Framing the "threat to Islam": al-wala' wa al-bara' in Salafi discourse.(Essay)

INTRODUCTION

IN RECENT YEARS, THE WORLD has witnessed several mass protests staged by Muslims against what they saw as insults to Islam. The best-known example of these is probably the wave of demonstrations against the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006. A common feeling among people taking to the streets protesting these cartoons was that not just the image of Muhammad but Islam itself was under attack and that the offensive drawings were simply another example in a long line of Islamophobic acts emanating from the West, particularly after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. (1) According to surveys conducted by Pew, the belief that Islam is under threat is "widespread, and growing" among Muslims all over the Islamic world. (2) Other findings state that "the perception that Islam is under threat is positively correlated with support for terrorism." (3) In fact, on several occasions Western governments have shown that they are sensitive to any suspicion that they might be considered "anti-Islamic". The French government, for example, explicitly tried to portray its ban on Muslim headscarves in French state schools in 2004 as rooted in the country's tradition of secularism, thereby trying to dispel any fears of anti-Islamic motives. (4)

The contentious movements behind protests such as the one mentioned above often use negative impressions about their adversaries as a powerful tool to mobilize their supporters. Research by scholars of Social Movement Theory (SMT) has shown that Western movements often engage in portraying their opponents as diametrically opposed to them and their values. (5) A concept these scholars often apply in dealing with the way movements portray themselves and their enemies is "framing". The term "frames" is used to denote "schemata of interpretation" that allow "its user to locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences defined in its terms." (6) A frame thus portrays people, events and occurrences in a way that is congruent with a person's perception of the world. Social movements' efforts to construct frames that give particular meanings to certain contentious issues ("framing") and their attempts to make the public adopt these frames as their own ("frame alignment") were first analyzed by Snow and Benford (7) and later applied to movements dealing with issues ranging from labor disputes (8) and feminism (9) to civil rights (10) and anti-war protests. (11)

It is important to realize that a frame is not the same as an ideology. Although the definition of the latter is by no means agreed upon, (12) it seems clear that the term "ideology" refers to a fairly detailed system of more or less interrelated ideas. Frames, on the other hand, are much broader and fairly vague manifestations of (parts of) a more intricate system of ideas. Frames therefore constitute what one author calls "the popular, bumper-sticker version" of an ideology and are used to familiarize audiences with "snippets" of an ideological worldview that, if successful, "permeate the public consciousness." (13) SMT-scholars therefore use the concept of framing not to replace ideology but to refer to movements' attempts to use simplified versions of its belief system as tools for the promotion of and the mobilization for its cause. (14)

Applying the concept of framing to Islamic social movements, SMT-scholars have shown that movements in the Muslim world often portray their opponents not just as political or military adversaries but as enemies of Islam itself. Framing this threat to Islam can vary from a perceived Western-inspired break-down of Islamic values (15) and claims that the ruling regime is the epitome of unbelief (16) to a supposed Jewish conspiracy against Palestinians and Muslims in general (17) and the portrayal of military conflicts around the Muslim world as a war on Islam. (18) Communiques issued by Al-Qa'ida try to frame the world in the same way. The organization's famous declaration of war against "the Jews and the Crusaders" in 1998, for example, mentions several areas of conflict in the Islamic world involving the US, only to conclude that these are "an open declaration of war upon God, his Messenger and the Muslims." (19) As Lia argues, it is the simplicity of this message and its transcending of theological and ideological differences that makes it resonate among a far broader audience than just Al-Qa'ida's core group of radical supporters. (20)

Framing the world in a way that portrays not just Muslim countries or groups, but Islam as a whole as being under threat thus seems to be a common practice among many Islamic social movements. This "Islam is under threat" frame is not limited to social movements, however. Individual radical scholars ('ulama') and ideologues also try to frame their struggles as fights between Islam and its enemies. The Egyptian ideologue Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), for example, dealt extensively with the perceived crisis in the Muslim world as emanating not from economic or political factors but from a conflict between Islam on the one hand and jahiliyya (the pre-Islamic period of ignorance) on the other. According to Qutb, it is up to a vanguard (tali'a) of true Muslims to restore Islam to its former glory. (21) The same attempt to frame a conflict in such stark terms can be seen in the writings of 'Abdullah 'Azzam (1941-1989), the Palestinian ideologue who was one of the leading proponents of jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. (22) He does not describe this conflict as part of the superpower rivalry during the Cold War but as a fight "between truth and falsehood" (bayna l-haqq wa-l-batil) in which jihad must be fought to protect the former. (23) He also states that "the attacks of the unbelievers" (hujum alkuffar) threaten the Muslims in their religion and require them to fight back in order to protect Islam. (24)

One particular group of ideologues that tries to frame Islam as being under threat consists of the adherents to Salafism, a strict and puritanical branch of Islam. Salafism developed as an outgrowth of the ideas of Muhammad Bin 'Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792), whose beliefs later became the version of Islam promoted worldwide by Saudi Arabia. Through contacts with members of the Muslim Brotherhood who had fled to the Saudi state to escape government repression in countries such as Egypt and Syria in the 1960s, many Salafis became highly politicized and critical of the Saudi regime. Others Salafis left their home countries to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to a radicalization of their beliefs. Salafis are thus a heterogeneous group but they share the desire to cleanse the Islamic creed ('aqida) as well as its strict method of application to the sacred texts, worship and everyday life (manhaj) of all forms of historical, cultural and non-Islamic influence, which they consider religious innovations (bida'.) In their attempt to purify the religion, Salafis try to emulate the supposedly true Islam of "the pious predecessors" (al-salaf al-salih), embodied by the Prophet Muhammad and the first generations of Muslims. A major part of the Salafi creed is the unity of God (tawhid), which Salafis define not just as the existence of a single god but also as His divine sovereignty in worship, which entails that Salafis frown upon popular practices such as the visiting of graves and calling on so-called saints. (25)