The Islamic Struggle in Syria

Copyright © 1983 by Mizan Press

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Abd-Allah, Umar F.

The Islamic Struggle in Syria.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Islam and Politics—Syria.    2. Syria—Politics and government.    I. Title.

DS98.2.A23   1982      956.91’04       82-14210

ISBN 0-933782-10-1

ISBN: 9781483557106

Designed by Joan Rhine

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

MAPS

FOREWORD by Hamid Algar

PREFACE

Evaluating Islamic movements from the Western perspective

1   SYRIA TODAY: its make-up and recent history

Its strategic importance

The people of Syria

The legacy of Greater Syria

The Nuṣairī sect

Syria after World War II

2   THE REGIME OF ḤAFĪẒ ASAD

Asad’s paradoxical rise to power, 1966-70

Actions of the regime, 1970-75

The Lebanon intervention, 1976

Internal repression

3   THE SYRIAN MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

Its emergence and development

Muṣṭafā as-Sibā‘ī

‘Iṣām al-‘Aṭṭār

The legacy of Marwān Ḥadīd

The leadership crisis

Stages of the jihād

4   THE ISLAMIC FRONT IN SYRIA

Events of unification

Members and leaders of the Front

The Proclamation and Charter

Purpose and principles of the Front

5   THE IDEOLOGY AND PROGRAM OF THE SYRIAN ISLAMIC FRONT

Internal affairs

The political system

The military

Education and society

The farmer, the land, and the worker

Islamic economics

External affairs

Opposition to imperialism

Neutrality

Palestine

The Islamic Republic of Iran

6   POSTSCRIPT by Hamid Algar

APPENDIX

Text of the Proclamation

NOTES

REFERENCES

INDEX

Foreword

In recent times, Muslim peoples have generally lived in ignorance of each other. Even neighboring peoples, such as the Turks and the Iranians, have known very little of what transpires on the other side of their common frontier; and remarkably few Muslims have a detailed and precise understanding of the social, political, and cultural circumstances of countries other than their own. This lack of mutual awareness—powerfully fostered by the superpowers and their surrogates—has brought about a particularly damaging form of separation among Muslims. Even Muslims trying to establish an Islamic order in their own homelands have often failed to appreciate the situation confronting their brethren elsewhere. This book will help Muslims in other parts of the world understand the Islamic struggle in Syria.

It is particularly imperative that the people and government of the Islamic Republic of Iran take stock of the current situation in Syria, together with its antecedents, with a view to revising Iranian policy toward that country. The Islamic Revolution of Iran has aroused enthusiasm in the Muslim world, and its potential for realizing Islamic unity is unparalleled by any other event in recent Islamic history. However, Iran’s policy of friendship with the regime of Ḥāfiẓ Asad and hostility to the Islamic movement of Syria constitutes a serious obstacle to the Islamic Republic’s efforts to deepen and extend its support among the Muslims of the world and aids those who seek to confine the impact of the revolution to Iran.

Close ties with the Nuṣairī-Ba‘thist regime of Ḥāfiẓ Asad have been a consistent element in the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy since its inception; in this respect, there is nothing to differentiate from each other such foreign ministers as Ibrāhīm Yazdī, Ṣādiq Quṭbzādah, and ‘Alī Akbar Vilāyatī. In fact, as the political structure of the Islamic Republic has grown more cohesive, the policy of generous friendship with Ḥāfiẓ Asad has become firmer and more emphatic, to the point that an effective alliance with his regime now appears to be the mainstay of Iranian policy in the Arab world.

It is enough to review some of the developments that have taken place during the past year. On October 25, 1981, an Iranian delegation headed by Ḥusain Shaikh al-Islām, political undersecretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, set out for Syria and Lebanon on a journey designed to arouse opposition to the Fahd Plan and reaffirm links between Tehran and Damascus.¹ On December 4, Prime Minister Mūsavī said of the explosion in the Azbakīya quarter of Damascus (which destroyed three centers of Ḥāfiẓ Asad’s state terror) that it was the work of pro-Israeli or rightist elements, thereby echoing the Asad regime’s propaganda.² Then, at the end of December, came another official visit to Damascus, in the course of which Foreign Minister Vilāyatī handed Ḥāfiẓ Asad an invitation to visit Iran. Commenting on the proposed visit—which fortunately has still not taken place—Prime Minister Mūsavī said that it would enable Ḥāfiẓ Asad to become acquainted with the realities of our Islamic Revolution.³ One week later, the organ of the Islamic Republican party proudly announced that Syria had declared official support for the Islamic Revolution of Iran and had one of its reporters interview the Syrian ambassador in Tehran, asking his views on the best ways to promote Islamic solidarity and unity.⁴

After the pitiless massacre in Ḥamāh in February 1982, it was widely hoped that Iranian policy toward Syria would finally change, or at least be modified. However, there was virtually no coverage of the events in the Iranian press, and President Ḥujjat al-Islām Khāmna’ī saw no reason to modify the customary tone of friendship in a message he sent to Ḥāfiẓ Asad on February 25, wishing him success in serving the sacred ideals of the people of Syria.⁵ Questioned about events in Syria, Foreign Minister Vilāyatī responded, on March 3, that the Muslim Brotherhood was mistaken in undertaking activity in Syria, given that country’s confrontation with Zionism, and asked rhetorically why the Brotherhood was not active in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.⁶ Six days later, Khāmna’ī sent another message to Asad, congratulating him on the anniversary of the Syrian Revolution (meaning, presumably, the accession of the Ba‘th party to power) and deploring the conspiracies facing Syria, hatched by imperialism and Zionism, presumably an allusion to the struggle of the Islamic Front.⁷

Worse was yet to come. On March 13, while the people of Ḥamāh were still burying their dead, a forty-member Syrian delegation headed by Foreign Minister ‘Abd-al-Ḥalīm Khaddām arrived in Tehran for three days of cordial talks with officials of the Islamic Republic. On his arrival, Khaddām spoke cynically about the need to strengthen a united Islamic front against Zionism.⁸ Three days of talks and negotiations produced a comprehensive commercial and economic agreement between the two countries and a joint political statement stressing the common goals of Iran and Syria.⁹

This effective alliance of the Islamic Republic of Iran—the only state to have emerged in recent times from a revolutionary Islamic struggle—with the Nuṣairī-Ba‘thist regime of Syria—a state engaged in the brutal suppression of a similar struggle—is highly incongruous. It becomes more incongruous still when one considers the repeated attempts that have been made to enlighten those responsible for the shaping of Iranian foreign policy. According to ‘Adnān Sa‘d-ad-Dīn, the leader of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, all the delegations he sent to Tehran to plead for a change in policy returned empty-handed, and they even discovered that their journeys to Iran had been reported in detail to the Asad regime.¹⁰ According to officials in the Iranian Foreign Ministry, the Brotherhood’s ideological and political positions, with regard to the United States and its surrogates in the Middle East, were found wanting.

The explanation commonly advanced for the close ties between Damascus and Tehran is that they rest on a basis of sectarian solidarity, that the Islamic Republic sees fellow Shī‘īs in the Nuṣairīs—the so-called ‘Alawīs—of Syria. This explanation is particularly favored by those who have wished from the outset to present the Islamic Revolution of Iran as sectarian, although in many cases they have themselves been motivated by sectarianism. It is true that the Nuṣairīs have in recent years sought to present themselves as Shī‘ī Muslims.¹¹ Moreover, certain indirect religious links have existed between Iran and the Nuṣairīs of Syria: Mūsā Ṣadr, the Iranian religious scholar who migrated to Lebanon to assume the leadership of that country’s Shī‘ī community, is said to have had close personal ties to Ḥāfiẓ Asad, even acting as his speechwriter on occasion.¹²

The sectarian explanation is inadequate, however, for at least two reasons. First, if the Islamic Revolution were indeed devoted to the promotion of Shī‘ī Islam, at the expense of Sunnī Muslims, this would presumably be reflected in all its policies, particularly its internal ones, whereas Shī‘ī-Sunnī relations are uncommonly cordial and harmonious within Iran. Indeed, aspirations for Sunnī-Shī‘ī unity throughout the Muslim world are deep and sincere in Iran. Second, the case of Syria is not unique, for Iran also maintains ties with other dubious regimes in the Arab world—members of the so-called Steadfastness Front—that cannot even marginally be identified as Shī‘ī.

This association of Iran with the Steadfastness Front probably explains its close ties with Ḥāfiẓ Asad.¹³ The cause of Palestine has always been dear to the Islamic movement of Iran, and, even before the revolution, there was a marked tendency to take at face value progressive Arab leaders who present themselves as militant foes of Zionism. Despite the numerous ambiguities of Ḥāfiẓ Asad’s record on the Palestine question, he is seen in Tehran as genuinely committed to the major objective of confrontation with Israel; so his regime’s internal policies escape close scrutiny and all opposed to him must necessarily be traitors or at the very least misguided. Almost every official communication between Iran and Syria has included references to the joint struggle against Israel and to Iranian readiness to fight side by side with the Syrian army against Zionism. The fact that the chief mission of the Syrian army, like that of the Iranian army under the Shah, is domestic repression, not external defense, goes unnoticed.

Some slight glimmer of recognition is, however, dawning in Iran that its policy of friendship with the regime of Ḥāfiẓ Asad requires justification. The division of the Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible for assessing liberation movements and the degree to which they merit the support of the Islamic Republic of Iran has recently published a lengthy analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood, paying particular attention to the Brotherhood in Syria.¹⁴ Many points in the analysis are valid, such as the Brotherhood’s frequent inability to secure organizational continuity and ideological coherence as well as certain Brotherhood leaders’ collaboration with pro-Western regimes. But the portions relating to Syria are of dubious accuracy and fail to provide an acceptable rationale for Iranian policy.

It is claimed, for example, that the Muslim Brotherhood’s opposition to the Asad regime is entirely sectarian in motivation and that its members have magnified the Sunnī-Shī‘ī division for narrow political reasons. Leaving aside the question of whether Ḥāfiẓ Asad and his fellow Nuṣairīs qualify as Shī‘ī Muslims, it must be noted that the Brotherhood (and the Islamic Front as a whole) has in fact condemned sectarianism—which is one of the most obvious features of Ḥāfiẓ Asad’s rule—and called upon the Nuṣairī community to participate in a joint national struggle against the Asad regime.

Still more surprising in the Revolutionary Guard analysis is the implicit parallel established between the Islamic Front in Syria and the Sāzman-i Mujāhidīn-i Khalq in Iran. The Asad regime is encouraged to expose the treacherous nature of the Front to the Syrian people, just as the Islamic Republic of Iran unmasked the true intentions of the Mujāhidīn. This equation of the Syrian struggle to overthrow a militantly anti-Islamic regime with the Mujāhidīn’s campaign to destroy the Islamic Republic is grotesque.

Similarly unconvincing is the Revolutionary Guard’s attempt to distinguish between the reactionary positions of the international leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood and a popular line prevailing among the membership. The international leadership has, in fact, adopted a positive attitude toward the Islamic Republic of Iran on a number of occasions, including the confrontation between Iran and the United States following the detention of the hostages in Iran.¹⁵ The international leadership also condemned the Iraqi aggression against Iran, a position that the Syrian Islamic Front repudiated because of the continuing ties between Tehran and Damascus.¹⁶ The Revolutionary Guard ought to have evaluated the international leadership more favorably.

The only positive feature in the analysis as it relates to Syria is the admission—probably for the first time in the Iranian press—that innocent Muslims have been killed in Syria and that Muslim women are being forcibly deprived of their ḥijāb. However, the blame for these acts is not placed where it clearly belongs—with the Asad regime. It is claimed instead that elements exist in the Syrian government with pro-Western tendencies who repress them [the members of the Islamic Front] in such an extensive way that innocent Muslims are also killed. As a remedy, it is proposed that repression be more discriminating. Likewise, attacks on Muslim women in the streets of Syrian cities are supposedly the work not of the regime but of elements and lines opposed to Islam, against which, for some unexplained reason, the government is unable to take decisive measures. To suggest that uncontrollable elements, not the regime of Ḥāfiẓ Asad, are responsible for the assault on Islam and Muslims in Syria, is naive at best.

A capacity for self-criticism is no doubt difficult to combine with revolutionary fervor, particularly when a revolution is under sustained and massive attack, as has been the case with the Islamic Revolution of Iran. The leadership of the Islamic Front has shown a lack of clarity in some of its positions, failing, for example, to condemn, or even identify by name, the chief financier and supporter of the Syrian slaughter—the Saudi regime that, with fine impartiality, makes its resources available to the twin varieties of Ba‘thist evil, the Syrian and the Iraqi. The recent alliance of the Islamic Front with various secular groups and parties in Syria is also a matter of concern.

None of this can justify the continued Iranian friendship with the murderous regime of Ḥāfiẓ Asad, a friendship that clearly runs counter to the stipulation in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic that its foreign policy be based upon, inter alia, the defense of the rights of all Muslims.¹⁷ It is time that this principle be consistently reflected in a sober, reasoned, and informed policy that excludes collaboration with oppressive regimes. It is time, in other words, that Iran cease disregarding the slaughter of innocents in Syria, the ties of Ḥāfiẓ Asad to the East and West, and the repeated complicity of his regime in the destruction of the Palestinian people.

It is encouraging to note that there are many in Iran who are opposed to the continuation of friendly ties with Ḥāfiẓ Asad; a high-ranking official of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance even went so far in private conversation as to offer the opinion that Ḥāfiẓ Asad is a worse enemy of Islam than the Shah himself was. More significantly, perhaps, the volunteers from the Corps of Revolutionary Guards who went to Syria at the onset of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon hoping to proceed to the front have returned to Iran fully enlightened on the true nature of Ḥāfiẓ Asad’s regime and its policies. Foreign minister Vilāyatī, however, continues to defend with vigor—albeit unconvincingly—Iranian policy toward Syria,¹⁸ and it often seems that only one of two events could change that policy: a reconciliation between Ḥafiẓ Asad and Saddām Ḥusain or the formal signing of a peace treaty between Syria and Israel.

The revision of Iranian policy remains, in any event, an urgent necessity, one enhanced by the fact that Iran has succeeded in expelling Iraqi forces from its territory and thereby increased its ability to influence the destinies of the Arab world. The great victories of Iranian arms have come at a time when Israel and its Maronite allies have been engaged in an unprecedented campaign of massacre in Lebanon, to which the response of the Arab regimes has been unprecedented passivity. The dispatch of Iranian volunteers to Syria at the onset of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was a welcome gesture, even though it had no practical consequences, and is a sign that the Islamic Republic alone may prove to possess the will and the capacity to confront Zionism with the unyielding enmity it deserves. But for the full potential of the Iranian role to be realized, it is necessary to discard the alliance with Ḥafiẓ Asad and put an end to the loss of moral authority and political credibility that alliance has entailed.

12 Dhū’l-Ḥijjah 1402/30 September 1982

H.A.

NOTE

After the completion of this work, it was shown to a person familiar with the Islamic movement in Syria. His view of events and persons differed somewhat from that of the author and is recorded in a series of footnotes, where he is identified as source nine.

Preface

During the course of the last five years an increasingly intense jihād (Islamic struggle) has been mounted from within Syria against the dictatorial Ba‘thist regime of Ḥāfiẓ Asad. Initially led by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, this jihād has attained since 1979 a level of strength and energy that portends the collapse of the network of secret police and special military units that form the foundation of Asad’s rule, and during the last year and a half it has made the transition from individual armed skirmishes to a popular revolution that includes virtually all Islamic elements in Syria. As the struggle has intensified, so has Asad’s internal repression of political enemies become more systematic and severe—a fact in which the free and philanthropic Western press has generally shown little interest. Asad’s infamous Law 49 has made it a crime punishable by death to be a member of or to be associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. During the year from June 1980 to June 1981, executions without trial numbered in the thousands, and during this same period Asad turned the military prison of Tadmur (Palmyra) into a death camp for his opponents complete with torture, mass executions of men and women, and the withholding of sanitation to induce disease.

Asad’s savage repression of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was meant to isolate and alienate it from the rest of the Syrian people, since until recently the Brotherhood constituted the only significant opposition to his regime. But the effect of his oppression has been the opposite, and the fall of 1980 marked the formation within Syria of a broad and united Islamic front, extending beyond the Muslim Brothers to include the Syrian ‘ulamā’ (Islamic religious scholars) and virtually all pro-Islamic elements in Syria. Since October 1980 the Islamic Front in Syria (al-Jabhah al-Islāmīyah fī Sūriyah) under the leadership of its Secretary General (al-Amīn al-‘Āmm), Shaikh Muḥammad Abū-’n-Naṣr al-Bayānūnī of Ḥalab (Aleppo), in coordination with ‘Adnān Sa‘d-ad-Dīn, Sa‘id Ḥawwā, and other leaders of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, has become the principal and directing force behind the Syrian Islamic Revolution. Formation of the Front has brought a marked increase in both the number and quality of the mujāhidīn (those active in jihād) fighting against Asad’s regime, and the Front has come to enjoy extensive support among the Syrian people, including even Syria’s non-Muslim minorities.

In addition to the task of bringing down the present regime, the Syrian Islamic Front has also begun preparing the groundwork for a new government to take authority in the immediate wake of victory. It is the Front’s objective to establish in Syria an Islamic state that will provide all, regardless of religious or ethnic background, with basic human rights, freedom and justice, and protection from want, degradation, and abuse—a true participatory democracy in which all Syrians will take part and in which all Syrians will feel themselves genuinely represented. In order to make its platform clear, the Front has issued comprehensive statements of its ideology, its concrete program and objectives, in two official documents that appeared in the winter of 1981: Bayān ath-Thawrah al-lslāmīyah fī Sūriyah wa Minhājuhā (Proclamation and Program of the Islamic Revolution in Syria) and Mīthāq al-Jabhah al-lslāmīyah fī Sūriyah (Charter of the Islamic Front in Syria), called throughout this book the Proclamation and the Charter.

It is the purpose of this book to give an accurate portrayal of the Syrian Islamic Front, its leadership, its ideology and program, and its place in Middle Eastern affairs. As an aid to readers not familiar with the nation and recent history of Syria and the nature of the dictatorship of Ḥāfiẓ Asad, the book begins with an introduction to the land and people of Syria and their strategic position in the Middle East. This is followed by an account of Ḥāfiẓ Asad’s rise to power and the policies he has pursued since that time, demonstrating that despite his radical rhetoric Asad has played a role subservient to the broad interests and designs in the Middle East of the superpowers. His opposition to the Zionist state of Israel has been essentially one of words and appearances, and in fact he has played and continues to play a part as essential to the Kissinger Plan as was Anwar as-Sādāt’s. Next is described the major Islamic opponent of Asad and his military predecessors, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, from its birth in the mid-1940s through its persecution in the following years. The phase of jihād under the Syrian Islamic Front comes next; the Front’s history, leadership, and principles are discussed to bring the reader to the present. The last and most important part of the book sets forth the ideology and program of the Syrian Islamic Front as presented in the Proclamation and Charter as well as official statements of the Front’s leadership. This part of the book also describes the platform of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood during the 1940s and 1950s under the leadership of Dr. Muṣṭafā as-Sibā‘ī, pointing out the very considerable continuity between his ideas and those of the present Islamic Front. Finally, the appendix includes the full English text of the Proclamation.

EVALUATING ISLAMIC MOVEMENTS FROM THE WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

The Islamically based resistance of the Syrian Islamic Front to the Ba‘thist dictatorship of Ḥāfiẓ Asad is part of a wider phenomenon in the Muslim world: the revival of Islam as a cultural and political force and—more properly—as the central, vital element in Islamic civilization. In the context of an Islamic society, the being of which is rooted in the religious and civilizational legacy of Islam, Islam does not constitute merely one of a number of cultural and political options. Rather, Islam is the natural and popular choice of the Muslim masses, the principle of their identity and the root of their independence and integrity as a people. That is why efforts to dominate and manipulate the Muslim masses—especially during the last two centuries, during the height of the colonial and neocolonial periods—have invariably been coupled with policies, often carried out by brutal coercion, designed to destroy Islam as a dynamic religious, cultural, and political force. The mere fact that Islam continues to survive harsh conditions in Algeria, in Turkey and Iran, in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, in Southern Thailand and the Southern Philippines, in Indonesia and Malaysia, Burma and post-partition India, in central Ethiopia, Chad, and Eritrea, in northern Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Balkans, not to mention other reaches of the vast Asian and African Islamic world despite policies in these countries that have included genocide and systematic ethnic, cultural, ideological, and even linguistic transformation—is itself an enduring testimony to the deep and lasting roots of the Islamic religion and the great courage of the Muslim people. And it is because of these roots and this courage that today, throughout the military dictatorships, counterfeit democratic republics, and corrupt and backward monarchies of the Muslim world, Islamic movements that politicize the masses, as Islam requires, and mobilize them to achieve independence and justice are outlawed and oppressed or kept under careful restriction and watch. But this same ceaseless repression of Islamic movements is a witness to their continued potential strength. For the Islamic movements alone can address the hearts of the Muslim masses, and only the revival of Islam in its primal strength as a comprehensive, liberating ideological force can free the Muslim masses from the colonial past and the neo-colonial present and reconstitute an independent Muslim world and Islamic civilization that can be, as it was in the past, a light and a source of prosperity and happiness for the rest of the world.

Islamic revival is something normative, necessary, and natural in Muslim society. It is central to the very life of that society, and only in its context can healthy and progressive societies emerge in the Muslim world that will tap the full potential of the people and fully incorporate, after an Islamic pattern, the beneficial advances of the present age. For Muslims, Islamic revival is a sign of hope, the beginning of a renaissance. Its political expression is a movement because it moves and mobilizes Muslim masses who for centuries would not arise for the sake of any other call. Muṣṭafā as-Sibā‘ī expressed this centrality of Islamic revival for Muslim societies when he described the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in 1947: "Our movement is neither a society nor a political party but a rūḥ [spirit] that permeates the very being of the ummah [Islamic community]: It is a new revolution."¹*

But in the West, the phenomenon of Islamic renewal and revival has been as unwelcomed as it was unexpected. The specialists and the formulators of public opinion in the West have generally shown themselves unable or unwilling to understand it or even regard it with equanimity. There are a number of reasons for this Western response. Some have to do with ignorance and misinformation and a centuries-old legacy of suspicion, ill-feeling, and prejudice toward Islam and the Muslim world. Others, however, pertain to the very real economic and political competition in the present world economic order between the powerful and dominant economies of the West and East and the dependent economies of the Muslim world (and the Third World in general), which are primarily exporters of raw materials and importers of finished products and even, in many cases, essential commodities. A long-standing and principal objective of Islamic movements has been to break this cycle of dependency, within which true progress and economic prosperity are impossible; and thereby to achieve economic, cultural, and political independence. Consequently, these movements have been and will continue to be opposed by those interest groups in the West and East that benefit from the status quo. It is not particularly surprising, given this background, that the same signs of Islamic revival that are welcomed in the Muslim world have been labeled in the media of the West as—at best—the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism or—at worst—an irrational, militant, antimodern, and anti-Western fanaticism that in self-provoked frenzy seeks to turn back the clock a thousand years and return to the Dark Ages.

At the beginning of his admirable study of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Johannes Reissner touches upon some of the problems implicit in the Western perception of Islam and the language the West uses. He considers, for example, the inadequacy of the label fundamentalism and quotes from Hill’s A Sociology of Religion: Our own society has been obliged to invent the term ‘fundamentalism’ for those who still take the traditional religious cosmologies seriously.² Reissner then questions whether the contemporary secularized languages of the West can be used accurately to describe and to analyze events of an Islamic nature in the Muslim world and suggests that the shortcomings and contradictions that characterize Western studies of the Muslim Brotherhood are to an extent the result of deficiencies of these languages. He notes that use of the term fundamentalism, when describing an Islamic movement, may preclude the researcher (or the reader) from entertaining the hypothesis seriously that the phenomenon for which it serves as a label is normal and natural in the context of Islamic society and culture.³

Although one of the more charitable terms the West has used for Islamic revival, the expression Islamic fundamentalism—as anyone familiar with the English language knows—is hardly neutral. It connotes far more to the average English-speaking reader than its bare literal sense of adhering to the fundamental principles of one’s faith. Because it was coined to denote the Christian literalists of the early twentieth century and opposed to modernism and liberalism, the term fundamentalism has become pejorative and implies an intolerant, self-righteous, and narrowly dogmatic religious literalism which, in its rigidity, is incompatible with progress and rationalism. Furthermore, it is associated in the Western mind with a reactionary, rearguard political conservatism, one which, especially in its American and South