No Thanskgiving for Turki: Islamism, individualism, and the internet

 

Interesting things are happening in the land of Istanbul Express re:the challenge to Islamism as ideology. It seems that even if Islam is used as a political ideology and rhetoric to install the post-modern state especially circa “Arab Spring” in MENA (Middle East and North Africa), after two decades or so it will still be subjected to a Kondratieff Cycle of bloom and decay. It will still be forced to go through the Khaldunish (re: Ibnu Khaldun’s historiography) paradigmatic shifts of rise and fall. It will still have to go through a Marxist cycle of dialectical materialism: that thesis-antithesis-synthesis ideological karma.

From Tianamen to Tahrir to Taksim — the trigger for mass protests might be different by the theme of renewal is the same. The technology used and how the culture utilizes it as a tool of transformation may be different but the threats to authoritarianism presented by “the masses composing of individuals” is the same: leaders that lead by the lethal power of laissez faire and the leit motif of religiosity are forced to go when individualism is threatened and when the internet rules.

The idea of an “Islamic state” as an alternative to the “secular state” that seemed appealing to Islamists seems to be under fire and has lost its appeal, as we have been seeing in the Arab Spring that sprung everywhere these days, somewhat finding a Tantric-yoga-like peacefulness in the anarchism of the hundreds-of-cities-strong Occupy Movement.