STRATEGIC STUDIES QUARTERLY
Year:2010 | Volume:13 | Issue:4 (50)|Papers Count:8

The main goal of this paper is to study the influence of the Salafi discourse in the Islamic world on the security in the Middle East and like the Baabi Sa’eid’s approach towards the political Islam, the author uses the discourse methodology in this paper. Due to its radical position against the secular western discourse, the Salafi Islam has caused grave concerns for the international society. This discourse, given to its challenges against the western international order and moving forward the Islam – identity based approach, has drawn great attention under the issue of globalization of security and therefore, Salafi Islam has been one of the important topics in the international security studies. In this way, the hypothesis of this paper is as follows: “given the origins of the Salafi Islam discourse in the Middle East, and in the light of its proliferation in the world, the security of this region has been globalized”. With the globalization of the security, discourses like the Salafi Islam has appeared in the virtual spatial and therefore its security readings have been much more visible in the literature. Wherever the Salafi Islam matches with the globalization, we will witness greater promotion and spread of an epistemology which believes that the Western discourse cannot provide proper security.

This paper aims at raising a Quran based concept of security. This kind of security is based on the belief in God and is extracted from the Holy Quran which is the words of the God. According to the hypothesis of the paper, the security refers to the belief, because the belief is one of the main core concepts of the Holy Quran which in turn is the foundation of the mundane and the hereafter life. However, the Holy Quran provides a raison d'être of security that is linked to the philosophy of creation and descent of humankind and leads to a special kind of anthropology without of which neither the study of aspects and faces of security nor the recognition of security regulations could be possible. Based on the relevant aspects and rules of security in the Holy Quran, this paper compares this kind of security with the current concepts of security including national security and finally it shows that there are many similarities between these concepts.

Based on the belief in human dignity, Islam sets its final aim as the humankinds to be furnished with the God’s ethic, spiritual evolution and eternal salvation, all of which can be obtained by supremacy of the good over evil and through awareness and freedom. According to Islam, the human being has got two aspects, namely, material and spiritual aspects and realization of salvation is subject to freely preference of the spiritual aspect against mundane aspect. Therefore, Islam has a value based judgment towards humankind and society. In this way, two main pre values exist, namely, eternal salvation through nurturing and primacy of the spiritual aspect of the existence and awareness and freedom in choosing between good and evil as the condition of realization of salvation. These two pre-values are the main pillars of meta-theoretical framework of the Islamic political thought and its main subjects including security.

Development of Islamic and indigenes a human science is subject to use the Islamic philosophy rather than the Western philosophy. In this way, the Transcendent Wisdom has an excellent capacity. Recently, the security studies has been remarkably developed in Iran, however, there has been no acceptable efforts to study security through the prism of Islamic philosophy and specially Transcendent Wisdom. This paper aims at introducing the security uses of anthropology based on four masters of Transcendent Wisdom, namely, Sadra, Tabatabai, Imam Khomeini and Motahari. And the author argues that based on the foundations of Transcendent Wisdom and specially the anthropological aspects which are studied in this paper, instead of Science of Security we should refer to Security Sciences, as with any anthropology, a special science of security can be developed and that is why there are three relevant patterns including, Transcendent, Customary and Low one.

The Shiite Jurisprudents are looking at the expedience through the Jurisprudence perspective and for them it is a requirement for Sharia and also recently for legitimacy of the Islamic government. In fact, ranking the expedience’ elements, according to the Shiite jurisprudence, has some obvious implications with regard to political, social and cultural security. However, to comprehend those implications, one should be well aware of the relationship between expedience and security. Two kinds of relationship have been differentiated; longitudinal relationship based on substitution of one of the elements instead of the others, the undesired implications of which can affect the triple references of security, namely political, social and cultural. If this trauma is recognized, it can lead to lateral relationship based on combination of the triple elements of the expedience which in order to meet and guarantee a balanced security environment, it prescribes some theoretical and practical requirements. This kind of relationship is based on Sharia and a timely and contextually dynamic understanding of Jurisprudence which comprises core of this paper’s hypothesis.

A survey from an outsider view at the jurisprudence indicates that the so called term of Islamic Terrorism has been globally promoted based on two approaches. First, terrorism is based on belief and attitude of some of the Muslims. Second, the Western countries have labeled some Muslims with the title of Islamic Terrorism. Apparently, they consider terrorism as a threat against security and democracy; however, they use this label as an instrument in their leadership of the world. But looking at Jurisprudence from inside shows that terrorist acts apart from the thinking behind them or the motivation to globalize it, is considered as criminal and condemned acts; because the main element of Jihad is face to face fighting and respecting its rules and not to surprised attacks and killing the innocent people and properties. However, there is no an independent title for terrorist acts; although due to its implications it is identical to rebellion and belligerence.

The Islamic movements contain divers and different features which can be studied from several aspects including formal, organizational, intellectual, ideological, aims and interests, historical and geographical environment, performance, movement and etc. This paper intends to study the intellectual typology of these movements through raising the following questions: How many fraction they are? And what are the implications of these fractions? In this regard, the author believes that identity revival, as one of the main concerns of the contemporary Islamic movements, has a very close relationship with the security of the Islamic world, however, the way of revival by these movements depends on their different views on the issue of identity. Given the potentials of jurisprudence and Kalam, it seems that it is only the Islamic rationalist movements based on Ijtihad that can provide an alternative political model in the Muslim world and develop holistic and sustainable security thereof.

The main goal of this paper is to study the influence of the Salafi discourse in the Islamic world on the security in the Middle East and like the Baabi Sa’eid’s approach towards the political Islam, the author uses the discourse methodology in this paper. Due to its radical position against the secular western discourse, the Salafi Islam has caused grave concerns for the international society. This discourse, given to its challenges against the western international order and moving forward the Islam – identity based approach, has drawn great attention under the issue of globalization of security and therefore, Salafi Islam has been one of the important topics in the international security studies. In this way, the hypothesis of this paper is as follows: “given the origins of the Salafi Islam discourse in the Middle East, and in the light of its proliferation in the world, the security of this region has been globalized”. With the globalization of the security, discourses like the Salafi Islam has appeared in the virtual spatial and therefore its security readings have been much more visible in the literature. Wherever the Salafi Islam matches with the globalization, we will witness greater promotion and spread of an epistemology which believes that the Western discourse cannot provide proper security.