NADEEM F. PARACHA
12th century Islamic thinker, Imam Ghazali, who advocated an end to ‘ijtihad’ (independent reasoning) with the view that Islamic thought had reached completion.
The term ‘Political Islam’ is an academic concoction. It works as an analytical umbrella under which political analysts club together various political tendencies that claim to be using Muslim scriptures and historical traditions to achieve modern political goals.
The term most probably emerged in the 1940s in Europe, to define anti-colonial movements that described themselves as Islamic in orientation. It is a 20th century construct and its first prominent expression is believed to be Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, formed in 1927.
Even though as a political tendency, Political Islam covers a wide range of movements involving various Muslim sects, sub-sects, nationalities, leftist as well as rightist rhetoric and narratives; it is the commonalities in these varied movements that make analysts study them as a single ideological entity.
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The earliest manifestations of Political Islam were the so-called Islamic Fundamentalism, Pan-Islamism and Muslim Nationalism.
‘Islamic Fundamentalism’ is a vague term. It is largely associated with various radical and militant tendencies found in the Muslim world, nut critics of this definition claim that it only means the following of the ritual fundamentals of Islam.
So, though usually attributed to the beliefs of modern-day extremist movements in the Muslim world, Islamic Fundamentalism is basically a firm belief in the theological musings of classical Islamic jurists and traditions.
The ‘political roots’ of this tendency, however, lie in the 12th century, when after three hundred years of open debate in the Islamic world between traditionalists and rationalists (Mu’tazilites), influential Muslim thinkers such as Imam Ghazali insisted that a perfect synthesis (between the two) had been reached and that Islam’s social and spiritual philosophy had achieved completion.
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