Recently, the mood of the global Islamic movement seems to have changed. A few years ago, it was euphoric. No one doubted that Muslims were on the rise. After the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the victories of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, of the Hizbullah against the Zionists in Lebanon and of the intifadas in Palestine, the independence of the Central Asian heartlands from the Soviet Union, the mobilization against Rushdie’s fitnah in Britain and the transformation of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) into a revolutionary movement in Algeria, the victory of Islam seemed imminent.
Failure of Iran: Today, the situation looks different. Iran, enmeshed in its internal problems, looks less convincing as the leading edge of a revolutionary Islamic movement. Years after defeating the Russians, the Afghans are still fighting each other. In Palestine, the gains of the intifadas have largely been buried under the US-sponsored ‘peace process’. The Central Asian republics have ‘elected’ former communists to government. The FIS is bogged down in a civil war they seem unlikely to 22 | | Dalit Voice | win soon. The Islamic movement in Egypt is similarly contained. With the Dayton Accord (US-sponsored again) the Serbs seem to have won in Bosnia. Only in Chechenia, where the Russians are being embarrassed by Muslims, is there some good News.
Turkish story: Suddenly, the state of the Islamic movement does not look as good as it did a few years ago. It remains at the centre of world affairs but concrete success stories are hard to find. Such was Muslim depression after the formal signing of the Dayton Accord in Paris in December that even Necmettin Erbakan’s ‘victory’ in Turkey’s general elections later that month was greeted as a victory for the Islamic movement. This smacks of grasping at straws.
Few would argue that the few decades have seen the nadir of Muslim political history. It is tempting to say that the situation of the Muslim world during this period, totally dominated and controlled by the West, is as low as we can possibly get, that things can only get better. But Muslims have said similar things before, only to see things get still worse. The fact that we cannot imagine being worse off than we have recently been does not mean that things cannot get “worsen.
Will it be crushed: The fact is that the contemporary Islamic movement will be solved only gradually and in stages. It may even, like other Islamic movements before it, be crushed, doing no more than providing lessons and inspirations for future generations. The painful experiences of Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Algeria, Chechnya and other places have to be gone through; they cannot be by- passed. The global Islamic movement is on a long, slow path with many obstacles. Our eventual destiny is still a long way off. All we can hope to do is to carry the load a little way, as generations before us did, and we will have made our contribution to the history of Islam.
