Patrick Haenni, Khaled Hamza, Mohamed Jeghllaly
Stéphane Lacroix, Abdelaly Hamiddine
On 26 October, Husam Tammam passed away after more than two years of fighting illness. The loss of Husam as a person, a friend and a fellow traveller is unbearable. But with him the world of scholarship also loses an exceptional and visionary researcher, whose work was read and appreciated by all those, in the Arab world as in the West, who think with any seriousness about the reconfigurations of contemporary Islam.
A free man
Husam Tammam was not, strictly speaking, an expert on Islamism, thinking along the lines of the various think tanks that interpret the reality of Islamism. Nor was he an academic testing various theories on Islamism. He was above all a free thinker, in the sense that he did not think from within an institution, whether academic, political or partisan. Instead, he drew freely, as an amateur in the best sense, on anything that could nourish his intuitions, made possible by a closeness to his subject that was at once respectful and critical: classical Islamic texts, contemporary activist discourse, the concepts of his many Western researcher friends, and keen observation of the changing realities of contemporary forms of Muslim religiosity, in Egypt as elsewhere in the region.
A wide-angle view
His freedom lay first of all in a perspective that was not reducible to a particular political demand. Islamism interested him, but he thought beyond it, looking at the contemporary redeployment of Islam not only in politics but also in society. Husam was as interested in questions of power as in mentalities, in activist organisations as in everyday religious practices that are a priori politically insignificant, such as the transformations of Islamic anashid or the strange fascination of Islamic circles with American-style management theories. On this basis, namely the ability to analyse politics “from below”, through sociology and empathy, he was a pioneer in uncovering some of the deep dynamics now running through the Muslim Brotherhood, such as its progressive “Salafisation” and “ruralisation”. In doing so he highlighted a central thesis that ran through his writings: the Muslim Brotherhood is in constant interaction with the social environment it seeks to reform.
The revenge of societies: the Brotherhood and the spirit of the times
And reform does indeed work both ways: the Muslim Brotherhood moves with the times.
First, it moves with the times of the nation state. One of Husam’s early studies, on the Brotherhood’s international organisation, showed clearly how, since the first Gulf War, the Brotherhood has been caught between defending a supranational ideal and the national interests it is de facto forced to take on board. In practice, for nearly twenty years, national interests have prevailed over transnational solidarity, and the Islamic Comintern has not worked.
Second, it moves with the times of the market. His studies of the new “Brotherhood activist culture” (thaqafa ikhwaniyya) went on to show that the Brotherhood did not escape a certain global mass culture. The rise of a current of self-criticism within the Brotherhood in a way crystallised the affirmation, within some parts of the movement, of a youthful, individualistic, anti-authoritarian culture that reshaped the entire religious field with the appearance of “new preachers” such as Amr Khaled, Tariq Suwaydan and Abdullah Gymnastiar.
Finally, the Brotherhood moves with “the Salafi times”, to use Husam’s expression: the political Islam of the Brotherhood is not external to Salafism, even though the Brothers and the Salafists are now rivals on the political stage. On the contrary, Salafism has managed to infuse the Brotherhood’s activist culture with its conceptions and representations, which would contribute decisively to weakening the so-called “reformist” current of leaders such as Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, to whom Husam was particularly close.
Husam thus understood that Islamism, far from being a movement explained by a fixed and final dogma, was an evolving reality, capable of sometimes radical mutations. His travels and fieldwork in the Arab world, in Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria and, above all, Morocco, enabled him to show that even what is supposed to be the very essence of Islamism, the close intertwining of religion and politics, was in reality interpreted very differently from one country to another. Just as Husam saw, and regretted, that the Egyptian Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood was unable to restore to politics its autonomy and specificity vis-à-vis religion, so he saw clearly, from the experience of Morocco’s PJD, that the separation of spheres was perfectly possible. More fundamentally, he believed that politics is first and foremost the space of the relative and of compromise, and that it could not accommodate the absolutist logic of religion. For him, recognising the irreducibility of political action was a necessary step for contemporary Islamism, and it was largely on the basis of this observation that he wrote with an increasingly critical perspective on the experience of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, fearing above all its “Salafisation”.
An overtaken Brotherhood
Husam’s writings are thus a call to normalise the Muslim Brotherhood. Its relationship with the society around it is not one of pure control: society determines its destiny as much as the reverse. Husam also noticed early on that the affirmation of Islam was being carried by ever more diverse agents, and that the Brotherhood tended to be overtaken both on its “left”, by the new preachers’ movement and the emergence of a “light” Islam, centred on the individual, open to the West, refusing mobilisation around identity and preferring to see Islam as a reservoir of values rather than of norms, and on its “right”, by the rise of Salafism, attached to precept rather than to value, not only outside but also inside the organisation. Egypt’s post-revolutionary landscape bore out this vision: on one side, the political coming-out of the Salafists; on the other, the emergence of a political current inspired by religion but seeking principle rather than precept, value rather than norm. Between the politicisation of the men of precept, the Salafists, and the structuring of the men of principle, the post-Islamists, to use the term Husam adopted for want of a better one, the Brotherhood will have to manage an ever more competitive Islamist scene.
In Husam’s footsteps… rereading the revolutionary moment
So far, the revolution has not really revolutionised the Brotherhood. Overall, it confirms the broad trends Husam had described: “Salafisation”, the continuing dominance of the “organisation current”, the growing marginalisation of the reformists, and bouts of internal criticism followed by renewed tightening of control.
It is therefore on the margins of the Brotherhood, to its “left” and to its “right”, that research seeking to continue Husam’s intellectual project can probably best be located. First, on Salafism and the evolution of its relationship to politics. This question had preoccupied Husam well before the revolution, at a time when Egyptian Salafists, then without any real influence on public debate, interested only accredited Islamism specialists. Against the dominant readings that froze Salafism in a narrow apoliticism supposedly rooted in theology, Husam had grasped the complexity of Egyptian Salafists’ relationship to politics, and its contradictions. He was therefore far less surprised than others to see them announce their official entry into politics once the revolution had taken place.
On this theme he had begun one of his last major research projects, which remains unfinished to this day. It was meant to shed light on a subject dear to Husam: how ideological organisations change. Intuitively, Husam liked to think that, when it comes to change, practices rather than broad ideological orientations call the tune. In the post-revolutionary situation, Egyptian Salafism would then be in a phase of ideological catching-up. The question remains open.
Second, to the left of the Brotherhood, the emergence during the revolution of this “post-Islamist” current, made up of former Brothers, young ex-Brothers and devout young people with no prior commitment, probably holds the greatest research potential for anyone wishing to extend Husam’s reflections. This current crystallised in the pre-revolutionary mobilisations, such as the 6 April movement, the campaign in support of ElBaradei and the anti-torture mobilisations around the emblematic figure of Khaled Said, an ordinary young man who died under no less ordinary torture in an Alexandria police station, as well as on the blogs of young Brothers steeped, from 2004 onwards, in the global anti-authoritarian and egalitarian culture that would pave the way for revolutionary consensus.
Normalising Islamism: a visionary act
In Husam’s view, then, “the organisation” is far from the sealed apparatus, resistant to any outside influence, of which the men of the “organisation current” (tayyar al-tanzim) dream. Over the past two years, one of his interests was the religious and political training manuals of Brotherhood activists. Here again, starting from the centre, he quickly turned to the environment, noting once more that the training of Brotherhood activists owes very little to this bookish activist knowledge and far more to the diffuse influence of the various sources of knowledge shaping “Brotherhood culture” (thaqafa ikhwaniyya): independent sheikhs such as Mohammed al-Ghazali and Yusuf al-Qaradawi, religious satellite channels, most of them Salafi in outlook, and the new preachers, Amr Khaled first among them. In short, at grassroots level, it is very often amateurism rather than the ideological rigour of the disciplined activist that prevails.
Beyond this, Husam understood that it is the very notion of an Islamic alternative that is being called into question: not only is the Brotherhood not some deus ex machina able to change at will the societies with which it shares Islam, but the dynamic of reaffirming Islam, however identity-driven it may otherwise be, is not outside a certain “global time”. Because they often divide wrongly, or because they mask the real questions, Husam had long been wary of identity-based problematics; he did not look to Islam for an alternative, nor did he place it in a position of opposition or hostility. And he understood that, often in spite of themselves, Islamists were indeed citizens of the world: a premonitory intuition that carried within it the seeds of the Arab Spring. With Husam Tammam, we also lose a visionary.
