Since the 1970s, the term al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Awakening, emerged and spread across the Middle East. More than a hundred books have been published in Arabic under the title The Islamic Awakening, along with thousands of studies, articles, and television programs devoted to it. The renowned Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi alone has written sixteen books on the Awakening, including:
The Islamic Awakening Between Adolescence and Maturity
The Islamic Awakening Between Denial and Extremism
The Islamic Awakening and the Concerns of the Nation
The Islamic Awakening Between Legitimate Disagreement and Blameworthy Division
Toward a Mature Awakening That Renews Religion and Advances the World
The Islamic Solution as Obligation and Necessity
The Jurisprudence of Priorities for the Islamic Movement
Toward an Intellectual Unity for Those Working for Islam (five volumes)
The Awakening, as the Sheikhs of Islam define it, is the renewal of the worldly life of Muslims through the renewal of their religion. This renewal is to be achieved by returning to the roots of Islam in the first three Islamic centuries, by fully emulating what is contained in those centuries, and by following the example of the Prophet of Islam and his companions, those whom they call the Righteous Predecessors (al-Salaf al-Salih). According to the French researcher Stéphane Lacroix in his book The Time of the Awakening, the contemporary Islamic Awakening is a fusion of Wahhabi jurisprudence and Muslim Brotherhood ideology. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahhabis are the two wings of this Awakening. They have interacted and cooperated, and together they have produced an extraordinarily dangerous activist version that combined the activism and comprehensiveness of the Brotherhood with the Salafism of Wahhabism. From this fusion has emerged most, if not all, of the violent Sunni Islamic movements, al-Qaeda, ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, Boko Haram, and others.
The Awakening has many synonyms: the Islamic Vigilance, the Islamic Revival, the Islamic Renewal, the Islamic Resurrection, the Islamic Renaissance, the Islamic Salafism. Its proponents, however, prefer the term Awakening. They hold that this renewal occurs at the head of every Islamic century (every hundred Hijri years). According to Islamic history:
The Renewer of the First Century was Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz (101 AH).
The Renewer of the Second Century was Imam al-Shafi’i (204 AH).
The Renewer of the Fifth Century was Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (505 AH).
The Renewer of the Seventh Century was Taqi al-Din ibn Daqiq al-’Id (702 AH).
The Renewer of the Fourteenth Century, according to Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Muhammad al-Ghazali, is Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Islamic Awakening was launched from three principal centers: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan. Its founding fathers may be identified as the Saudi Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792), the Egyptian Hassan al-Banna (1906–1949), and the Pakistani Abul A’la al-Mawdudi (1903–1979).
On the Shia side, the founding fathers are Khomeini (1902–1989) and Ali Shariati (1933–1977), extending down to their disciples such as Khamenei and Hassan Nasrallah.
The matter then developed from the founding fathers of the Awakening into the stars, symbols, and sheikhs of the Awakening, including, by way of example and not exhaustively:
In Saudi Arabia: Bin Baz; Bin al-Uthaymeen; Abd al-Rahman al-Dosari; Salman al-Awda; Safar al-Hawali; Awad al-Qarni; Hamoud al-Shu’aibi; Abdullah ibn Jibreen; Abdullah ibn Humayd; Saad al-Faqih; Muhammad al-Mas’ari; Juhayman al-Otaibi; Saeed al-Ghamdi; Hamoud al-Tuwaijri and his son Abdullah; Abd al-Wahhab al-Tariri; Abd al-Rahman al-Barrak; al-Taifih; Saud al-Faysan; Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin; Muhammad Aman al-Jami; Mansour al-Nuqaidan; Musa al-Qarni; Mohsen al-Awaji; Muhammad al-Arifi — and of course Bin Laden.
In Egypt: Sayyid Qutb; Muhammad al-Ghazali; Muhammad Mutawalli al-Sha’rawi; Sheikh Kishk; Omar Abdel-Rahman; Ayman al-Zawahiri; Omar al-Tilmisani; Said Ramadan and his son Tariq; Zaynab al-Ghazali; Abd al-Halim Mahmoud; Sayyid Imam; Sayyid Sabiq; Muhammad Qutb; Fahmi Huwaidi; Muhammad Amara; Muhammad Selim al-Awa; Jad al-Haq Ali Jad al-Haq; Muhammad Hassan; Abu Ishaq al-Huwayni; Muhammad Hussein Yaqub; Mustafa al-Adawi; Hazem Shouman; Yasser Burhami.
Pakistan and Afghanistan: Sayyid Ahmad Khan; Abul A’la al-Mawdudi; Muhammad Ilyas; Burhanuddin Rabbani; Abdul Rasul Sayyaf; Gulbuddin Hekmatyar; Mullah Omar.
North Africa: Allal al-Fassi; Rachid al-Ghannouchi; Abbasi Madani; Ali Belhadj; Abd al-Qader al-Idrisi.
Kuwait: Ismail al-Shatti; Muhammad Ahmad al-Rashid; Ahmad al-Qattan; Abdullah al-Nafisi.
Jordan: Kamel al-Sharif; Muhammad Nasir al-Albani; Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi; Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani; Abu Qatada.
Sudan: Hassan al-Turabi; Zayn al-Abidin al-Rikabi; Jaafar Idris.
Lebanon and Iraq: Muhammad al-Sawwaf; Fathi Yakan.
Among the Palestinians: Abdullah Azzam; Ahmed Yassin; Ramadan Abdullah Shallah; Azzam Tamimi — and all the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
A large number of books have appeared that provide the ideological theorization of the Islamic Awakening, of jihad, and of Islamic violence. Among these Islamists, these books are treated with the standing of sacred texts:
In the Shade of the Qur’an and Milestones by Sayyid Qutb
Memoirs of the Call and the Caller and the Epistles of Hassan al-Banna
Kitab al-Tawhid by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab
Jihad in Islam, Islamic Government, and The Religion of Truth by Abul A’la al-Mawdudi
The Jurisprudence of the Sunna (Fiqh al-Sunna) by Sayyid Sabiq
Loyalty and Disavowal (al-Wala’ wal-Bara’) and Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner by Ayman al-Zawahiri
The Signs of the Merciful in the Jihad of the Afghans by Abdullah Azzam
Islamic Law and Say to the Tyrant: No by Omar Abdel-Rahman
The Neglected Duty (al-Farida al-Gha’iba) by Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj
The Religion of Abraham (Millat Ibrahim) by Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi
The Master in the Preparation of the Equipment (al-’Umda fi I’dad al-’Udda) by Sayyid Imam
Jihad and Ijtihad by Abu Qatada
The Call to Global Islamic Resistance by Abu Mus’ab al-Suri
The Management of Savagery by Abu Bakr Naji
The complete works of Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Muhammad al-Ghazali
The recorded cassettes of Sheikh Kishk
al-Sha’rawi’s Tafsir of the Qur’an
The weekly program Sharia and Life (al-Sharia wal-Hayat) hosted by Yusuf al-Qaradawi on the Al Jazeera channel
The Islamic Awakening has passed through many phases. What concerns me here are two in particular: the phase of international terrorism, which reached its peak on September 11, 2001; and the phase of international Islamism, which is the appearance of vast Islamic networks covering most of the world’s states, especially the Western states, and which seek to apply the values, the culture, and the Sharia of Islam in the Western states specifically. There are hundreds of Islamic organizations and thousands of large mosques across Europe, North America, and Australia, financed by petroleum surpluses and supervised by the Wahhabi and Brotherhood cells in the West. The ultimate goal is the Islamization of the West and the toppling of Western civilization.
To contain and recruit Muslims, the Awakening has adopted short and attractive slogans, such as Islam is the Solution and Islam is in Danger. It has taken the woman’s hijab and the man’s beard as symbols that distinguish its adherents from others.
The Islamic Awakening has identified its enemies, whom it considers the enemies of Islam and of Muslims:
The West, especially America and Europe.
Israel and the Jews in general.
Non-Muslims in the Islamic states, especially Christians.
The Muslim rulers who do not apply the Islamic Sharia.
Secularism, modernity, and the manifestations of modern civilization.
But why did the Islamic Awakening appear at this particular time?
The principal reason is the surplus of petrodollars, which the Wahhabi-Brotherhood alliance deployed to advance its agenda. They found in the fall of the Ottoman Islamic Caliphate in 1924 a cause that would justify reviving the Caliphate once again.
What also helped accelerate the ambition of the Sunni Awakening was the Iranian Revolution of 1979, with Khomeini’s seizure of power and the establishment of a Shia theocratic state governed by the clerics.
Another cause is the Awakening’s own conception that the backwardness and degradation of Muslims is the consequence of their abandonment of the application of Islam, of jihad, and of conquest, and that their abandonment of Islam is what led to Western colonization of their lands. They themselves should have been the ones who conquered the West. Their principal aim in the present is therefore a reverse conquest, the destruction of the West from within, using every instrument that Western civilization makes available to them, including democracy and the freedoms, in order to undermine those very values.
To summarize: the Islamic Awakening is the largest dangerous and destructive global phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century, and it remains so up to the present moment. Beyond having ruined the Middle East, it has terrorized the world with contemporary international terrorism. The greatest losers from the appearance of this Islamic Awakening, however, remain the Christians of the Middle East and of the Western states. They have been subjected to racial discrimination, persecution, forced displacement, the kidnapping of their daughters, and the burning and bombing of their churches, to the point that Christianity has nearly been extinguished entirely from states such as Iraq, Syria, Gaza, and the regions of the Palestinian Authority, and their numbers and their civilizational role have severely declined throughout the whole of the Middle East.
As for Europe, it has come under permanent Islamic danger. There are entire cities that Muslims have taken over and that have become semi-closed, dangerous, and frightening, even to the original people of the country, and that are difficult to enter.
And in America, they are attempting to drag the country toward the same fate as Europe.
Magdi Khalil is a senior fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.
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"This renewal is to be achieved by returning to the roots of Islam in the first three Islamic centuries, by fully emulating what is contained in those centuries..."
In other words, regression, not reformation.
They will fail. Because they are wrong. But much damage will be done in the meantime.