore have to seek it, willy-nilly, from foreigners. The dependence into which they sink is a direct consequence of their non-Islamic orientation.³⁸

Izetbegovic elaborated his assessment of nationalism by contrasting it to pan-Islamism. He noted that “pan-Islamism always came from the very heart of the Muslim peoples; nationalism was always imported stuff.”³⁹ Addressing his fellow Muslims in the very personal and reflective Notes from Prison, Izetbegovic advises his fellow Muslims everywhere to “start thinking of yourself as a Muslim, in order to rescue yourself from the narrow confines of the tribe or nation. Become protagonists of the Islamic Renewal and Islamic culture.”⁴⁰

President Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt once asked Marshal Tito what he thought of Alija Izetbegovic. Tito collaborated with Nasser and Nehru of India to lead the nonaligned movement. Arab analysts report that Tito told Nasser that he considered Izetbegovic far more dangerous than the Muslim Brothers, whom Nasser regarded as his major opponents. At that time the Brothers did not advocate the formation of an Islamic political party. In contrast, Tito explained that Izetbegovic believed that those who advocate an Islamic revival should organize politically to seek power. Moreover, Izetbegovic believed that the preferred route to power would be the ballot box in democratic elections. Such democratic political views naturally alarmed authoritarians like Tito and Nasser. Izetbegovic clearly spelled out their logic in the Declaration. The essential premise of Izetbegovic’s thinking is the necessity for both a religious and political revolution. The Declaration explicitly states that “the religious renewal has a clear priority.” The starting point for the religious transformation would necessarily be Islam itself. For all the battering that the faith had suffered, Islam, he wrote, is “alive … not a desert.” Yet Izetbegovic also cautioned that Islam is one thing and the historical record of Muslims another. Great damage had been done to Muslim peoples. The renaissance would necessarily follow “from the principles and nature of Islam and not from the dismal facts characteristic of the Muslim world today.”⁴¹ As a first step to the ultimate renaissance, Izetbegovic called for a moral revolution to close that gap between the higher principles of Islam and the disappointing behavior of contemporary Muslims. In the wake of that religious reform, the political revolution would follow. The heart of the political revolution would be the democratic exercise of power by the post-reform Muslim majority.

The journey would be a long one to prepare Muslim peoples for these responsibilities. Izetbegovic portrayed that struggle for moral rebirth in classic Qur’anic terms. At heart, the struggle would be the great jihad, the internal moral struggle to be a better human being. This Qur’anic understanding places a sense of responsibility front and center on the individual Muslim. Izetbegovic argued forcefully that while criticism of others can be merited, the real sign of maturity is self-criticism. In a particularly insightful passage, he elaborated on this notion:

When I think about the situation of Muslims throughout the world, my first question always reads: Do we have the destiny that we deserve, and are others always to blame for our situation and defeats? And if we are to blame—and I believe so—what did we miss doing, but should have done, or, what did we do, yet should not have? For me, these are two unavoidable questions regarding our unenviable situation.⁴²

Izetbegovic took particular care to warn against succumbing to the destructive temptation to demonize the dominant Western powers and attribute all failures to Western machinations. In a stunning passage in a later work he elaborated on these terms:

The West is neither corrupted nor degenerate. It is strong, well-educated, and organized. Their schools are better than ours. Their cities are cleaner than ours. The level of respect for human rights in the West is higher, and the care for the poor and less capable is better organized. Westerners are usually responsible and accurate in their words. Instead of hating the West, let us proclaim cooperation instead of confrontation.⁴³

That plainly expressed admiration for certain characteristics of Western societies stands out against the dominant anti-Western conspiracy theories that proliferate in the Arab and Islamic worlds. However, Izetbegovic did not extend his admiration to imitation of a Western model of transformation or to the terrible Western culture of violence that haunted Western pathways. The Turkish example of Westernization from above was a powerful negative one for Izetbegovic. His anticommunism did not translate into admiration for all things Western. Turkey was too close at hand to allow such unwise indulgence. Izetbegovic argued that “Turkey, as an Islamic country, had ruled the world”⁴⁴ but had dropped to the level of “a third-rate country” when it emulated Western nationalism. The universal values of Islam, rather than Western-style nationalism, would make Muslim nations strong.⁴⁵

Like Ayatollah Fadlallah, Izetbegovic understood that the struggle for freedom was at the heart of the Islamic renaissance. In the battles for freedom, Izetbegovic leaned decisively toward reliance on nonviolence. In the Islamic Declaration Izetbegovic condemned the casual resort to violence or a coup and forced change from above.⁴⁶ At the same time, he understood that no one gives you your freedom. To a large degree, the means used to achieve freedom will depend on the moral and material capacity of the insurgents, although not completely. An abstract commitment to violence or nonviolence will not, in Izetbegovic’s view, determine the character of a movement for freedom. He understood that the nature of the adversaries faced, and the situation within which the struggle takes place, would also shape the struggle in important ways. In Izetbegovic’s view, choice does not always figure into the ways the battle for freedom takes shape. But when it does, Izetbegovic argued that peaceful means should be chosen.

In addition to his influential manifesto, Izetbegovic produced a body of writings far more substantial than one could reasonably expect from an activist and national political leader. Islam between East and West provides the most developed presentation of his ideas and is generally regarded as the most sophisticated of his writings on Islam. While the Islamic Declaration established Izetbegovic as an important activist and advocate of the Islamic Renewal, it was Islam between East and West that made his most substantial intellectual contribution. No less a figure than Muhammad al Ghazzali has provided an authoritative evaluation of his status as a major centrist Islamic thinker.

In an appreciative, posthumous review published in 1997, Muhammad al Ghazzali judges the book a “momentous contribution to contemporary Islamic thought.”⁴⁷ Ghazzali notes that Izetbegovic presents in his work not only a critique of Western thought but also an insightful elaboration of preferred alternative modes of thinking. Ghazzali explains that he does so by drawing in sophisticated ways on the original sources of the Islamic tradition.⁴⁸ Ghazzali illustrates this quality with reference to the discussion of human rights. Apologetic literature simply asserts that Islam already contains whatever is positive from the West. In contrast, Izetbegovic provides an erudite explanation of the quite different sources of human rights in Islam. Izetbegovic explains that for Muslims human rights are rooted in the Qur’anic principle of istikhlaf (the divine call to humanity to act as God’s regent on Earth). Islam grants a unique and matchless position to man in the order of existence. In contrast, Western materialism explains away man as merely a certain stage in the natural evolution of nature. The Qur’anic conception presupposes an essentially free agent with a choice. Izetbegovic goes further: He makes the argument that Islam embodies the very principle according to which man was created—that is, the unity of the material and the spiritual. For that reason, Ghazzali elaborates, Izetbegovic is making the critical point that “there is an inherent harmony between man and Islam” that he juxtaposes to the necessary tension between religion and human nature in otherworldly Christianity.⁴⁹ In Islam, humanity is entrusted by God to live life in accordance with God’s laws, calling for righteous deeds and action against evil in practice. Human beings have a role that is at once worldly and spiritual. In just the same way, Izetbegovic argues that Islam provides a unity of religion and social order, without any conflict between the two. This unity, which is foreign both to Christianity and materialism, he concludes, is “the basic and the ‘most Islamic’ characteristic of Islam.”⁵⁰ Ghazzali commends Izetbegovic’s ability to offer very broad and insightful generalizations, such as his view that all intellectual approaches fall into one of three categories of thinking: materialist, religious, or Islamic. He positions Islam as a distinct and unique tradition that is neither wholly worldly nor entirely otherworldly. Islam he explains, correctly in Ghazzali’s view, “is neither exclusively concerned with the material amelioration of human life here, nor does it dictate its followers to wholly dedicate themselves to the other-worldly concerns. It is a combination of both.”⁵¹ Ghazzali credits Izetbegovic with a lucid explanation of the elusive concept that Islam simultaneously affirms this world and all it holds for man as well as the promise of “the Home of the Hereafter.”⁵²

Islam between East and West provides a very effective antidote for the denunciations of Izetbegovic as an anti-Western fundamentalist. The work contains an extensive and highly laudatory evaluation of key phases in the development of Western culture, notably of the art and literature of the Renaissance. Izetbegovic’s major focus on Western philosophy contains a very positive assessment of what he considers an Anglo-Saxon school of social theory that comes in for high praise. He contrasts the principled and flexible practicality of American thought with the abstract and speculative European philosophical tradition. The Anglo-Saxon tradition, he notes, sought a middle way between science and religion. Particularly noteworthy is Izetbegovic’s striking conclusion that there are critical parallels between Islam and American pragmatism. He concludes that the similarities are so extensive that they justify considering philosophical pragmatism “the Islam of the West.”⁵³ Principled, determined, and practical: These are all fair adjectives for the commitments of the great American pragmatists like John Dewey. Izetbegovic identified these same characteristics with the centrist Islamic tradition. They also aptly describe the career of Alija Izetbegovic himself.

Ghazzali, who is generally regarded as one of the major Islamic thinkers of the twentieth century, concludes his essay with an extraordinary assessment of Izetbegovic’s place in the Islamic tradition. He writes that “Alija Izetbegovic belongs to that galaxy of savants and intellectual masters of the Muslim scholarly tradition that include such luminaries as al Ghazali, al Razi, Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn al ‘Arabi, Ibn Rushd, Shah Wali Allah, Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi and Muhammad Iqbal.” Ghazzali adds, however, that “Muslim scholars of the present times have yet to give Alija Izetbegovic the place and recognition that are his due.”⁵⁴

Alija Izetbegovic died on October 19, 2003. His funeral in Sarajevo was extraordinary in many ways. There were world leaders in attendance who celebrated the large role Izetbegovic had played. From Dar al Islam came the prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who remarked simply that “Alija Izetbegovic enjoys great respect and has a special place in the hearts of Turkish people.”⁵⁵ However, the day belonged to the thousands and thousands of ordinary Bosnians who poured into Sarajevo.

Variations

To see these heralds of the Islamic Renewal together is to marvel at the rainbow of their colors, representing distinctive interpretations of Islam suitable to very different settings. They were Sunni and Shi’a, Kurd, Turk, Arab, Bosnian, and Iranian. They were lay intellectuals with intense commitments to Islam. They were mystics who reveled in Islam’s spiritual dimensions. They were callers to Islam close to the people. They were learned scholars of Islamic legal reasoning who wrote for the ages. These figures exemplify the “variations” celebrated in the Qur’an as part of God’s plan.⁵⁶

The heralds of the Renewal were innovators. For all their differences, they shared the three fundamental commitments of resistance against foreign dominance, insistence on the cohesiveness of the ummah, and transcendence of sectarian divides. In pursuit of these core objectives that reflected the higher purposes of Islam, these historic Islamic intellectuals and activists created new forms of association that would enable Muslims to be Muslims in a world dominated by the West and threatened by its culture of violence. They strived to secure the future of the ummah. In all their instructive variety, they acted in parallel but uncoordinated ways to protect Islam. They were the signs, for the most part ignored in the West, for the coming of the fourth great historic surge of Islamic Renewal and reform. That fourth wave continues to work its way around the globe today.

The world was quite unprepared for these heralds of the Renewal. The conventional wisdom in the West did not question the continuing rise of secularism and the decline of all religious orientations. Islam was of only marginal interest and importance. It was seen as part of those phantoms of the past that would rise periodically and cast meaningless shadows on the forward march of a science-based progress and development that sharply circumscribed the scope for religion. That march would eventually leave all such phantoms behind. In the East, including the lands of Dar al Islam, powerful anti-Islamic and insistently secular forces seemed poised to have done with Islam. The dismal state of Muslim countries, especially according to the terms defined by the West such as the rate of economic growth or the percentage of women in the workforce, blinded the West to the latent power of Islam in the hearts and minds of its believers.

Human creativity of distinctly Islamic inspiration gave the lie to all these certainties. Each of the figures who contributed to the Renewal did so in strikingly inventive ways that defied conventional analyses. The new associational forms eluded standard categories. The Islamic Renewal to which they all contributed would take the world by surprise. Muhammad al Ghazzali was in the vanguard of a distinguished group of intellectuals who founded a “school of intellectual thought” that bore little resemblance to the Muslim Brotherhood organization from which most of its major figures emerged. It was emphatically not a social movement. Necmettin Erbakan created an Islamic political party of a totally new kind. It was committed at once to a conservative Islam and to technology-driven development and democracy. Erbakan’s was not a party of Islamic extremists. Neither Marxist nor Fanonist, Shariati reintroduced to the modern world Abu Dharr, the Prophet’s companion, whom he declared to be Islam’s first revolutionary socialist. Shariati found in university lectures the perfect vehicle to convey his creative rethinking of Islam. The throngs of students and others who came to hear the charismatic speaker knew, just as he did, that these were not ordinary lectures of a university professor. Shariati retold all the great stories of the ancient Shi’i communities. He aimed to generate the mass energy to drive a revolutionary Islam and not a Shi’a revival. Alija Izetbegovic, plagued his entire life by unfounded charges of Islamic extremism, demonstrated just how pragmatic and pluralistic a Bosnian Islamic consciousness could be. He was not an extreme nationalist, nor was he an Islamic fundamentalist. It proved impossible to force any of these figures into the available categories. Each one created entirely new forms to energize and inspire the mass of ordinary people, new ways suffused with the spiritual power of Islam. Their astonishing creativity made the heralds of the Renewal virtually invisible, except to the millions of Muslims who responded to their message.