From Islam To Islamism, From Islamic Fundamentalism To Jihadism

Introduction

The topic of the work suggests as if a seamless path leads from Islam via Islamism to the terrorist concept of "jihad"8 , that is, with a certain consistency, Islam is to be seen as the starting point of a development that indirectly becomes the basis of jihadist terrorism9 . Islam itself is assumed to have a high potential for ideologization, which is permanently activated in the present. The three terms, it is assumed here, therefore do not describe three discrete states, but rather a gradual transition that makes a clear classification difficult. In the course of the investigation it must become clear whether this general suspicion is justified, is wrong, or must be modified and differentiated. That religions, insofar as they believed to proclaim the only authoritative truth, were and are to a particular extent the cause or co-cause of ideological conflicts, i.e. susceptible to fundamentalism, is taken as a strong premise. The Thirty Years' War is one such example, in which, in the name of God and Christian religions, religious motives and secular as well as spiritual strivings for power led to an extensive depopulation of the German Empire. The public burning of the pantheist Giordano Bruno by the Inquisition and the reprimand of Galileo Galilei by this institution prove an intolerant fundamentalism of Catholicism at that time.

Tepe's model of hermeneutics serves as an analytical treatment of the problem of fundamentalism. In his stage model of literary text interpretation, he distinguishes between two levels, the cognitive and the reflexive. The cognitive level is characterized by an objective and thus historically resistant sense of the text; the reflexive level poses the question of why the text is the way it is, that is, of the reason for the text's conception (Tepe 2001, 118-124).

The author would like to apply this model also to the interpretation of cultural phenomena and add to this stage model a third and last one. What presents itself as most real in a culture is its surface with the free play of economy, society, art, individuality, trends, values. At first sight, this agile set of relations seems to be without rules, random and aimless, i.e. chaotic. But with the premise that every effect is preceded by a cause, the question can be asked: Why are the phenomena the way they are?

The analysis of the object level thus brings to light the forces by which the contradictory surfaces are caused: contradictory or reinforcing value systems, convictions, theories. In the case of literary texts, this is the author's formative art program and value system, which determine the text structure as a causal background, so that the author's artistic and worldview intentions are reflected in the text. But the interests of the political actors can be questioned even further. The regress ends where assumptions, theories, value systems cannot be justified by any reasoning in turn. These founding premises are provided in their most comprehensive form by philosophy, religion and myth and directly determine the deep structure of a culture and thus indirectly its multifaceted reality.

Culture and history can be analyzed according to this three-layer theory. Thus, according to this theory, the topic demands a step-by-step approach. Islam as a religion with its unquestionable value system, which provides the ontological premises of the theological and profane superstructure, is first called "Islamism" in a value-neutral way, which in turn provides the theoretical justification for the confusing section of reality called "jihad.

If we compare the deep structures of the Western world with the Islamic world, it turns out that there is a deep, seemingly unbridgeable ontological difference between the Western and Islamic worlds. Islam assumes a world that was created by Allah and is therefore recognizable only through him. The Koran as sola scriptura describes objectively, binding for all times, absolutely true, what it is about this world and the role of man. The form of government that results from this is what Prenner (2005, 128) calls "nomocracy," a primary rule of God's word from which reality follows analytically. One can imagine this act of creation as an illocutionary speech act, which at the same time performs the corresponding action to the linguistic in formation, for example: 'I baptize you [...]'

By receiving the Koran, the Muslim learns about God's intention, but also about the nature of his world. The Koran is thus the mediator of objective knowledge, to which the Muslim must adapt: a direct path to knowledge of God and the world is not possible. Truth thus means "conformity of thought and action to the statements of the Koran" because it is semantically valid as God's word and therefore factually objective. The highest commandment of Islam is hidden in the term "surrender to God's will," which means monarchical and theological absolutism of Allah, to whom man is only an insubstantial shadow. Islam defines itself and its world from God, the almighty ruler.

The West represents the ontology of subjectivity according to the motto of Protagoras "Man is the measure of all things". The doubt about the objective world of the Middle Ages, which is understood as a reflection of the divine one, comes to its methodical expression in Descartes. At first everything is doubtable, even the existence of one's own person. But if one imagines the non-being of one's own person, then there must be an imaginer who imagines his non-being, the I, the self-consciousness, which already precedes all individual knowledge. So the universal doubt goes wrong, because to be able to doubt always presupposes already knowledge. Thus, skepticism does not lead to abstinence from knowledge, but to unquestionable knowledge. Descartes' method, then, is to arrive at doubt-free knowledge through doubting. Human reason, he concludes, is the locus of unconditional knowledge, while the object world can at any time feed skepticism because of its contingency. Subjectivism, then, by negating doubt, determines at the same time the indubitable thinking and being subject, no longer an idea of God's existence conceived as absolute objectivity. The power of imagination, reason, ratio are the conditions for the I to be certain of itself as well as of the world.

Thus, modern times represent an anthropocentric worldview, while Islam follows a theocentric basic concept. For him, God and his creation are the absolutely real, to which the human functions of being and cognition must be aligned. Both are diametrically opposed and constitute the fundamental difference between the two worlds. Basic positions, here the relation between religious objectivism of Islam and secular subjectivism of the West, determine the problems of today's world. Thus arises the objective of this thesis: From the philosophical position of realism (value-neutral understood as a collective term for many philosophical currents), which assumes the existence and at least partial recognizability of an extra-subjectively existing external world, the "supra-naturalistic value system"10 (Tepe 1988, 11) of Islam shall be critically reflected.

First of all, there are two directions of the ideology-critical analysis, the epistemological and the socio-critical: Ideology11 , now used in a comprehensive sense neutral to positive, changes according to the theory of "location-bound thinking" of cultural sociology (Mannheim 1984) on the one hand the philosophical and profane thinking and perception of reality, on the other hand also the perception and shaping of political-social reality. The former asks about the anthropologically attributed abilities of all human beings to absorb and process data, about the ability to think: about its conditions, possibilities and limits and criticizes attempts to influence the criteria of cognition and thus the ability to cognize on the basis of any pursuit of interests, prejudices or indoctrinations. The other criticizes social designs that pretend to be able to orient a society according to true, i.e. universally valid and binding values.

Birnbacher (1996) has proceeded according to a similar method of ideology criticism in the essay "Schopenhauer as Ideology Critic". An ideological complex is first subjected to a theoretical critique of the falsity of the statements, then the reason for this "distortion of truth" (51) is determined: political functions and moral intentions of the new doctrines of salvation that have bent the facts of the matter to suit their goals, to be critically evaluated, and finally the behavior of the actors who have produced an ideology or blindly follow it is exposed.

This critique of ideology has already been carried out on a theoretical level. I mention here only Lieber, Tepe, Salamun. Ideology formation takes place according to scientifically researchable laws, whose criteria can be documented scientifically-descriptively. Here I base myself on Salamun (2005), who points to the already elaborated criteria of a critique of ideology and totalitarianism, which can fruitfully contribute their "explanatory approaches and interpretive hypotheses" (9) in the analysis of fundamentalism. Surprisingly, it emerges that all fundamentalist movements develop in a structurally very similar way, so that they can presumably be based on the same, super historical structural model. The individual fundamentalist worldviews are then only individuations of a super historical structure, so that the goal of the work must be a determination of the individual characteristics of Islamic fundamentalism12 on the basis of these general structural features. But such descriptive accounts - we think of...