Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

3 4Islam i n World Cult u r e smatic individuals, such as Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah of the LebaneseShi’ite group Hizbullah, a group that rose to prominence in the wake of the Israeliinvasion of Lebanon in 1982 (Kramer 1997). A number of these movementsturned increasingly to the use of violence and even terrorist attacksupon civilians as the means to further their agendas. For many Americans beforeSeptember 11, 2001, this type of militant Islam was most often associatedwith the Palestinian i n t i f a d a—the “uprising” against the Israeli occupation ofthe West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Indeed, Islamic activists and ideologues likethe leader of Hamas, Shaykh Ahmad Yasin, have masterfully manipulated Muslimsentiments to make Palestine “the symbolic, if not the actual, center ofworldwide Islamist resistance” (Abu-Amr 1997, 242). Suicide bombers and theterror they inspire have exploded on front pages and newscasts worldwidesince the 1980s with stories and gruesome images of militant Muslims killingJews and Christians. However, some Islamist movements directed their violencenot only toward non-Muslims but also toward Muslims whose politics didnot agree with their own.For example, in 1981 President Anwar Sadat of Egypt was assassinated bymembers of the Islamic Jihad. During the shooting, one of the gunmenshouted, “I have killed Pharaoh!” referring to the Qur’anic symbol of the greatantagonist of Moses (Kepel 1993, 192). During the Iran-Iraq War of1980–1988, some Iranian Shi’ite clerics preached that the issue was a battleagainst the “Great Enemy” of Islam in the person of Saddam Hussein. The governmentof the Islamic Republic of Iran also ordered an official boycott of thehajj from 1987 to 1990 in protest against the policies of the Saudi state. Theyear after the Iranian boycott ended, Saddam Hussein himself took a new turntoward Islamic politics, picking up the baton of self-righteous indignationagainst the Saudis to criticize their cooperation with the “infidel Americans”during the first Gulf War in 1991 (Piscatori 1991).One of the most visible trends in Islam in the late twentieth and earlytwenty-first centuries has been its increased ideologization and politicizationin many parts of the world. However, there has never been any consensus on aunified model of Islamic politics, and contestations over the place of Islam instate institutions have thus continued to be played out in myriad differentways in different places, dependent on local cultural contexts and on themodern histories. In Sudan, for example, a military coup in 1989 brought topower an Islamist government whose policies are directed by the We s t e r n -educated Hassan Turabi (Esposito and Voll 2001, 134). On the other hand, in1992, when Islamists had made significant gains in electoral politics in Algeria,the military staged a coup to prevent the Islamists from gaining powerthere, igniting waves of horrendous violence that decimated the country fornearly a decade (Willis 1996, 233ff.). In Malaysia, a nonviolent Muslim oppositionmovement led by the moderate Anwar Ibrahim was stifled when he was