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

6 0Islam i n World Cult u r e swhich is increasingly stereotyped as a movement of peasants and the workingclasses, prominent Islamists sometimes have backgrounds that involved variouselements of Sufi thought and practice. Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, Hasan al-Banna in Egypt, and popular leaders and cultural critics Fqih Zamzami andAbd al-Slam Yasin of Morocco all had roots in Sufism. In Lebanon, on theother hand, the Ahbash Sufi order has energetically organized to oppose politicallyactive Sunni Islamic groups. The Ahbash reject the ideology of SayyidQutb and call for pacifism and moderation, even while entering electoral politicsto counterbalance groups linked with Saudi and Egyptian Islamist radicals.P a r a d o x i c a l l y, they maintain good relations with Hizbullah, the Shi’ite groupthat became internationally notorious in the 1980s for its attacks on Israel andits kidnapping of foreigners in Beirut during the civil war that followed the1982 Israeli invasion. In Lebanon as well as in other countries where Sufism isa popular practice, the Shi’ite veneration of the Prophet Muhammad and hisfamily is attractive to Sunni Muslims as well and can act as a devotional bridgebetween the two communities (Hamzeh and Dekmejian 1996; Hoffmann-Ladd 1992).Electoral ventures such as that of the Ahbash are not rare in countrieswhere limited political participation is allowed. In Egypt and Jordan, membersor sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood have run for and won election toseats in Parliament and have been appointed to the judiciary. But the boundariesof toleration are always uncertain and are constantly shifting. In 1982,President Hafez al-Asad of Syria ordered the massacre of 10,000 people in thetown of Hama as part of an attack on Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood. Elsewhere,relative degrees of freedom to form political parties and participate in electionsfor local or national offices alternate with cycles of repression, vote fixing,and political arrests. The Egyptian government still periodically cracksdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, as it did in 1995 when it claimed to possessevidence of Brotherhood involvement in an assassination plot against PresidentHusni Mubarak. Days before an election for the lower house of Parliament,Egyptian police arrested hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood members, aswell as leftists, human rights advocates, and others.In 1991, as Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to win a roundof national elections, those elections were canceled when the country ’s milita ry seized control of the government and outlawed the FIS. This action precipitateda decade of obscene violence in which tens of thousands of Algeriansdied. The military claimed that FIS’s entry into the political arena was a platformfor the permanent seizure of power through the cancellation of futureelections, since some Islamist activists claim that human legislation throughp a r l i a m e n t a ry democracy is contrary to the rule of divine law. This is, ofcourse, a fundamental contradiction of modern liberalism: that people mightfreely elect those who would deprive them of freedom. But the military ’s ac-