Beyond Islamism - Tariq Ramadan
▻http://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?article13030&lang=fr
The world has changed, and everything suggests that Islamist organizations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and other legalist and reformist groups, have not kept pace with world-historical developments, with shifts in international relations, and, most of all, with the new paradigm of globalization. In addition, state power, which in the beginning was understood as a means to social, political, economic and cultural reform, emerged as an end in itself, perverting both the intentions and the actions of a significant number of Islamist movements. These factors have combined to create, over time, a disconnect between the oft-repeated claims of the Islamist movements, which have maintained substantial popular support, and their inability to respond to the challenges of the new era. Having become nationalist Islamist movements, their obsession with the state eventually led to them neglecting fundamental economic issues, major cultural concerns, and even failing to address the basic questions of freedom, citizenship and individual autonomy. Driven into opposition, totally committed to (and imprisoned by) the desire to legitimize their participation in the democratic process as credible, open and dependable in the eyes of the West, the Islamists have become a reactionary force that, in the name of pragmatism, with one compromise after another, have preserved their religious references while voiding them of their potential for social, economic and cultural liberation.
How remote we are from a new interpretation of our scriptural sources, or from a peoples’ liberation “theology” that would give absolute priority to the poor and the oppressed ; that would, finally, see social and political relations in economic and cultural terms. The Islamists, today, have no credible or viable economic alternatives to offer. In the name of their obsession with international recognition, they have bowed down before the imperatives of the dominant capitalist economy. The religious reference has become a strictly reactive and a strictly protective one, directed primarily against the permissive excesses of the West and Westernizers. It has forfeited its ability to offer an ethical approach to education, social justice, the environment, culture and communication. There have been frequent populist attempts to enlist religion for emotional, identity-related or electoral ends.