Prof. Dr.
Dawud Gholamasad
introduction
Hardly a day has passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the associated disappearance of bipolar tensions in interstate relations without reports of radical actions by Islamists in any part of the world and the corresponding reactions to them. Until September 11, however, it was above all the governments of Islamic societies that the Islamists perceived as a serious threat to the rule of law there. Since the terrorist attacks in the United States , they have now been perceived as a global threat against which the entire mental energies and material resources of the international community under American leadership have been mobilized.
The difficulty of this struggle against the Islamic terrorist organizations, declared " war of the century", lies in its new quality, which makes it extremely unlikely to be won by conventional means, even if some military battles are won. Even parts of the US government feel these concerns . At the same time, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld expressed doubts as to whether the United States will achieve the main goal of its campaign against Afghanistan and whether it will capture Osama Bin Laden. In an interview, he said: "The world is big. He has a lot of money , he has a lot of supporters. I don't know if we will succeed." [1] This doubt is justified above all because the socio- and psychogenesis of Islamism , which is already considered the newest form of totalitarianism, is not adequately taken into accountdifferent from Islam as the true religion of Muslims. Consequences are the simplification of the problem in the form of the personification of a social movement in the form of some terrorist leaders, accompanied by a lack of understanding for the increasing mass sympathy for their now globally networked organizations. The experience of this growing sympathy now seems to have led to a change in perception in the USA, because the American Middle East expert Daniel Pipes stated: "The wide and deep Muslim enthusiasm for Bin Laden is an extremely important development and should be understood and not ignored become." [2] Pipes bases the results of several surveys in various Islamic societies and estimates that Bin Laden is already enjoying the emotional support of half of all Muslims in the world. One shouldn't forget that Muslims make up 20 percent of the world's population. As a result, around ten percent of all people worldwide already sympathize with Bin Laden. They replace him with his ideal of ego, identify with each other as mass individuals and thus form a mass in the psychological sense. [3]
The neglect of the social basis of Islamism to date results in a problematic orientation of the alliance's joint strategies, which are likely to have unpredictable consequences in the long term. Without appropriate reorientation and a move away from a previously dominant double standard of the Allies, the existing tensions and conflicts would possibly even worsen. The escalation of violence observed in Islamic societies so far confirms this forecast. This dynamic of development would be understandable if one did not neglect the structural similarities of domestic and international tensions and conflicts. As a rule, however, not only are these structural similarities neglected,
In order to address a possible direction of reorientation, with which one could overcome the described lack of understanding and prevent the escalation of the conflict, I would like to briefly discuss a few theses here:
It would be more appropriate to reality not to understand Islamism as a totalitarian ideology of the extremely violent Muslims who abuse Islam, in contrast to Islam as the true religion of the otherwise peaceful Muslims. With this stigmatization of an opponent perceived as threatening and the assumption of a rational calculation of the Islamists, one can legitimize one's own reactions, but only treats the symptoms. A radical treatment of the phenomenon as a social problem presupposes understanding Islamism as well as Islam as a belief system in the sense of a more or less emotional means of orientation for Islamic people who are by no means crazy - even if their actions seem to be of a different rationality consequences.especially the society that they form with each other and the largely unconscious, more or less close emotional ties that they have with it. Its main goal is not to give these people an interpretation of the physical world. [4] If that were the case, the religious orientation of many natural scientists could not be explained. In addition, one could not understand how it is possible that people trained in natural sciences and engineering form the core group of Islamists from which the suicide bombers of September 11th were recruited. However, what the suicide bombers manifest is an ambivalence of orientation as an essential aspect of the belief system, which is conceivable simply because two types of ties can exist side by side, even if they are in conflict with each other.
As a belief system, Islamism - like any other belief - has, in addition to the behavior-controlling function, identity-constituting and regulating functions: it gives people answers to the questions of who they are and what it is worth living for or, if necessary, dying if it is Survival of social unity as a frame of reference is required. It gives them the feeling for their own meaning and value as individuals and at the same time as members of their social survival and meaning unity. As partners in such a social unit, not only are they assured of their own physical survival, but it is made possible for people to continue living after physical death in the memory of people. As a religious belief system, Islamism differs from secularized belief systems in the degree of its fantasy content or its appropriateness in reality. He promises people more than the more secularized belief systems for the high price they have to pay as members of the faith community, namely a value and meaning that transcends their own life.
Islamism provides the framework for a social movement that idealizes the behavior and experience canon of an older Islamic leadership elite than Islam and makes it God's immutable law. It is a form of development of the normative image that a certain group of Muslims have of the social world and that goes back to the remembered era of Islamic supremacy. In this sense, Islamism represents a normative notion of a balance of power and status that is pleasing to God, which may only be inclined in favor of the Muslims. Consequently, the Islamists appear above allthe current intergovernmental distribution of sources of power and status as unjust because it discriminates against a community of God-fearing Muslims with group charisma.
The common experience of all Muslims of social reality is the common root of Islam and Islamism. But although their roots may lie in the earlier writings and traditions of thought, Islamism is a present-day phenomenon. Accordingly, it cannot be denied that it is a reaction of the people involved in the modernization process to modern problems. The question, however, is what problems?
In my view, Islamist movements are nativist [5] chiliastic surveys [6] , They emerged as a change from the chiliastic quietism of Islamic people to their chiliastic activism. Let us understand the chiliasm known as the "principle of hope" as a collective willingness to set out to create paradisiacal happiness on earth, as expressed religiously in the belief in a realm of justice after the return of the Redeemer, and by Quietism we mean, in contrast, an orientation of the people on a fusion with God through wishless and willless giving in his will, which manifests itself in her apocalyptic seclusion and complete calm of her mind, then Islamist movements are an expression of the change in the willingness of Islamic people to take a collective start to create paradisiacal happiness or justice on earth in a collective departure from nativist-oriented people, ie people who demonstratively emphasize their own self-worth as a group. As a nativist movement, Islamism is therefore one of the active forms of implementation of a new distribution scheme of symbols of superiority, to which the self-esteem of the ascent-oriented, Islamic people is attached.
At present, the power of the life-enhancing function of self-esteem can be seen, among other things, in the tendency to increase the value of one's own group at the expense of the value of others. [7] Self-esteem, both in one's own eyes and in the eyes of other social formations, is therefore determined by the power struggles between different groups of people. As a result, the imperative force of relationships of self and foreign value arises not least from the fear of people for each other, of physical annihilation, enslavement, exploitation, dependence or annihilation of meaning. Finally, the fear of an impending loss of meaning often evokes feelings of extreme hostility - in such a way that the faithful are ready to destroy the opponents who are perceived as opponents in order to guarantee their own belief system and their tradition or their higher value.
This interpretation is suggested if one listens carefully to these people and takes their concerns seriously instead of pathologizing them and thus stigmatizing them as speechless, extremely violent madmen who understand no other language than that of violence. This is the only way to understand them, together with their suffering. Because where there is suffering, there is passion. It is their unbearable suffering that drives these activists to sacrifice themselves to establish new self-esteem relationships, in the sense of reversing the existing order of power and status. The need for these destructive tendencies is e.g. B. highlighted by Ayatollah Chomeini, who already shaped his famous formula in the 1960s: Islam is a tree that can only grow if it is nourished by the blood of youth. [8]
With the rejection of the passive mindset of the quietists, which is particularly characterized by the striving for godly piety and calmness of the soul, the chiliastic activists differ in that they can no longer wait for the Redeemer. The culmination of this self-redemption is the suicide attack, which can be interpreted as a turning of the collective grief of the Islamic, ascent-oriented people into a hegemonic frenzy.
This affective disinhibition manifests the change from willingness to leave to practical departure to establish justice. This change is a result of the change in the structure of needs of the certain chiliastic activists, which is dominated by respect and self-respect. However, this structural change is the result of the increasing satisfaction of economic needs, which pushes the non-economic needs to the fore and thus initially makes the wealthier classes the core group of Islamist suicide bombers. Their affective disinhibition also documents a de-civilization surge in their behavior and feelings as a boomerang effect of an experienced unbearable humiliation by the established people of the world, who they understand as a declaration of war. This conflict situation, experienced as a state of war, which results from a certain balance of power to its disadvantage, causes this structural change in needs. I would like to briefly explain this connection.
As in any normative self-image of people as individuals and societies based on civilization, in the sense of a means of orientation and control, the use of violence against oneself and other people is also prohibited in Islam. Suicide is therefore considered a mortal sin. However, in these societies as well as in all others, there is a sacred duty to altruistic suicide. In contrast to selfish suicide , i.e. Intihar , this individual sacrifice for the community is called Ishtihad. It is one of the highest commandments in a war declared sacred, jihad, for the fulfillment of which direct access to paradise is promised.
Here, the differently shaped societies do not differ in the heroism of altruistic suicide in defense of the community, but only in the way they are rewarded. With the increasing secularization of societies, this too is becoming secularized. For this reason, wars are always legitimized as acts of collective self-defense, in which the use of every means seems to be permitted. From this bloody experience, international conventions emerged that set such destructive tendencies within civilizationally defined limits, the observance of which the international community tries to sanction institutionally.
It would therefore be a "pars pro toto distortion" [9] the reality of reducing acts of a group that violate civilization standards in a culture-specific manner. However, the belligerent aggression and the resulting emotional disinhibitions are currently aspects of the nation-state organizational form of humanity as attack and defense units, which in turn are mostly differentiated ethnically and denominationally. This form of organization is characterized on the one hand by the increasing civilization of domestic relations in the sense of the suspension of physical violence as a principle of regulation of the competition and elimination struggles for the available power and status opportunities. On the other hand, it goes hand in hand with a simultaneous heroization of physical violence in international relations, the need for which is legitimized as self-defense. The war, along with its side effects, is an expression of the absence of an effective control of violence in international relations. The mutually exclusive traditions of belief and behavior are in turn one of the main reasons for the return of a growing reciprocal threat and fear on the international level, right up to war. [10]
The affective disinhibition of the people involved in Yugoslavia, which went hand in hand with an ethnicization and confessionalization of the conflicts, clearly showed that such decivilizing tendencies cannot be explained in terms of culture, but only from the absence of effective violence control. Such a suspension of physical violence as a result of centralized violence control generally results from the monopolization of the threat of violence and the use of violence in a reversible state-building process. In the absence of this effective control of violence as well as its continued unregulated abuse, people's affective disinhibition arises from their hostile relationships. The degree of disinhibition depends on the perceived degree of threat. It is therefore the perceived dangerous situation that causes such affective disinhibitions, which are perceived as a decline in civilization and, as in the case of the attacks of September 11, are condemned as a barbaric act. The affectivity of the action context creates a vicious cycle of threat, which constantly increases the affectivity of the action - with fatal consequences for thousands of innocent people. But even this is in the nature of any war that releases the destructive tendencies controlled by civilization. which constantly increases the affectivity of actions - with fatal consequences for thousands of innocent people. But even this is in the nature of any war that releases the destructive tendencies controlled by civilization. which constantly increases the affectivity of actions - with fatal consequences for thousands of innocent people. But even this is in the nature of any war that releases the destructive tendencies controlled by civilization.
Wars are collective acts of attack and defense by people, which differ from each other in terms of civilization in the range of their identification with people. The nationalization, ethnicization and confessionalization of social conflicts thus manifest the scope of the identification of the people involved with people regardless of their group affiliation at different levels of integration. In the case of Islamists, their identification extends to their fellow believers, to idealized Muslims as a community they remember as a hegemonic power.
They are ready for any sacrifice to restore this remembered hegemonic position of power of the Muslims, because they align themselves with the idealized image from the time of their size and continue to live this for them as a mandatory model. Their war declared sacred, which they wage with the sacrifice of their own lives, is therefore the most radical form of fulfilling this obligation. It thus becomes the engine of their collective willingness to leave. The action-guiding power of this obligatory model can only be understood if one realizes that a person's we-image and we-ideal is as much a part of his self-image as the image and ideal of himself as the only person to whom he " I "says. Come in addition, [11] In these societies, participation in the group charism, the past and present successes and achievements of one's own group, requires that each individual physically sacrifices himself in order to restore or secure the size presented. The high self-image or the group goals to be achieved are more important for the individual than their own physical existence, since their own existence or sense fulfillment is much more tied to the existence of the group.
The memory of the Islamists is above all their memoryto outstanding and at the same time idealized achievements of Muslims during the first six centuries of Islamic rule: Islamized societies were one of the most developed in this period. They delivered the most advanced scientific and technical achievements and created unusually victorious armies. The Islamic people like to remember this pattern of success of the Muslims, which seems self-evident to them, since the Prophet Muhammad left Mecca as a refugee in 622 and returned as ruler eight years later. It is remembered that as early as 715 the Muslim conquerors built an empire that ranged from Spain in the west to India in the east. For this reason, for a long time, their beliefs also seemed to distinguish their higher social rank from other groups. So to be a Muslim meant to be a member of a victorious and dominant community of people that stood out from others through their pattern of civilization. It is therefore no wonder that some Muslims now retrospectively establish a correlation between their faith and their social rise at the time as a hegemonic power and therefore see themselves as a charismatic group in the sense of a community favored by God.
Their centuries of collective grief are the result of the experience of social decline in the Islamic world since the 13th and 15th centuries, without Muslims becoming aware of it until the 18th century. While new discoveries were made in the West, the Islamic world sank into a kind of smug ignorance during this period. This is e.g. For example, by the famous Muslim intellectual Ibn Khaldun, who wrote about Europe around 1400, "I hear that some things are developing in the country of the Romans, but only God knows what is happening there." This ignorance made the Muslims vulnerable when they could no longer ignore what had happened in Europe, namely an increase in the chances of power that resulted from the development of the triad of basic controls: nature control in the form of technological development, social control in the form of nation-state formation and drive and affect control in the form of increasing civilization of the behavior and experience of people in Europe. So it was the progressive development of this triad of basic controls that escaped the Muslims - a development that ultimately led to a shift in the balance of power between Islamic and Christian societies and thus to their social ascent and descent.
The most dramatic turning point in the balance of power to the detriment of Muslims was evident in July 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte landed in Egypt, thus conquering the center of the Muslim world with astonishing ease. Other attacks followed in the next two centuries. After the Zionist occupation of Palestine and the humiliating defeats of the Arab states in the Six Day War in 1967, the most tragic of these attacks for Muslims like Bin Laden seems to be the US presence in Saudi Arabia since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait: "The greatest catastrophe, which Muslims have suffered since the Prophet's death is the occupation of the Holy Land of Ka'ba and the Qible by Christians and their allies " [12] Bin Laden announced in August 1996. The Islamists feel obliged to combat this "occupation of the soil of the holy site" [13] because they have to do justice to their defensiveness and thus their honor: "Our terrorism against them, ours It is our duty to keep armed land occupied. They are like a giant snake that has entered our house and must be killed. " Regarding the Saudi Arabian ruler, he continues: "He who allows them to walk armed in his country even though they enjoy peace and security is a coward ... " [14]
From this inability of the Saudi ruler to maintain the state monopoly on violence, which at the same time leads to its crisis of legitimacy, Islamists like Osama Bin Laden not only derive the legitimacy of their struggle not only against the USA, but also against the unjust rule in their own country , This is also supported religiously, namely by the alternative Fatwas - legal opinion - of the clergy competing with the established clergy, such as B. Sheikh al-Shuaibi, who are expanding jihad as a holy war against foreign unbelievers to a fight against their own unjust regime. [15] If this is generalized, the inability of the established post-colonial states of different types (such as Wahabite in Saudi Arabia, Arab-nationalist or Arab-socialist in more secularized states such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq) seems to be the basis of legitimation for the nativist-oriented chiliastic Deliver movements.
This worsening of the legitimacy crisis of the existing power relations in Islamic societies is understandable if one understands the state as an organizational form of general reproductive conditions of society. These general conditions of reproduction include, above all, protecting the physical existence and integrity of citizens against attacks both internally through the monopolization of physical violence and externally through appropriate defense efforts. From this existential function, the state becomes a unit of attack and defense and thus a frame of reference for people's self-experience as a we group. The government can only claim legitimation by fulfilling such protective and protective functions. Their failure leads to their crisis of legitimacy. However, the failure of states in Islamic societies is an expression of their relative weakness compared to the more developed state societies of Europe and America - despite their gain in power in the course of the transformation of interdependencies, which include the emergence of OPEC and the new multipolarity of interstate relations since the disintegration the Soviet Union.
The frustration of the Muslims, which can turn into aggression at any time, is enormous in view of the unfavorable balance of power and status. This widespread, unbearable feeling of humiliation is such. For example, expressed by the imam of a mosque in Jerusalem, when he emphasizes: "We used to be the masters of the world and now we are not even masters of our own mosque." [16]
From this experience, the past two centuries of the social decline of Islamic societies have been characterized not only by a collective grief for a glorified past, but also by attempts to explain the loss of the former hegemonic position of the Muslims and appropriate strategies to overcome them. Essentially three currents developed, each encompassing a broad spectrum. In addition to secular modernism and Islamic reformism, Islamism is one of the explanatory and reaction patterns of Islamic people.
When, as a result of industrialization in Europe, the balance of power finally and unmistakably shifted to the disadvantage of Muslims, a general feeling of bewilderment spread among them. They wondered what went wrong. The Islamists felt abandoned by God and wondered why God had turned away from them. They attributed this to the neglect of Islamic laws in the sense of the normative structure of a God-preferred Muslim society, as accelerated by modernization in the sense of Westernization. This is mainly because the social decline of Muslims related not only to military and economic power, but also to the power to define the normative order of social reality.
The Islamists see the solution to the problem in combating the westernization of Islamic societies, while calling on Muslims to live a godly life according to Islamic law, the Sharia, and trying to implement it in the form of re-Islamization of their own state societies.
Islamism is therefore a religion of these advancement-oriented and as such chiliastically influenced Nativists, as it is e.g. B. Ayatollah Khomeini emphasizes: "Islam is the religion of the fighters who advocate justice and justice, the religion of those who strive for freedom and independence, the school of the fighters against colonialism." [17] Their militant attacks are therefore aimed at overcoming power and status relationships that are perceived as unjust and degrading.
The turning of mourning for an idealized past into a destructive rage against the personified originator of their inferior situation is only understandable if the individual and collective identity of people is understood psychologically as a " remembered continuum of change ". The memory of the loss of power in their states goes hand in hand with a crisis of identity and meaning . Because in their understanding loss of power means loss of meaning and value at the same time. It is the experience of this crisis of meaning, which resonates in Ayatollah Khomeini's rhetorical question: "Were the laws, the exposition, propagation, dissemination and enforcement of which of the Prophets took twenty-three years of work, only for a limited time?" [18]
It is only in this context that one realizes that the Islamists are ready to fight given the experienced social decline. No means seem too crude and barbaric to them, because their power and their image of themselves as a great and great formation has a higher value for them than almost anything else. It is even more difficult for them than their own lives. But since their collective self-image no longer corresponds to the real distribution of power, martyrdom imposes itself on them as the highest imperative for overcoming this crisis of identity and meaning. In this way, at least personally, victory seems certain to them - either in the form of victory in the earthly struggle for justice or by entering paradise as a reward for martyrdom. The attempt, The shock of realizing the changed position of the Muslim world at all costs and the keen desire to reverse the development process are so extreme because the factual resources of these societies are compared to the ideal for which they were restored by the Islamists are used, are very low. In this sense, the suicide bombings only confirm the rule that the weaker, the more insecure and desperate people become on their way down the social ladder, the harder they feel that they are fighting with their backs to the wall, the raw the more acute the danger is that they will disregard and destroy the civilized standards of behavior that they are proud of in their own society. and the keen desire to reverse the development process is so extreme because the factual resources of these societies are very small compared to the ideal that the Islamists are trying to restore. In this sense, the suicide bombings only confirm the rule that the weaker, the more insecure and desperate people become on their way down the social ladder, the harder they feel that they are fighting with their backs to the wall, the raw the more acute the danger is that they will disregard and destroy the civilized standards of behavior that they are proud of in their own society. and the keen desire to reverse the development process is so extreme because the factual resources of these societies are very small compared to the ideal that the Islamists are trying to restore. In this sense, the suicide bombings only confirm the rule that the weaker, the more insecure and desperate people become on their way down the social ladder, the harder they feel that they are fighting with their backs to the wall, the raw the more acute the danger is that they will disregard and destroy the civilized standards of behavior that they are proud of in their own society. because the factual resources of these societies are very small compared to the ideal for which they are being used by the Islamists. In this sense, the suicide bombings only confirm the rule that the weaker, the more insecure and desperate people become on their way down the social ladder, the harder they feel that they are fighting with their backs to the wall, the raw the more acute the danger is that they will disregard and destroy the civilized standards of behavior that they are proud of in their own society. because the factual resources of these societies are very small compared to the ideal for which they are being used by the Islamists. In this sense, the suicide bombings only confirm the rule that the weaker, the more insecure and desperate people become on their way down the social ladder, the harder they feel that they are fighting with their backs to the wall, the raw the more acute the danger is that they will disregard and destroy the civilized standards of behavior that they are proud of in their own society. [19]
But the pursuit of a change in the self-esteem pattern increased among the weaker Islamists as a result of the functional democratization that they have now experienced both within the state and between states in the sense of a shift in the balance of power in favor of outsiders. This functional democratization manifested itself not only in the Islamization of the revolution in Iran against an invincible regime that was always supported by the Western world. It also showed itself in the expulsion of the Soviet army from Afghanistan. These events are the most striking examples of the shift in the weight of power in favor of the previously weaker Islamic people.
This relative increase in the power of people previously largely excluded from access to the sources of power and status is primarily a result of the modernization processes of Islamic societies on the one hand and the emergence of the multipolar tension axis between international relations after the collapse of the Soviet Union on the other, without this shift in the balance of power being accompanied by a corresponding transformation of the social habits of the people involved and their corresponding institutionalization. The terrorist character of the Islamist movements is therefore a consequence of the shift in balance from cooperation to conflict, last but not least, the established - both the more powerful states at the level of intergovernmental integration and the governments of Islamic societies at the domestic level - lead the competition for power and status opportunities unregulated, that is, by all means. The violent repression of the emerging social groups, combined with a double standard of the established, who defended their power and status opportunities by all means, exacerbated the crisis of legitimacy of the existing power relations on both levels of integration and contributed to the further brutalization of the competitive struggles.
Domestic and international relations require a reorganization of the distribution of power between weaker and more powerful social groups if the struggles for power are not to escalate. Otherwise, this escalation would result in additional energies due to the increasing mass sympathy of the Muslims for the Islamist movements. The fear of an impending loss of meaning could lead to extreme hostility towards non-Muslims among all Muslims, so that they too would be willing to destroy them in order to guarantee their own belief system, their tradition or their higher quality. This danger is currently exacerbated by the very young age structure of these societies, whose population is on average 18 years old and as such relatively emotionally excitable.
The increasing mass of Islamic societies currently provides the social condition for the possibility of this mass chiliastic nativism. The dimensioning of these societies is itself one of the consequences of the process of disintegration of previous levels of integration of these mostly ethnically and denominationally oriented and as such segmentally organized societies of the peasant population - while at the same time suppressing the development of democratic institutions of integration by the established. Therefore, the solution to the problem lies in an institutional democratization of the internal and intergovernmental integration units of people - as a new frame of reference for their self-experience and their institutionalized struggles for the redistribution of power and status.
The civilization of relations in the form of the suspension of violence in the sense of its democratically controlled monopolization by the state does not only mean the socialization of the state in the less developed societies; it also means a simultaneous suspension of violence in international relations in the form of appropriate equipment for a democratically reformed UN with the necessary means for effective control of these relations and their non-violent regulation.