Journal of the Middle East and Africa, 1:153–170, 2010

Taylor & Francis Group, LLC # 2010

ISSN: 2152-0844 print=2152-0852 online
DOI: 10.1080/21520844.2010.517512

The Politicization of Islam into Islamism in

the Context of Global Religious
Fundamentalism

BASSAM TIBI

The article seeks to establish a basic distinction between Islam, as a

religious faith, and Islamism, as a political ideology, without
denying Islamists to be based in Islam, however, in an invention
of tradition. All Islamists share the goal of Islamist governance
and are in disagreement, however, over the strategy=tactic: violent
Jihadism or institutional participation. Despite their approval of
the ballot-box, institutional Islamists reject the political values
and culture of a democracy. Therefore, the compatibility of
Islamism and democracy is questioned.

KEYWORDS globalization, institutional Islamism, Islamism,

Islamist internationalism, Jihadism, Political Islam, religious
fundamentalism

The present study continues earlier research on Islamist anti-Semitism1 and

focuses on the distinction between Islam, a tolerant faith that embraces Jews,

BASSAM TIBI is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Goettingen,

Germany, and A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. He is a member of the
Academic Council of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). This
article was completed in June 2010 during the author’s senior fellowship as the Judith and
Burton Resnick Scholar for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

1
See Bassam Tibi, ‘‘Public Policy and the Combination of Anti-Americanism and
Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Islamist Ideology,’’ The Current (Cornell University) 12, no.
1 (Fall 2008): 123–146. In ignorance of the totalitarianism feature of Islamism, Noah Feldman
states in his book The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2008) that the shari’a state is based on constitutionalism and thus compatible with democracy.
For a contrast, see Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals (New York: Melville House,
2010), especially chapters 2 and 3 on Islamist anti-Semitism.

153
154 B. Tibi

and Islamism, a totalitarian ideology.2 It examines the terms ‘‘political

Islam,’’ ‘‘Islamism,’’ ‘‘Integrism,’’ ‘‘religious fundamentalism,’’ and ‘‘Islamic
awakening’’ as different labels for describing the same phenomenon of the
politicization of Islam. To be sure, religious fundamentalism is a global
phenomenon, not restricted to Islamic civilization. It is articulated in the case
of political Islam3 in a sociocultural and world-political context as part of
the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism whose many varieties predate
the end of the East-West conflict. Political religions have become a major
concern in a post-bipolar system, though political Islam neither is an out-
come of post-bipolarity nor does it derive from local and regional conflicts,
such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, as is mistakenly claimed by some Western
scholars. More pertinent for understanding the Islamic variety of the
phenomenon is Islam’s inner crisis, which was triggered by the encounter
with modernity. The related predicament has intensified after the failure of
Islamic reform and the decline of Islamic liberalism. The ensuing secular
ideologies also failed to cope with problems of development. Secularization
has been replaced by a process of desecularization carried out by Islamism.
Political Islam presents itself as a particular solution to the fundamental
problem of creating political order: hakimiyyat Allah or God’s rule. In fact,
the drive to remake the world is one of the basic features of any religious fun-
damentalism. An invention of tradition, on the grounds of divine precepts, a
return of the sacred, is at work when assuming a political shape in pursuit of
a new world order. With this understanding, politicized religion is viewed as
embedded into a global sociopolitical context. To acknowledge this is not to
reduce the worldview of the fundamentalists to the context in point. This
would be a misleading reductionism that the present study utterly dismisses.
Instead, a proper understanding is needed of the interplay between religion
as a cultural system, and politics, society, and socioeconomic development.
Otherwise no adequate grasping of the introduction of fundamentalism into
contemporary Islam is possible. This article makes three fundamental claims
about Islam and Islamism.

2
See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; New York: Harcourt, 1976).
Bassam Tibi, Der neue Totalitarismus. Heiliger Krieg und westliche Sicherheit (Darmstadt:
Primus, 2004), revives Hannah Arendt’s concept of totalitarianism and applies it to Islamism
viewed as the new variety of this phenomenon. See also idem, ‘‘The Totalitarianism of Jihadist
Islamism,’’ in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 1 (March 2007): 35–54. The
identification of Islamism as totalitarian has been argued in Berman, The Flight of the Intellec-
tuals, 45–51.
3
These statements are based on two published monographs on Islamism as religious fun-
damentalism completed in the past two decades by this author: The Challenge of Fundamen-
talism. Political Islam and the New World Disorder, rev. ed. (Berkeley: The University of
California Press, 2002), and Political Islam, World Politics and Europe (New York: Routledge,
2008). A third monograph, Islamism and Islam is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
 Politicization of Islam 155

First, for ordinary Muslims, Islam is a faith and a cultural system that
determines their way of life, not a framework for a political state order. By
contrast, for Islamists, Islam is interpreted as an order for the state based on
a totalizing shari’a. This invented tradition functions as a response to Islamic
civilization’s exposure to a globalizing modernity that has caused a crisis for
modern Islam. Islamism is a variety of religious fundamentalism and reflects
a defensive cultural response to modernity. In an offensive move, Islamism
makes a claim at remaking the world. The challenged become challengers.
Second, Islamism—understood as a variety of religious fundamentalism—
is offensive for Muslims, because it is an exclusive ideology that creates
entrenchments as well as obstacles to development and cultural change.
Islamism hinders Islamic civilization from joining an international community
based on democratic peace and impedes peace between Muslims and
non-Muslims as well as intra-Islamic peace.
Third, while democratization of Islam is possible, there can be no Islami-
zation of democracy. Democracy is not simply a matter of ballot boxes and
voting booths. Above all, it is based on the values of a political culture of plural-
ism that all Islamists reject. To participate in the democratic peace, Muslims not
only need to depoliticize their faith by dissociating it from fundamentalism and
its concept of order, but also engage themselves in ‘‘rethinking Islam’’ through
religious reforms. Introducing the concept of democratic pluralism requires a
wholehearted effort in rethinking Islam to accommodate modernity. Given
its anti-Semitism, Islamism is incompatible with a liberal ‘‘open Islam’’ because
it is—as stated—a totalitarian ideology that fulfills most of the criteria set forth
by Hannah Arendt in her study of totalitarianism.
In the West, there are scholars who believe in appeasing Islamism and
including Islamists in the democratic game. This essay rejects this thinking,
viewing Islamists as the new wave of totalitarianism. Though Hamas and
Hezbollah go to the ballot box, they refuse to comply with the values and
rules of the pluralist culture of democracy. This reality is not evidence for
the consonance of Islamism and democracy, but rather begs the question:
Why can’t Islamist parties be democratic?4
Islamism elevates shari’a to the level of a comprehensive organic legal
system—even to a claimed constitutionalism. This invented Islamist shari’a
not only contrasts with positive and legislative law, but being a totalizing
shari’a it is in conflict with democracy and human rights.5 This shari’atized

4
See the debate on Islamist parties and democracy published in Journal of Democracy 19,
no. 3 (July 2008): 5–54. Among these contributions is Bassam Tibi, ‘‘Islamist Parties: Why They
Can’t Be Democratic,’’ 43–48. For case studies see Matthew Levitt, Hamas. Politics, Charity and
Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). On Hezbollah see
Hala Jaber, Hezbollah: Born with a Vengeance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
5
See Ann Elisabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991)
and Bassam Tibi, ‘‘Islamic Law=Shari’a, Human Rights, Universal Morality and International
Relations,’’ in Human Rights Quarterly 16, no. 2 (1994): 277–299.
156 B. Tibi

Islam not only alienates Muslims from the rest of humanity, it creates divi-
sions within Islam itself. In contrast to polarizing Islamism, liberal Islam
bridges the divides on all levels.
There is a distinction between institutional and jihadist Islamism that
helps to understand why institutional Islamists do not fight physical jihad,
which is not to give these so-called moderate Islamists any credit for demo-
cratic legitimacy. Their reference to democracy is merely instrumental. In the
Islamist pursuit, the ultimate goal is the Islamic shari’a based state, which is
not a democracy. The separation between the public and the private in the
polity is essential to democracy. Islamism’s objection to this separation belies
the contention of some pundits that shari’a could be an expression of demo-
cratic constitutionalism. Nor is the Islamist assimilation of European
anti-Semitism a reassuring sign of democracy.
The inflationary and often inadequate use of the term ‘‘fundamentalism’’
by certain Western scholars of Islamic studies is a rejection of the entire con-
cept. Robert Lee states: ‘‘The word fundamentalism has been generally
applied . . . I side with those who do not find this term helpful . . . I prefer
the term Islamists to describe such groups . . . ’’6 As Islamism is merely the
Islamic variety of the general phenomenon of religious fundamentalism,
what is the rationale for this rejection?
In short, political Islam is a variety of religious fundamentalism that
challenges the secular world order, threatening not only secularism,7 but
also Muslims in search of a better future within a larger humanity, with its
plurality of religions and cultures. Islamist fundamentalism rejects, as a tota-
litarian ideology, the principles of pluralism, and thus exacerbates Islam’s
predicament with modernity.8

ISLAMISM IS THE RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM IN ISLAMIC

CIVILIZATION: WHAT IS ISLAMISM?

From a sociological standpoint, religion is a social reality; thus, religious

fundamentalism is a fait social, in Emile Durkheim’s sense of the term. The
politicization of religion is a phenomenon conceptualized as religious funda-
mentalism. This applies not only to Islam, as the media suggest, but stretches
across religions, observable also in Christianity and in Judaism. Islamist
movements, however, pursuing nonreligious ends are a case in point. Those
Western scholars dealing with Islamism who do not come from Islamic
6
Robert Lee, Overcoming Tradition and Modernity: The Search for Islamic Authenticity
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), 21.
7
Daniel Philipott, ‘‘The Challenge of September 11 to Secularism in International Rela-
tions,’’ World Politics 55, no. 1 (2002), 66–95.
8
See Bassam Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity: Cultural Change and Religious
Reform (New York: Routledge, 2009), 65–94, 209–236.
 Politicization of Islam 157

studies lack the needed knowledge and often fail to understand the deeply
religious implications of fundamentalism and thus succumb to mere social
interpretations. In contrast, we see that Islamic fundamentalists defend
themselves as ‘‘the true believers.’’ For Islamists, fundamentalism means
subscribing to the true usul (fundamentals) of religion. They wrongly present
their ideology as being fundamental to Islam, and thus consent to the term
usuliyya (fundamentalism).9 The reference to the ‘‘fundamentals’’ is,
however, mostly highly selective. In fact, the term usuliyya is a recent
addition to Arabic and other Islamic languages, but the phenomenon itself
predates the introduction of the word now used to designate it.
The first fundamentalist movement in Islam was established in 1928
under the name ‘‘Movement of the Muslim Brothers.’’10 The phenomenon
called religious fundamentalism is the same as Islamism or as political Islam.
The French referred to it with the term inte´grisme. Though Islamists accept
terms like usuliyya, or political Islam, they prefer to speak of an al-Sahwa
al-Islamiyya or Islamic awakening11 in the belief that their movement heralds
the revival of the usul. What is Islamism and why is it different from Islam?
Before answering this question it is pertinent to reject the historical line that
Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan
al-Banna, draws from the early Islamic revivalism of al-Afghani to the polit-
ical Islam of al-Banna. For Islamism is not revivalism, but rather an invention
of tradition.
The major contention of Islamism is that Islam is combined with the
dawla (state); however, this term is not included in the Qur’an, nor does
it exist in the hadith (the legacy of the prophet). The same applies for the
terms nizam Islami (Islamic system) and hukumah Islamiyya (Islamic
government). These Islamist terms are not commonly employed in the
Islamic tradition.
What is the overall context of religious fundamentalism in Islam? I argue
that the contextual bedrock of political Islam is globalization.12 This explains
the contradiction that a tradition, itself invented, is imbued with modernity.
Despite the reference to globalization, I refrain from interpreting political
Islam as a mere reflection of constraining structures. Independent of
globalization, the framework of the Islamic tradition is fully considered and
included in the politicization of Islam; it leads to the emergence of a

9
See Hasan Hanafi, al-Usuliyya al-Islamiyya [Islamic Fundamentalism] (Cairo: Madbuli,
1989).
10
See Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (London: Oxford University
Press, 1969).
11
Mohammed Imara, al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya wa al-Tahddi al-hadari [The Islamic Awak-
ening and the Civilizational Challenge] (Cairo: al-Shuruq, 1991).
12
See my contribution on fundamentalism in The Globalization Reader, ed. Frank J.
Lechner and John Bali (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 358–363.
158 B. Tibi

defensive culture that then moves to become a mobilizing force in the shape
of an activist revolutionary internationalism.
There are many perceptions and interpretations and great diversity
within Islam. However, the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims share the same view
of belonging to an imagined umma (community), which includes Muslims in
the diaspora. The related worldview of Islamism reflects a political ideology,
not the Islamic traditional faith, but it is also based in Islam. Even though
the umma is characterized by a tremendous religious and cultural diversity,
there exists a Salafi belief of an essential Islam shared by those involved in the
politicization of Islam. Islamic religious fundamentalists do not only act at
home, they are also active in Europe and exploit the lack of integration of
the Muslim diaspora13 to mobilize for their goals. Europe has become a
battlefield for Islamist networking.
In the post-bipolar age, a vision expressed by Sayyid Qutb in the time of
the East-West conflict becomes the core of a mobilizing ideology of Islamist
movements. Qutb14 is the rector spiritus of political Islam, both jihadist and
peaceful institutional Islamism. The difference between the two refers to
the means—participation in institutions or jihad—not the goal: Islamic order
and governance. As John Kelsay puts it:

In its broad outlines, the militant vision . . . is also the vision of cri-
tics . . . they do not dissent from the judgment . . . that the cure . . . involves
the establishment of Islamic governance . . . the problem of militancy is
not simply a matter of objectionable tactics. The problem is the very
notion of Islamic governance.15

This is exactly what religious fundamentalism is all about: the shari’a

state as a manifestation of true Islamic governance. Here one can see the

13
On the Islamic diaspora in Western Europe, see Bassam Tibi, ‘‘Muslim Migrants in
Europe. Between Euro-Islam and Ghettoization,’’ in Muslim-Europe or Euro-Islam: Politics,
Culture, and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization, ed. Nezar AlSayyad and Manuel Castells
(New York: Lexington Books, 2002), 31–52. On the politics of Islamist recruitment see Lorenzo
Vidino, Al-Qaeda in Europe: The New Battleground of International Jihad (Amherst, NY:
Prometheus, 2006).
14
Sayyid Qutb, al-Salam al-Alami wa al-Islam [World Peace and Islam] (Cairo: Dar
al-Shuruq, 1992), 172–173, reinterprets jihad as an ‘‘Islamic World Revolution.’’ The contem-
porary moderate Islamist Hasan Hanafi develops this idea with a claim for an Islamic lead
in this phrasing: ‘‘In the past, Islam found its way between two falling empires, the Persian
and the Roman. Both were exhausted by wars. Both suffered moral and spiritual crises. Islam,
as a new world order, was able to expand as a substitute to the old regime. Nowadays, Islam
finds itself again a new power, making its way between the two superpowers in crises. Islam is
regenerating, the two superpowers are degenerating. Islam is the power of the future, inherit-
ing the two superpowers in the present’’ (quoted by Martin Kramer, Arab Awakening and
Muslim Revival [New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1996], 155–156).
15
John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2007), 165–166.
 Politicization of Islam 159

‘‘family resemblance’’ of all religious fundamentalisms. Yet, among the differ-

ences in religious fundamentalism, one finds those religious fundamentalists
with universal claims and others who lack universalism in their religious
outlook. Hindu fundamentalists, for example, are concerned only with an
imagined Hindustan as the territoriality of Hindu civilization. The Islamist
universalist imagination of dar al-Islam (abode of Islam) as a global entity
is reflected in a worldview that extends its agenda to all humanity. Qutb
pleaded for an ‘‘Islamic World Revolution’’ waged through a cosmic jihad
that would bring about an Islamic world order. The ‘‘Islamic state’’ with its
‘‘Islamic order’’ is only one step in this direction and is not restricted to an
imagined territoriality of dar al-Islam, but is rather considered valid for the
world at large.
In a nutshell, the universal Islamist claim resembles Communist inter-
nationalism, albeit articulated on religious grounds. These related visions
are in conflict with global pluralism and democratic peace. The Islamist
vision of the world in the twenty-first century is based on the following major
characteristics of political Islam:

1. Political: The concept of din wa-dawla: interpreting Islam as a political

religion prescribing divine order for the state to be run by an Islamist
government.
2. Legal: The newly invented concept of shari’a going beyond the Qur’anic
meaning of morality and the traditional concept of Islamic law,16 which, in
its origin, is a civil law for mu’amlat (interaction) as it covers marriage, div-
orce, inheritance, and so forth, but is not intended for determining state order.
In contrast, the new shari’a is the totalizing state law of a political order.
3. Cultural: The assumption that all Muslims form one monolithic umma
reflects the view of an imagined community that is supposed to share the
same culture. This perception underpins Islamic internationalism. Uniform
Islamic clothing (Islamist veils for women) and symbols (beards for men),
in addition to other features, serve to support the claim of one Islamic cul-
ture that dismisses the cultural diversity, not only in the world, but also
among Muslims, denying them religious pluralism. In this understanding,
the umma becomes not only reduced to an ethnic identity, but in the Isla-
mist perception, also a unified gated community. Nonetheless, the umma is
expected to expand and encompass the entire globe.
4. Military: The traditional Islamic concept of jihad,17 like shari’a, is reinter-
preted beyond its original Qur’anic and traditional meaning, becoming

16
See Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
17
See Bassam Tibi, ‘‘War and Peace in Islam,’’ in The Ethics of War and Peace: Religious
and Secular Perspectives, ed. Terry Nardin (1996; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998),
128–145. Also see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American
Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
160 B. Tibi

jihadiyya or jihadism, which legitimates lawless warfare, an irregular war,

understood as holy terrorism, but for unholy ends.

These features are shared by Islamists of all varieties. The most signifi-
cant distinction among Islamists, as mentioned, is between institutional
Islamism and jihadist Islamism. The most prominent examples of institutional
Islamism are the moderate Turkish Islamists of the AKP who pursue their
goals through political participation in existing democratic institutions. These
institutional Islamists continue the tradition of Turkish political Islam from
the Selamet Partisi in the early 1970s to the present.18 Since 2002, they have
ruled the secular Republic of Turkey.
The opposite extreme is jihadism,19 best presented by al-Qaeda and its
networks that challenge international security, both on the global level and
that of individual states. The jihadism of Algerian political Islam is a well-
known national example.20 So what is the worldview that underlies the
ideology of political Islam to qualify it as religious fundamentalism?

THE IDEOLOGY OF ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM:

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

To properly understand Islamism, one must examine it on the normative

level (its function as religious doctrine) and the structural level (religion in
society as a fait social). Neither political Islam nor jihadism can simply be
rejected as ‘‘un-Islamic,’’ as former British interior secretary Jacqui Smith
did when she was still in office.21 Other methods of dissociating Islam and
its believers from jihadist terrorism are needed.
The inherited Islamic worldview22 determines the ideology of the
fundamentalists, however, in a new shape. The Islamist phenomenon is a
political one, but it is also intrinsically imbued with a religious meaning.
18
For a background on Islamism in Turkey, see Marvine Howe, Turkey Today: A Nation
Divided Under Islam’s Revival (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000). For more recent develop-
ments, see Zeyno Baran, ‘‘Turkey Divided,’’ Journal of Democracy 19, no. 1 (2008): 55–69; and
Bassam Tibi, ‘‘Turkey’s Islamist Danger. Islamists Approach in Europe,’’ Middle East Quarterly
16, no. 1 (2009): 47–54.
19
On internationalist jihadism, see Peter Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of
Osama Bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001). On the meaning of Islamism to national and
international security after September 11, see Bassam Tibi, ‘‘Religious Extremism or Religioni-
zation of Politics? The Ideological Foundations of Political Islam,’’ in Radical Islam and Inter-
national Security, ed. Hillel Frisch and Efraim Inbar (New York: Routledge, 2008), 11–37.
20
On local jihadism, Algerian style, see Michael Willis, The Islamist Challenge in Algeria
(New York: New York University Press, 1996).
21
See the report by James Slack, ‘‘Terrorism? We’ll Call It Anti-Islamic,’’ Daily Mail,
January 18, 2008: 8.
22
On the Islamic worldview, see Bassam Tibi, Islam between Culture and Politics, rev. ed.
(New York: Palgrave, 2005), 53–68.
 Politicization of Islam 161

Analyses that focus exclusively on the sociopolitical context miss this

dynamic.
One needs, first, to pinpoint the different historical stages in the rise of
political Islam. When the Muslim Brotherhood was established in 1928, the
movement was equally involved in the politicization of general Islamic
beliefs by advancing the concept of Nizam Islami or Islamic order=
government and promoting jihadism as terrorism. The religious doctrine of
jihad and the concept of law were given new meaning. With the return of
the sacred in political garb, the traditional Islamic worldview changes as well.
This process is documented in al-Banna’s writings, and also Qutb’s work, and
has spread around the Islamic world far beyond Egypt, the country of its
origin.23
Qutb provided the Muslim Brotherhood with a firm ideological
foundation for Islamism. The founder of the movement, al-Banna, was more
activist than thinker, even though he left behind major essays. These,
coupled with Qutb’s writings, are viewed as the cornerstone of Islamist ideol-
ogy. But it is a misconception of Islamic contemporary history to put
al-Banna on an equal footing with the nineteenth-century Islamic revivalist,
al-Afghani.24
In its formative years, between 1928 and the execution of Qutb in 1966,
the Muslim Brotherhood established the seeds of this new direction within
Islam as Islamic fundamentalism. In the early years of 1928–1967, political
Islam was more or less on the fringe. The turning point was triggered by
the Arab defeat in the Six Day War of 1967, the watershed event that created
a legitimacy crisis in the Arab world.25 The secular ideologies of Nasserism
and Ba’thism, which had prevailed until 1967, were now challenged by
fundamentalists. These events in the Arab world, the cultural core of Islamic
civilization, generated a ripple effect throughout the world of Islam. Political
Islam started to become a mobilizing power far beyond the Middle East,
presenting the ultimate alternative of the ‘‘Islamic solution’’ to the anzimat

23
See Hassan al-Banna, Majmu’at Rasail al-Imam al-Shahid [Collected Essays of the
Martyr Imam] (Cairo: Dar al-Da’wa, 1990). Herein the basic essay on jihad, 271–292. On Qutb,
see note 14.
24
The Swiss-born Muslim Tariq Ramadan wrongly states in his book Aux Sources du
Renouveau Musulman. D’al Afghani à Hasan al-Banna: Un Sie`cle de Re´formisme Islamique
(Paris: Éditions Bayard, 1998) that historical and intellectual continuity exists between the
nineteenth century revivalist al-Afghani and his grandfather, Hassan al-Banna. In fact,
al-Banna was by no means a revivalist, but truly the founder of jihadist Islamism. For a criti-
cism of Tariq Ramadan, see Berman’s The Flight of the Intellectuals, 15–26, 27–53.
25
On the Six Day War, see B. Tibi, Conflict and War in the Middle East. From Interstate
War to New Security (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993, 2nd edition, 1998), chapters 3 and 4
and on the ensuing legitimacy crisis, see Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament. Arab Political
Thought and Practice Since 1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), on funda-
mentalism, 50–75 and Michael Hudson, Arab Politics. The Search for Legitimacy (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1977), 1–30.
162 B. Tibi

al-hazima (regimes of defeat) and supplying a concept of order for the

whole world. Egypt continues to be the intellectual religious core.26 The call
for an ‘‘Islamic state’’ is a basic challenge to the nation-state throughout the
Islamic world.
The world over, all religious fundamentalisms share two major goals:
first, desecularization27 and second, the de-Westernization of society within
the framework of a new ‘‘Revolt Against the West,’’28 specifically directed
against Western values of cultural modernity that are often confused with
Western hegemony. These two goals are intricately intertwined but not well
understood by experts in the West. To reiterate: Islamists attempt to topple
secular regimes as a step in their quest for a new world order. Islamism as
a variety of religious fundamentalism is not about terrorism, but rather the
order of the state and the world. This process takes place as a war of ideas.29
This is more important than the terrorism of al-Qaeda itself.
In his book Ma’alim fi al-Tariq (Signposts Along the Road),30 Qutb pro-
vides the Islamist road signs, not only for all Muslims, but for all humanity.
Qutb made the two-step strategy clear. The first step is to establish haki-
miyyat Allah for dar al-Islam. Then follows the second step; an Islamic
world revolution to accomplish world peace under conditions of siyadat
al-Islam (supremacy of Islam). This ideology promotes global Islamist
internationalism.
The global Islamic revolution is directed against the jahiliyya (pre-
Islamic ignorance). The historical background of this Islamist thinking is
the decline of Islam and the rise of the West.31 The impact of Qutb is not only
restricted to the jihadist al-Qaeda, but extends to institutional peaceful Isla-
mism as in the case of Turkey. At issue is not a sect, but a major direction
in contemporary Islam. David Cook states that Qutb acted:

from Egypt, the very center of Arab Muslim political, intellectual and
religious debate, and his life and achievements parallel exemplify the rise
of political Islam . . . he joined the Muslim Brotherhood . . . and quickly
became its dominant intellectual figure.32

26
On Egypt, see Carry Rosefsky Wickham, Mobilizing Islam (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003).
27
See Bassam Tibi, ‘‘Secularization and De-Secularization in Islam,’’ Religion-Staat-
Gesellschaft 1, no. 1 (2000): 95–117; and idem, Islam’s Predicament, 178–208.
28
See Hedley Bull, ‘‘Revolt Against the West,’’ in The Expansion of International Society,
ed. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 217–228.
29
See ed. Eric D. Patterson and John Gallagher, Debating the War of Ideas (New York:
Palgrave, 2009).
30
Sayyid Qutb, Ma’alim fi al-Tariq [Signposts along the Road] (reprint; Cairo: Dar
al-Shuruq, 1989), 5–10, 201–202.
31
See Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–17.
32
David Cook, Understanding Jihad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 102.
 Politicization of Islam 163

It is most unfortunate that in Islamic studies in the West—particularly

Europe—jihadist Islamism is not viewed as an interpretation of Islam, but
either as an abuse of religion and a distortion that has nothing to do with true
Islam or as an Islamaphobic prejudice. The consequence is the West’s lack of
knowledge about the phenomenon.
To sum up, Islam is for Islamists a system of government based on a
concept of a divine order33 to be established both in the Muslim world
and worldwide. The utopian fantasy of Islamist fundamentalism is to
replace the prevailing Westphalian secular order of sovereign states with
an Islamic one. It is for this reason that political Islam is a concern for
international security. Because Islamism is a variety of religious funda-
mentalism that claims universality for its political beliefs, Islamists place
Islamic civilization in conflict with the rest of humanity and create divides
within Islam.

THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE WESTPHALIAN ORDER VERSUS THE

UNIVERSALISM OF POLITICAL ISLAM

Islamic civilization dominated major parts of the world from the seventh to
the seventeenth century. The rise of the West changed the world. The West’s
modern military technology based on the industrialization of warfare brought
to a halt the Islamic jihad project and replaced it with European expansion.
Bernard Lewis recounts this process when answering the question: ‘‘What
Went Wrong?’’ Lewis’ question references the present world order, where
the West has indeed replaced Islamic dominance. Why is it wrong that
Islamists want to reverse this historic development in their revolt against
the West?
The impact of Western civilization is an undeniable fact; if decoupled
from Western hegemony, it can be defended rationally. In the process of
decolonization, Asians and Africans justifiably defied Europe. At the same
time, they drew their political thought from their European heritage. The
present revolt against the West, however, ‘‘as best exemplified in
Islamic fundamentalism,’’34 is directed against Western values, not just
Western hegemony. The cultural modernity on which the universality of
the modern world rests is something that ought to be distinguished from
Western political hegemony. The universality of jahiliyya cultural modernity

33
This ideology is reflected in the major works of influential Islamists, including Mustafa
Abu Zaid Fahmi, Fan al-Hukm fi al-Islam [The Art of Government in Islam] (Cairo: al-Maktab
al-Masri al-Hadith, 1977) and Salim al-Awwa, Fi al-Nizam al-Siyyasi lil-dawla al-Islamiyya
[On the Political System of the Islamic State] (1981; Cairo: al-Makthab al-Misri al-hadith,
1983).
34
Hedley Bull, ‘‘Revolt Against the West,’’ 222.
164 B. Tibi

admits—in principle—democratic pluralism and global civil society for all

civilizations on equal footing, even though this is not yet the reality. Western
hegemony has to be criticized—but not confused with the principles of the
present world order.
By contrast, the universalism of political Islam, which is not even shared
by all Muslims, aims to replace one hegemony with another. Islamism is not
a liberation theology, but a real threat for non-Muslims. What is labeled as
Islamic tolerance includes the classification of non-Muslims as inferior
dhimmis.35 Therefore, Islamic supremacy is by no means acceptable. The
difference between the universality of modernity and the hegemony of the
West can be demonstrated by this example: One can rationally criticize
the instrumental use of human rights in hegemonic U.S. foreign policy with-
out engaging simultaneously in a rejection of human rights as a universal
concern.
The secular nation-state challenged by Islamist fundamentalism is
flawed in its failure to meet development demands, but the divine order
Islamic fundamentalists advocate is not an alternative acceptable to non-
Muslims. Samuel Huntington is wrong on other counts, but he is right when
he states that ‘‘modern democracy, . . . is democracy of the nation-state and its
emergence is associated with the development of the nation-state.’’36
To return to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, the preeminent sociologist
and social historian Charles Tilly notes that ‘‘over the next three hundred
years the Europeans and their descendents managed to impose that state
system on the entire world. The recent wave of de-colonisation has almost
completed the mapping of the globe into that system.’’37
Continuing his research, Tilly writes five years later: ‘‘Something has
changed in the extension of the European state system to the rest of the
earth,’’ adding ‘‘Europe created a state system that dominated the entire
world. We live within that system today. Yet the world outside Europe
resembles Europe no more than superficially.’’38
The message is this: The nation-state is not well established in
non-Western civilizations. This is a fact. What conclusions are to be drawn?
Even though the present world order rests upon the globalization of the
nation-state, in non-Western civilizations they lack substance, being

35
See Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude. When Civilizations Collide (Cranbury, NJ: Asso-
ciated Universities Press 2002). On Islamic tolerance, see Yohanan Friedman, Tolerance and
Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2003).
36
Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 13.
37
ed. Charles Tilly, The Formation of the National States in Western Europe (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985), 45.
38
Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell
1990), 191.
 Politicization of Islam 165

nation-states only in a nominal sense.39 In international relations research,

the expansion of the West is presented as an expansion of international
society. Most of Asia and Africa were first colonized and then emerged during
their postcolonial development as sovereign states. Through decolonization
they obtained sovereignty, nominally evolving into nation-states, and
therewith became legally mapped into the modern international system. This
pattern of development applied also to the world of Islam.
In the past, Islamic civilization had its own period of imperial growth.40
When the Islamic empires decayed, the world of Islam fell subject to
European colonization. The dar al-Islam is today no more than an imagined
community, because it is in reality subdivided into nation-states. In the
course of its decolonization, the world of Islam made an effort to accommo-
date the new international environment by joining the international system of
nation-states. Today, Islamists want to reverse this historical process through
a return to Islamic unity. This is the meaning of the Islamist replacement of
the ‘‘end of history’’ with the ‘‘return of history.’’41
In the Arab Middle East, former Ottoman provinces reemerged after
decolonization into nation-states designed along the Western model. From
the outset, new Arab states were challenged by pan-Arabism, secular Arab
nationalism, and now by political Islam.42 They were plagued by two pro-
blems: first, the existing tension between universal Islamism as well as
pan-Islamism (the two are often wrongly equated with one another) and
the nation-state; and, second, the conflict between existing territorial
sovereign states (e.g., Syria, Iraq) and the vision of a pan-Arab state that
challenged the legitimacy of existing nation-states. The Arab state-system,
then, was from the beginning a troubled one. I have coined the term
‘‘nominal nation-state’’ to designate states like these that lack most of the
basic requirements for a substantial nation-state: a polity, civil society,
citizenship, and a related national identity. These nominal nation-states are
now being challenged by Islamist fundamentalism.
To return to the matter of endorsing the universality of cultural mod-
ernity and rejecting the universalism of political Islam, one has to question

39
See Robert Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third
World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). On these ‘‘nominal states’’ in the Arab
world, see Bassam Tibi, ‘‘The Simultaneity of the Unsimultaneous: Tribes and Imposed
Nation-States,’’ in Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, ed. Philip S. Khoury and
Joseph Kostiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 127–152.
40
See Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006), and Alan Jamieson, Faith and Sword: A Short History of Christian-Muslim Conflict
(London: Reaktion Books, 2006).
41
For more details, see Bassam Tibi, Political Islam, 161–187.
42
B. Tibi, Arab Nationalism. Between Islam and the Nation State (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 3rd edition, 1997).
166 B. Tibi

the legitimacy of the Western nation-state. The fact that this Western model
did not work in the Arab Middle East, where existing nation-states have
been ridiculed both by realists and idealists alike as ‘‘tribes with national
flags,’’ is not prima facie evidence for the allegation that the model itself
is wrong. In the footsteps of Qutb, the leading Egyptian Islamist and
Muslim Brother Yusuf Qaradawi addresses these shortcomings today. In
a three-volume work entitled al-Hall al-Islami (the Islamic solution),43
Qaradawi revives, as a global TV mufti, the earlier tradition of political
Islam in Egypt. Living in the Gulf state of Qatar, he exerts great impact
through his numerous books and his weekly appearances on al-Jazeera,
spreading Islamist propaganda on a global level, reaching even the Muslim
diaspora in Europe. Qaradawi dismisses anything coming from the West,
including democracy, as hulul mustawradah (an imported solution). This
misleading argument serves as a formula for blaming the West for all ills in
the world of Islam. On these grounds he pleads for a wholesale
de-Westernization to purify Islam as a precondition for the Islamization
of the entire world.
Next to al-Banna and Qutb, Qaradawi is today the leading Islamist
authority. He calls for the return to Islam, but his Islam is inauthentic, based
on an invention of tradition. Moreover, Qaradawi is a Sunni Islamist, and
there is also a Shia model, which originates with the Iranian Revolution in
1979. Of course, sectarian forces have constrained its impact, for there is a
competition between the Sunni and the Shia elements of Islamic funda-
mentalism. Despite these differences, the Islamic Revolution in Iran success-
fully demonstrated not only that Islamists are able to seize power and
establish an ‘‘Islamic state,’’ but that they may yet advance this state to a
nuclear power.44
Still, Sunni Islamism, the focus of the present article, is the mainstream.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran was, and continues to be, a Shia event, limit-
ing its impact. It reinforced the unfolding of Islamist fundamentalism but did
not give birth to political Islam, which had emerged as a Sunni phenomenon
a half-century prior. Nevertheless, the leaders of the Iranian Revolution con-
tinue to view their Islamic Republic, potentially to become a nuclear power,
as the ‘‘center of the universe.’’45

43
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, al-Hall al-Islami [The Islamic Solution], 3 vols. (reprint; Beirut:
al-Risalah, 1980); see especially vol. 1: al-Hulul al-Mustawrada [The Imported Solutions].
44
See Alireza Jafarzadeh, The Iran Threat. President Ahmadinejad and the Coming
Nuclear Crisis (New York: Palgrave, 2007).
45
See Graham Fuller, The Center of the Universe: The Geopolitics of Iran (Boulder, CO:
Westview, 1991).
 Politicization of Islam 167

RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM IN ISLAM AND THE

RETURN OF HISTORY

After the end of the East-West conflict, Francis Fukuyama foresaw promising
prospects and coined the term ‘‘the end of history,’’46 by which he meant the
final victory of Western values. This did not materialize. What is happening
seems to be quite the opposite: Islamism claims a revival of Islamic doctrines
and precepts, but engages in an invention of tradition, thus rekindling
historic tensions between Islam and the West. While this revolt has generated
the new phenomenon of Islamism, it nevertheless has historic roots. It is not
‘‘constructed,’’ as some politically correct scholars wrongly suggest. This
agenda resumes the history between Islam and Christian Europe. As John
Kelsay states:

Much of the contemporary return to Islam is driven by the perception of

Muslims as a community . . . having a mission to fulfill. That this percep-
tion sometimes leads to conflict is not surprising. In encounters between
the West and Islam, the struggle is over who will provide the primary
definition to world order. Will it be the West, with its notions of territorial
boundaries, market economies, private religiosity, and the priority of
individual rights? Or will it be Islam, with its emphasis on the universal
mission of a transtribal community called to build the social order
founded on the pure monotheism natural to humanity? The question
for those who envision world order, then, is, ‘‘Who determines the shape
of order, in the new international context?’’ The very question suggests a
competition between cultural traditions with distinctive notions of peace,
order, and justice. It thus implies pessimism concerning the call for a new
world order based on notions of common humanity.47

Scholars who combine the narrative of history with an effort at

social-scientific conceptualization may accept my suggestion that Islam, long
before the West, triggered a process that can be viewed as globalization,
defined as the attempt to impose its own model on the rest of the globe.
Islamic expansion was the first model of globalization, though it was not
fully successful in mapping the entire world. The globalization of the
‘‘Islamicate’’48 in medieval history is an historic fact. This Islamicate came into
being when Arab Muslims first engaged in wars of conquest49 in the seventh

46
See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press,
1992).
47
John Kelsay, Islam and War: A Study of Comparative Ethics (Louisville, KY: John Knox
Press, 1993), 115–118.
48
This term was coined by Marshall G. S. Hodgson in The Venture of Islam. Conscience
and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
49
Fred M. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1981).
168 B. Tibi

century. This continued throughout the seventeenth century by Muslim

Turks. In that historic period the pronounced goal was to expand their
civilization across the globe. After the Arab decline, the ascending Turks
continued this early Islamic expansion until the rise of the West. The indus-
trialization of warfare, and the West’s military revolution from 1500–1800,
were the cause of this rise. Islamic expansion and Islamic jihad wars were
replaced with Western globalization.50 This is the history revived at present
by Islamism.
The Islamist anti-Semitism mentioned at the outset of this article alleges
a ‘‘Jewish conspiracy’’ blamed for the decline of the Islamic jihad. Qutb called
for a world revolution to accomplish peace and prosperity under Islamic
rule, which includes Ma’rakatuna ma’a al-Yahud (our struggle with the
Jews).51 For this reason, Islamist fundamentalism also includes an agenda
of a new anti-Semitism based on the Islamization of a European ideology that
led to the Holocaust. In their perception, Islamists compete with ‘‘world
Jewry’’ in the quest to rule the world in a claim for the return of history.
The West continues to prevail in the world at large politically, economi-
cally, and militarily, but its values are culturally questioned. Fukuyama’s
assumption about ‘‘the end of history’’ as the victory of European values
has proven mistaken. The return of the history of civilizations after the col-
lapse of East-West bipolarity is a backlash against the ideologically driven
repression of history and culture of the other. Those people, Muslims among
them, once considered by arrogant Westerners as ‘‘people without history’’52
are now rising. Unfortunately, this return of history includes the pitfalls of
anti-Westernism, anti-Americanism, and even anti-Semitism. Therefore, this
trend is not a sign of a promising future. Islamism ignites cultural tensions
that lead to conflict and violence.53

CONCLUSIONS: ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION BETWEEN POLITICAL

ISLAM AND DEMOCRATIC PEACE

The politicization of religion following exposure to modernity leads to

religious fundamentalism. The Islamic variety of the phenomenon is
Islamism. Jihadism is only one dimension of Islamism. Therefore, it is wrong

50
See Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the
West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
51
The pamphlet by Qutb, Ma’rakatuma Ma’a al Yahud [Our Struggle with the Jews]
(reprint; Cairo: no date) is the source of this new anti-Semitism.
52
Eric R. Wolfe, Europe and the People Without History, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997).
53
See Bassam Tibi, ‘‘Islam: Between Religious-Cultural Practice and Identity Politics,’’ in
Cultures and Globalization: Conflicts and Tensions, ed. Helmut Anheier and Yudhishthir Isar
(London: Sage, 2007), 221–231.
 Politicization of Islam 169

to equate political Islam with violence. At issue is a pursuit of establishing a

divine order. The uniqueness of Islamism is its pertinence internationally
through its vision of setting up an Islamic world order. This Islamist inter-
nationalism entails a design for remaking the world.
The Islamist challenge is not violence, but rather an agenda of desecu-
larization. What is named a postsecular society is an anti-Western develop-
ment giving religion a new role in world politics. As argued, it is not a
renaissance of religious ethics, but rather an expression of fundamentalism.
To be sure, this phenomenon also exists in Western Christianity. In the
Islamic case, the most serious variety of this process of politicization of
religion is at work. Unlike the subsuming of universalist Christianity into
post-Christianity, the universalism of Islam is still alive and kicking, assum-
ing a political shape. This happens on two levels: religious Islamic
fundamentalism in domestic government and politics, focusing on issues
of order on the home front with the goal to topple. Next, political Islam
disclaims the present world order and offers an Islamic alternative. Islamic
civilization is in a state of crisis and requires Islam as the solution.54
Instead of seeking a solution, Islamists seek a scapegoat. They propa-
gate the belief that the ‘‘crusaders and Jews’’ are the source of all existing evil,
creating a combination of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. In general,
Islamism divides, rather than unites, humanity. What Muslims need is not
political Islam. Rather, they need to come to terms with their own crisis
and join in the effort to build democratic peace. In my view, Islamist funda-
mentalism is not only a threat to world peace but also a threat to intra-Islamic
peace. What Muslims really need is to dissociate their religion from Islamist
shari’a politics in order to address the real issues underlying the crisis of their
civilization.
A propaganda war is ongoing, in which Islamists have succeeded in stig-
matizing their critics as purveyors of xenophobia and Islamophobia. In fact,
neither Islamophobia nor a brand of Orientalism is at issue. Among Western
scholars there are only a few who understand fundamentalism properly and
dare to criticize this totalitarian ideology. The late Ernst Gellner understood
fundamentalism and had the integrity to criticize it. This Jewish Holocaust sur-
vivor called for reviving the Enlightenment against the challenge of fun-
damentalism. For doing this he was defamed by Edward Said in the Times
Literary Supplement (TLS). In this regard Gellner wrote: ‘‘Religious fundamen-
talism . . . gives psychic satisfaction to many . . . It is at present quite specifically
persuasive and influential within one particular tradition, namely Islam.’’55

54
For critical views on this Islamist standpoint see Ali A. Allawi, The Crisis of Islamic
Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), and Bassam Tibi, ‘‘The Return of the
Sacred to Politics: The Case of Shari’atization of Politics in Islamic Civilization,’’ in Theoria:
A Journal for Political and Social Theory 55, no. 115 (April 2008): 91–119.
55
Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992), 84.
170 B. Tibi

In medieval times—the better days of Islamic civilization—Jewish and

Muslim rational philosophers, like Maimonides and Averroes, could share
the same cultural heritage.56 In the age of Islamic fundamentalism, which
also carries with it a new anti-Semitism, the sentiments are much different.
The return of the sacred in the shape of religious fundamentalism reveals
the limits of pluralism and the weakness of cultural relativism.
The alternative to the clash of civilizations is democratic peace in the
Kantian sense.57 Islamism, unlike civil Islam that allows democracy and
human rights, is an obstacle to this need for democratic peace. The view that
Islamist fundamentalism is the most recent variety of totalitarianism is not
popular among U.S. scholars, who fail to understand that Islamism under-
mines democratic peace.
In Europe, Islamism prevents Muslims from becoming citizens of the
heart. The result is ethnicity of fear.58
Scholars and policymakers need to understand the distinction between
Islam and Islamism. It is most distressing to note Paul Berman’s point that
‘‘the Islamist movement, in prospering, has succeeded in imposing its own
categories of analysis over how everyone tends to think’’ with the result that
‘‘Islamist judgments end up getting adopted by Western and non-Islamist
journalists,’’59 and, one might add, scholars as well.
One rightly argues that Western policymakers and scholars need to
abandon the invidious associations of Islam with violence and jihadism.
But to view discussions of Islamism as arising from pure prejudice is a distor-
tion. Given religious reform and cultural change, an Islamic ethics based on
the tradition of Islamic humanism that is compatible with democracy, plural-
ism, and civil society60 is certainly possible. This truly moderate Islam is,
however, not to be confused with Islamism—the ideology of the Islamic
shari’a state. Only when Islamists abandon this agenda will they qualify as
post-Islamists.61

56
Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage of Islam (London: Routledge, 1975).
57
See Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden (reprint; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978). The
phrase was revived by Bruce M. Russett, Grasping Democratic Peace (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993).
58
See Bassam Tibi, ‘‘A Migration Story: From Immigrants to Citizens of the Heart,’’ Fletcher
Forum of World Affairs 31, no. 1 (2007): 147–168; and idem, ‘‘Ethnicity of Fear? Islamic
Migration and the Ethnicization of Islam in Europe,’’ Studies on Ethnicity and Nationalism
10, no. 1 (2010): 126–157.
59
Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals, 285–286.
60
Bassam Tibi, ‘‘Bridging the Heterogenity of Civilizations: Reviving the Grammar of
Islamic Humanism,’’ in Theoria: A Journal of Political and Social Theory 56, no. 120 (2009):
65–80. See the chapter on pluralism in Bassam Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity:
Cultural Change and Religious Reform (New York: Routledge, 2009), 209–236.
61
For an example, see Ed Husain, The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain,
What I Saw Inside and Why I Left (London: Penguin Books, 2007). Therefore, Olivier Roy’s
general notion of post-Islamist is a baseless construction.
Copyright of Journal of the Middle East & Africa is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied
or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.
However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.