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Over the past 50 years, secularism in the Arab world has continued to decline. If we link this decline to a specific event that led to this decline and the rise of fundamentalist movements in the Arab world, then it will be the Six Day War of 1967.
And the failure of the republican regimes of certain Arab countries to find real popular solutions or to deal with the Palestinian question.
In the mid-1970s, Egyptian fundamentalists carried out a series of sporadic terrorist attacks that caught the attention of the West, which at the time was still focused on the threat of Communist expansion and the use Islamic fundamentalist movements and political Islamist movements to face the communist tide.
The end of the Soviet-Afghan war in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union two years later brought fundamentalist movements and fundamentalist thought to the fore as a major threat to international peace, especially after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the Madrid bombings in 2004 and the series of bombings in London in 2005.
Al-Qaeda has given itself the right to target the West in the name of true religion, but as a reactionary and paradoxical phenomenon, Islamic fundamentalism is by nature incapable of realizing its political or societal vision, particularly of a jihadist character. .
The slogans of the French Revolution had a great influence on the intellectuals of the period of Arab secularism, which lasted from the 19th century until the outbreak of World War II. European colonial policy especially after World War I weakened the cause of Arab liberalism and led to the emergence of Islamic fundamentalism. It also paved the way for the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, a radical movement that played a central role in overhauling the Islamic world, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. The decline of Arab liberalism is in part due to Britain’s refusal to establish an Arab state in Syria despite its previous promise to do so, and the failure to keep its promises to Arab revolutionaries against the Ottoman Empire.
Muhammad Rashid Rida was an influential Islamic thinker who was a follower of 19th century Reform or Enlightenmentists such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abdo, whose liberal Islamic teachings promoted a version of Islamic societies that met the demands of the modernity. Rida sincerely supported the creation of the Kingdom of Syria in 1919 and adopted a secular constitution for it which did not declare Islam the official religion of the state, and promised and preached pluralist democracy, but the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, which recognized the French mandate over Syria, changed Rida’s stance on promoting secularism and embracing Salafism and political Islam, which in turn inspired Hassan Al-Banna to found the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to convert to a dynamic political Islam.
Sayyid Qutb, an extremist Muslim Brotherhood thinker with intellectual fluctuations, who went from extreme liberalism demanding absolute freedom to fundamentalism, and from the Wafd party to the Muslim Brotherhood party, after which he was ordered to suspend the attempted assassination of Gamal Abdel Nasser, a 1964 book titled “Milestones in the Path”, which wrote The Intellectual Foundations of Militant Islamic Movements for over half a century. This classifies the community of the Brotherhood as a society of truth, the surviving group and others as infidels.
Qutb argued that if Islam were to be successful, it would have to wage a war against the West and spread Islamic religious and cultural values around the world, which is an inevitable clash of civilizations. According to Qutb, the West was morally bankrupt and unable to provide a functioning value system for humanity.
Fundamentalist leaders such as Qutb believed that the struggle for truth in her group against anything that disagreed with her ultimately caused the rise of contemporary militant jihadism. Despite the legalization of the pole of violence, jihad is crucial for him to achieve the ultimate goal of the group: the group’s access to power and power. Because of its teachings, the first conflict between fundamentalist jihadists in Egypt took place in the 1990s, before spreading to other places and crossing borders.
There are clear parallels between fundamentalist and totalitarian movements such as Nazism and Fascism. Both aspire to restore the glories of the past, restore lost empires or find new ones. Fascists believe in the cultural and moral superiority of their race and they see themselves as promoters of a mission advancing the interests of disenfranchised peoples. In 1938, Al-Banna promoted that every practicing Muslim, according to the group’s literature, has a duty to protect all other Muslims, just as the “German Reich” saw itself as the protector of anyone of German blood.
Al-Banna added that if Mussolini believed he had the right to rekindle the glory of the Roman Empire, Muslims had the right to restore the greatness of the Islamic Empire even at the expense of independent and sovereign states, all Arab states should submit to the rule of the community.
Radical Islamists and fundamentalists behave like religious fascists. They use brutality and cruelty to enforce popular conformity and wreak havoc to undermine state power. They declare jihad against the ruling elite as well as part of the people whom they consider to be apostates. Militant movements such as Daesh, Al Qaeda and Al Nusra commit heinous deeds and apply brutal punishments without recognizing the elements of repentance and forgiveness which are elements of great importance in Islam.
Fundamentalism in the Arab world is the result of decades of cultural inactivity, intellectual stagnation, and failed social and economic policies in many Arab countries, especially in the republics.
Extremists have distorted the role of Islam in social policy. They politicized faith and placed it at the center of their definition of modernity.
For them, modernity means a state dominated by religion. They seek to suppress opposing views and use their faith to justify the brutal elimination of their opponents regardless of their religion. They lack full control over the country, they promote their religious ideology as an ideology that offers precise explanations and answers to all social phenomena, and justifies the use of violence by asserting that it is necessary to protect the sacredness of Islam.
By targeting the state, they alienate the local population who see them as the enemy at home, as well as their former supporters who see states working for the future while fundamentalist movements hijack a return to the past, according to them. close understanding.
Most Muslims no longer believe that Islamic fundamentalism will offer a better future. The rise of extremist movements such as Daesh, al-Nusra and al-Qaeda at the stage of the Arab Spring and the attempt to unify the Muslim Brotherhood with power have revealed that fundamentalist movements, whether jihadist or political, will not offer a better future but will want to return to the past, and the task of reform oriented political reform is not a reality and is balanced by an ethical compass that has become obsessed with establishing the caliphate. Fundamentalism is now in decline in the Arab world.
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