Leiden University

Department Member, Institute for the interdisciplinary study of Law

Thesis Title: Secular totalitarian and Islamist legal-political philosophy

About

My PHD thesis covers two distinct territories: totalitarianism research and an analysis of the Islamist phenomenon.

The first part is an investigation into the origin and nature of totalitarianism. It focuses on Nazism and Stalinism in particular and analyzes the origins of these types of legal-political philosophy thought through the history of Western political thought. It then examines the theory and practice of both Nazism and Stalinism and correlates them with the different totalitarianism theories of Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin and Claude Lefort. What results is a definition and understanding of totalitarianism that can be used to ascertain whether or not Islamism is a novel form of totalitarianism.

The Second part of this study focuses on Islamist theory and movements. This part begins with an analysis of the basic legal-political philosophy of Islam in general. It describes the centrality of Islamic law (shari’ah) in Islamic thinking and explains the relationship between Islam’s canonical sources, the different modes of theological-legal thinking and ends with a description of the different legal evolution of the concept of jihad. Since Islamists are above all to be understood as jurists, not philosophers or ideologists, the centrality of Shari’ah law and jurisprudence (fiqh) in the Islamist discourse cannot be overstated. Hence a thorough analysis of the classical Shari’ah ius ad bellum and ius in bello is presented.

This is followed by a very in depth analysis of three major Islamist ideologues: Sayyid Qutb, Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayman al-Zawahiri. These three represent three different aspects of the Islamist’s spectrum:
The bottom up approach of Sayyid Qutb, which is the hallmark of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates.
The top down approach of Ayatollah Khomeini, the oufnder of hte Islamic republic of Iran.
The transnational decentralized revolutionary Vanguard model of al-Qaeda as propgated by al-Zawahiri.
Not only does this method show the consistency of the Islamist-jihadist ideology across the Sunni-Shia divide, it also shows that this ideology can, and is being translated into practice in variant disguises ranging from the non-violent bottom-up approach of Qutbian da’wa organizations, the top-down approach of Islamists movement in control of state power (Iran), to the extraordinarily violent decentralized transnational franchise model of al-Qaeda.

This study finds that the islamists concept of Jihad, and its particular laws of war are closely connected to those held by scholars of the Islamic orthodoxy. Naming Islamism an abuse of Islam for non-Islamic goals is therefore simply not true. Moreover, in their pursuit of purifying the world entire of anything the Islamists deem un-Islamic, they give an extraordinary amount of attention to making sure they do not transgress the boundaries of either the Shari’ah or the consensus of the most well respected ulama. Therefore, if one wants to combat Islamism one has to address the issue of the link between the Islamists’ ideology and orthodox Islam. Simply denying that this link exists, which is now common policy, is counter-productive. Moreover, it facilitates the Qutbian da’wa organizations efforts to operate under the radar of counter-terrorism organizations in their bid to offer logistical, material and above all legal-political support to more violent front organizations such as Hamas, Hizbollah or al-Qaeda. 
This study finds that Islamist ideologies are thoroughly totalitarian and should be put on par with Nazism and Stalinism. Their modus operandi in terms of practical organization may have evolved from their totalitarian predecessors and is more adapted to the 21st century, but their goals and the means by which they seek to attain their goals can only be fully understood when one understands these movements as being totalitarian.

This means that the terror employed by these movements is not the result of injustice against the Islamic world, but the logical outcome of their ideology. In other words, terror will exist as long as there are movements willing to put the ideology into practice. Seeing that the ideology has close ties to the orthodoxy, the problem becomes one of colliding human rights. This study advises, amongst others, that any group that propagates or adheres to the Islamist version of Islam be deemed a political rather than religious group, thus denying them some fundamental religious rights and bringing their particular religious views firmly under the umbrella of criminal law. Islamist movements should not be treated any different that Nazist or Stalnist movements. The main brunt of the terror of Islamist movements is directed at Muslims first, Jews and Christians second and the West at large only in third place. Some Islamic countries, such as Indonesia, already have legislation in place which seeks to pacify these movements through laws that would not pass the test of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. Seeing however their experience in these matters and the precedent created by the case of Refah versus Turkey, this study advises Western governments to adopt the Indonesian-Turkish model of the militant democracy and urges Western governments to abandon the idea of a clean cut separation between Islamism and Islam in general. Denying the relationship between these two can only obscure and hamper counter-terrorism efforts and is of no service to those Muslims who do not adhere to the Islamist version of Islam which. After all, it is these non-Islamist Muslims which are the primary target of the Islamists efforts for forceful conversion to Islamist-Islam.