Mphil thesis related to mass communication assignment

Suddenly, many of them reached a stunning conclusion: these movements | | have already appeared, in the guise of Islamic fundamentalism. | | | | It has been a time of fervent Western testimonials. Islam, avers a noted journalist in Foreign Affairs, is now “ at a juncture | | increasingly equated with the Protestant Reformation,” due to the growing number of Islamists who “ are now trying to reconcile | | moral and religious tenets with modern life, political competition, and free markets. What these “ supposed fanatics” really want,| | writes a leading political scientist in Ethics and International Affairs, is “ the end of corrupt, arbitrary, and unpredictable | | rule and the imposition of the rule of law and responsible government. ” The new Islamic fundamentalism should be seen “ for what it| | is,” concludes a former intelligence analyst in the Washington Post, | | a movement that is historically inevitable and politically “ tamable. Over the long run it even represents ultimate political | | progress toward greater democracy and popular government. | | These views have reverberated in the hearing rooms of Washington. The then-director of the CIA, Robert Gates, told the House | | Foreign Affairs Committee in February 1992: | | I’m not ready yet to concede that Islamic fundamentalism is, by its nature, anti-Western and anti-democratic.

There are some | | fundamentalist elements in the region ??? they’re not in power ??? that are not necessarily that way. And I think that it’s also an | | evolution. | |” I had made myself a romance about these reformers,” Wilfrid Blunt confessed fifteen years after publication of The Future of | | Islam, “ but I see that it has no substantial basis. ” Blunt was not the first Westerner to be swept off his feet, then left | | bewildered, by the promise of Islamic revival.

Here and there, fundamentalists organized model communities. Although billed as | | successful experiments in self-reliance, they were actually Potemkin mosques, built and supported with money from oil-rich donors. | | Fundamentalists also organized Islamic investment banks, which were supposed to prove that market economics could flourish even | | under the Islamic prohibition of interest. The most extensive experiment in Islamic banking, in Egypt, produced Islamic financial | | scandal in fairly short order. | | | | But most of new followers read no theory and lost no money.

They stood mesmerized by the rhetorical brilliance of men like the | | Sudan’s Hasan al-Turabi, Tunisia’s Rashid al-Ghannushi, and Lebanon’s Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah. These preachers did not intone | | musty Islamic polemics against the unbelievers. Often they sounded more like the tenured Left, venting professorial condemnations | | of the West’s sins. | | | | Indeed, many of them issued from the academy.

At the time, the | | architects of these experiments had no sense of the fundamentalists’ appeal; they thought that the openings would work to the | | benefit of parties advocating liberal reform. | | | | It was the fundamentalists, though, who led the dash through the newly opened door. The first of a succession of surprises had | | occurred in Egypt’s parliamentary elections in 1987, when a coalition dominated by the fundamentalist Muslim Brethren emerged as | | the biggest pposition party in a contest gerrymandered to assure victory for the ruling party. The fundamentalists also | | outdistanced all other opposition parties in the 1989 elections for Tunisia’s parliament, although a winner-take-all system gave | | every seat to the ruling party. That same year, the fundamentalists nearly captured the lower house of Jordan’s parliament, in | | that country’s first general election since 1967. Then, in 1990, the fundamentalists swept the country-wide local elections in | | Algeria. | | | Given these successes, almost overnight fundamentalist movements became the most avid and insistent supporters of free elections ???| | an unpatrolled route to the power that had hitherto eluded them. Liberal Arab intellectuals, who had lobbied for democratic | | reforms and human rights for much of the 1980s, now retreated in disarray, fearful that freer press and elections might play | | straight into the hands of fundamentalists. | | | For Western theorists of democracy, it was as if the Arabs had defied the laws of gravity. Few admitted the bind as frankly as | | Jeane Kirkpatrick, who said: | | | | The Arab world is the only part of the world where I’ve been shaken in my conviction that if you let the people decide, they will | | make fundamentally rational decisions. But there, they don’t make rational decisions, they make fundamentalist ones. | Most theorists, however, refused to be shaken. In order to synchronize the Arab predicament with the march of democracy, they | | developed a convenient theory ??? the theory of initial advantage. | | | | The fundamentalists, according to this theory, enjoyed an advantage in the first stage of democratization: they knew how to | | organize, to stir emotions, to get out the vote. But “ as civil society is enlivened,” announced one political scientist, “ it is | | only natural that the influence of the Islamist groups will be challenged. Then their appeal would fade, once the people enjoyed | | a full range of options. In the privacy of the voting booth, the voters would become rational actors, and elect liberals and | | technocrats who proposed serious answers to the crisis of Arab society. | | | | Algeria’s parliamentary election, first scheduled for June 1991 and then postponed until December, was to have proved the point. | | According to the theorists, Algeria had the best chance of giving birth to a liberal democracy.

More than any other Arab country, | | Algeria enjoyed an intimate connection with Europe, and its elites were at home with the ways of the West. True, the new Algerian | | voter had already given one sweeping victory to the Islamic Salvation Front (known by its French acronym, FIS) in local elections. | | But expert opinion declared the FIS victory a “ protest” against the corruption of the ruling party, not a vote for a stern regime | | of Islamic mores. Anyway, ran the argument, the FIS had lost its initial advantage, first by mismanaging the muncipalities where | | it had assumed authority, then by backing Saddam Hussein in his Kuwait blunder. | | |” Saddam’s defeat has turned the Algerian political situation upside down,” announced L’Express, “ leaving the FIS in the worst | | position of all. ” It was safely predicted that Algerians would turn away from the sheikhs in the upcoming parliamentary election ???| | a fair and free ballot, structured in technical consultation with the best Parisian authorities in the sciences politiques. The | | FIS can now count on only a die-hard bloc of unemployed urban youths,” opined an American political scientist in the Journal of | | Democracy, who found it “ unlikely that the FIS will gain enough votes to dictate the makeup of the new government. ” Such confident| | assurances anesthetized Algeria’s elite, who secretly worshipped foreign expertise and looked surreptitiously to the foreign press| | to explain their own predicament to them. | | | Thus, Paris and Algiers were both astonished when the FIS won a landslide victory in the first round of the parliamentary | | election, nearly burying Algeria’s regime and its Westernized elite. The Sudan’s Turabi was right for once when he claimed that | | any observer with insight should have been able to predict the outcome: “ The Western media wished this not to be so, so they hid | | the facts from everyone, so the results came as a surprise. But the self-deception went beyond the media, to the battery of | | democracy doctors who had ministered to the ailing Algerian polity. Their theory of initial advantage proved to be an immense | | blind spot, large enough to conceal a near-revolution. | | | | Algeria confirmed something that had been demonstrated in study after study of fundamentalist movements: fundamentalism is no fad,| | but the preference of a generation.

The presentation of candidates would be entrusted to a neutral institution that would explain to the people the options| | offered in policies and personalities. | | Through this elaborate hedging, Turabi arrives at a tacit justification for one-party rule, which is the actual form of government| | he now justifies and supports in the Sudan. | | | | Of the vast complex of democratic values and institutions offered by the West, the fundamentalists have thus seized upon only one,| | the free plebiscite, and even that is to be discarded after successful one-time use.

They remain ambivalent, if not hostile, | | toward party politics, and they spend much of their intellectual energy arguing that the reckless expansion of freedom can only | | harm the collective security of Islam. When asked which existing regime most closely approximates an ideal Islamic order, | | fundamentalists most often cite the governments of the Sudan or Iran ??? the first a military regime, the second a hierocracy ruled | | by an increasingly autocratic cleric, and both first-order violators of human rights. | | | The second argument holds that Islamic fundamentalism drives many movements and represents a wide spectrum of views, not all of | | them extreme. Because of its diversity, the past or present performance of fundamentalism in one setting says nothing about its | | future performance in another. And this diversity also rules out domino-like progress: the world does not face an Islamintern, but| | a variety of local movements. | | | | The concept of a iverse fundamentalism has wound its way to Washington, where it achieved full flower in a June 1992 speech by | | Edward Djerejian, then Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs: | | In countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa, we thus see groups or movements seeking to reform their societies in | | keeping with Islamic ideals. There is considerable diversity in how these ideals are expressed. We detect no monolithic or | | coordinated international effort behind these movements.

The Sudan has run Algerian | | voting data through its computers for the FIS, it has provided diplomatic passports for foreign fundamentalists, and it has | | brought the foremost fundamentalists to Khartoum to create an Islamic Arab Popular Conference, of which Turabi is secretary. Iran | | is still more active, and not only continues to finance Hizbullah in Lebanon, but includes a line item in its budget for support | | of the Palestinian Intifada ??? monies which have gone largely to fundamentalists who battle the peace process.

Visitors to Khartoum| | and Tehran are astonished at the odd mix of foreign fundamentalists who can be spotted in hotel lobbies and government ministries. | | | | There is, in short, much ado about something, part of which is visible above-board in publicized visits and conferences, part of | | which is arranged in the conspiratorial fashion mastered by the fundamentalists during their long years underground.

S. has, but we had the power previously and we have now the foundations to develop that | | power in the future. | | This restored balance between Islam and the West excludes the intrusive existence of Israel in the lands of Islam. Unlike several | | Arab regimes and the PLO, which have grudgingly accepted the reality of the Jewish state, the fundamentalists remain | | uncompromisingly theological in their understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Palestine is a land sacred to Islam, a land | | stolen by the Jews. Not an inch may be alienated.

Israel is a cancer in the Islamic world, implanted by imperialism and nurtured | | by the U. S. The Jewish state has to be fought, passively through non-recognition, actively through jihad. Ibrahim Ghawsha, | | speaking for Hamas, the largest Palestinian fundamentalist movement, has drawn analogies that go beyond the usual parallel of | | Israel and the Crusaders: | | We think the conflict between the Arabs and Jews, between the Muslims and the Jews, is a cultural conflict that will continue to | | rage throughout all time. . . Algeria fought for 130 years. Even the Baltic states, which were occupied by the Soviets, have had| | their independence recognized by world states 45 years after they were occupied. The Palestine question is only [about] 40 years | | old, considering that it came into being in 1948. We are at the beginning of the road. Our adversary needs to be dealt with | | through a protracted and continuous confrontation. | This view is shared by fundamentalists of all stripes, from the many Sunni movements in the Muslim Brethren tradition to the | | Shi’ite movements that receive guidance and support from Iran. | | Imagined Islamism | | Democracy, diversity, accommodation ??? the fundamentalists have repudiated them all. In appealing to the masses who fill their | | mosques, they promise, instead, to institute a regime of Islamic law, make common cause with like-minded “ brethren” everywhere, | | and struggle against the hegemony of the West and the existence of Israel.

According to one academic analyst, | | The twenty-first century will test the ability of political analysts and policymakers to distinguish between Islamic movements | | that are a threat and those that represent legitimate indigenous attempts to reform and redirect their societies. | | Would that these movements could be divided into two such broadly opposed categories.

But every movement combines threat and | |” reform” in a seamless message, and much of the supposed “ reform” is threatening as well ??? to women, minorities, and the | | occasional novelist who would write a book on Islam. Which of these movements could be trusted with power, and which would betray | | that trust at the first opportunity? No one can possibly know, because the threat that resides in fundamentalism is anchored to | | its foundations, and is liable to resurface at critical moments when the peace and stability of the region hang in the balance. | | | Political pluralism and peace do have true friends in the Middle East and North Africa. They are beleaguered and dazed by the | | generational surge of Islamic fundamentalism, and they are divided over the fate of Algeria and its implications. Some have been | | ridiculed by the democracy theorists as self-styled liberals, guilty of pedaling the view that existing governments are preferable| | to the anointed fundamentalists. But their forebodings are as justified as those of Westerners who shudder at the rise