{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="}
THE REVOLT OF ISLAM
by BERNARD LEWIS
When did the conflict with the West begin, and how could it end?
Issue of 2001-11-19
Posted 2001-11-19
I”MAKING HISTORY
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="}
President Bush and other Western politicians have taken great
pains to make it clear that the war in which we are engaged is a
war against terrorism”not a war against Arabs, or, more
generally, against Muslims, who are urged to join us in this
struggle against our common enemy. Osama bin Laden's message
is the opposite. For bin Laden and those who follow him, this is a
religious war, a war for Islam and against infidels, and therefore,
inevitably, against the United States, the greatest power in the
world of the infidels.
In his pronouncements, bin Laden makes frequent references to
history. One of the most dramatic was his mention, in the October
7th videotape, of the "humiliation and disgrace" that Islam has
suffered for "more than eighty years." Most American”and, no
doubt, European”observers of the Middle Eastern scene began
an anxious search for something that had happened "more than
eighty years" ago, and came up with various answers. We can be
fairly sure that bin Laden's Muslim listeners”the people he was
addressing”picked up the allusion immediately and appreciated
its significance. In 1918, the Ottoman sultanate, the last of the
great Muslim empires, was finally defeated”its capital,
Constantinople, occupied, its sovereign held captive, and much of
its territory partitioned between the victorious British and French
Empires. The Turks eventually succeeded in liberating their
homeland, but they did so not in the name of Islam but through a
secular nationalist movement. One of their first acts, in
November, 1922, was to abolish the sultanate. The Ottoman
sovereign was not only a sultan, the ruler of a specific state; he
was also widely recognized as the caliph, the head of all Sunni
Islam, and the last in a line of such rulers that dated back to the
death of the Prophet Muhammad, in 632 A.D. After a brief
experiment with a separate caliph, the Turks, in March, 1924,
abolished the caliphate, too. During its nearly thirteen centuries,
the caliphate had gone through many vicissitudes, but it remained
a potent symbol of Muslim unity, even identity, and its abolition,
under the double assault of foreign imperialists and domestic
modernists, was felt throughout the Muslim world.
Historical allusions such as bin Laden's, which may seem abstruse
to many Americans, are common among Muslims, and can be
properly understood only within the context of Middle Eastern
perceptions of identity and against the background of Middle
Eastern history. Even the concepts of history and identity require
redefinition for the Westerner trying to understand the
contemporary Middle East. In current American usage, the phrase
"that's history" is commonly used to dismiss something as
unimportant, of no relevance to current concerns, and, despite an
immense investment in the teaching and writing of history, the
general level of historical knowledge in our society is abysmally
low. The Muslim peoples, like everyone else in the world, are
shaped by their history, but, unlike some others, they are keenly
aware of it. In the nineteen-eighties, during the Iran-Iraq war, for
instance, both sides waged massive propaganda campaigns that
frequently evoked events and personalities dating back as far as
the seventh century. These were not detailed narratives but rapid,
incomplete allusions, and yet both sides employed them in the
secure knowledge that they would be understood by their target
audiences”even by the large proportion of that audience that was
illiterate. Middle Easterners' perception of history is nourished
from the pulpit, by the schools, and by the media, and, although it
may be”indeed, often is”slanted and inaccurate, it is
nevertheless vivid and powerfully resonant.
But history of what? In the Western world, the basic unit of
human organization is the nation, which is then subdivided in
various ways, one of which is by religion. Muslims, however, tend
to see not a nation subdivided into religious groups but a religion
subdivided into nations. This is no doubt partly because most of
the nation-states that make up the modern Middle East are
relatively new creations, left over from the era of Anglo-French
imperial domination that followed the defeat of the Ottoman
Empire, and they preserve the state-building and frontier
demarcations of their former imperial masters. Even their names
reflect this artificiality: Iraq was a medieval province, with
borders very different from those of the modern republic; Syria,
Palestine, and Libya are names from classical antiquity that hadn't
been used in the region for a thousand years or more before they
were revived and imposed by European imperialists in the
twentieth century; Algeria and Tunisia do not even exist as words
in Arabic”the same name serves for the city and the country.
Most remarkable of all, there is no word in the Arabic language
for Arabia, and modern Saudi Arabia is spoken of instead as "the
Saudi Arab kingdom" or "the peninsula of the Arabs," depending
on the context. This is not because Arabic is a poor
language”quite the reverse is true”but because the Arabs
simply did not think in terms of combined ethnic and territorial
identity. Indeed, the caliph Omar, the second in succession after
the Prophet Muhammad, is quoted as saying to the Arabs, "Learn
your genealogies, and do not be like the local peasants who, when
they are asked who they are, reply: 'I am from such-and-such a
place.' "
In the early centuries of the Muslim era, the Islamic community
was one state under one ruler. Even after that community split up
into many states, the ideal of a single Islamic polity persisted. The
states were almost all dynastic, with shifting frontiers, and it is
surely significant that, in the immensely rich historiography of the
Islamic world in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, there are histories
of dynasties, of cities, and, primarily, of the Islamic state and
community, but no histories of Arabia, Persia, or Turkey. Both
Arabs and Turks produced a vast literature describing their
struggles against Christian Europe, from the first Arab incursions
in the eighth century to the final Turkish retreat in the twentieth.
But until the modern period, when European concepts and
categories became dominant, Islamic commentators almost
always referred to their opponents not in territorial or ethnic terms
but simply as infidels (kafir). They never referred to their own
side as Arab or Turkish; they identified themselves as Muslims.
This perspective helps to explain, among other things, Pakistan's
concern for the Taliban in Afghanistan. The name Pakistan, a
twentieth-century invention, designates a country defined entirely
by its Islamic religion. In every other respect, the country and
people of Pakistan are”as they have been for millennia”part of
India. An Afghanistan defined by its Islamic identity would be a
natural ally, even a satellite, of Pakistan. An Afghanistan defined
by ethnic nationality, on the other hand, could be a dangerous
neighbor, advancing irredentist claims on the Pashto-speaking
areas of northwestern Pakistan and perhaps even allying itself
with India.
II”THE HOUSE OF WAR
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="}
In the course of human history, many civilizations have risen and
fallen”China, India, Greece, Rome, and, before them, the ancient
civilizations of the Middle East. During the centuries that in
European history are called medieval, the most advanced
civilization in the world was undoubtedly that of Islam. Islam may
have been equalled”or even, in some ways, surpassed”by India
and China, but both of those civilizations remained essentially
limited to one region and to one ethnic group, and their impact on
the rest of the world was correspondingly restricted. The
civilization of Islam, on the other hand, was ecumenical in its
outlook, and explicitly so in its aspirations. One of the basic tasks
bequeathed to Muslims by the Prophet was jihad. This word,
which literally means "striving," was usually cited in the Koranic
phrase "striving in the path of God" and was interpreted to mean
armed struggle for the defense or advancement of Muslim power.
In principle, the world was divided into two houses: the House of
Islam, in which a Muslim government ruled and Muslim law
prevailed, and the House of War, the rest of the world, still
inhabited and, more important, ruled by infidels. Between the two,
there was to be a perpetual state of war until the entire world
either embraced Islam or submitted to the rule of the Muslim
state.
>From an early date, Muslims knew that there were certain
differences among the peoples of the House of War. Most of them
were simply polytheists and idolaters, who represented no serious
threat to Islam and were likely prospects for conversion. The
major exception was the Christians, whom Muslims recognized as
having a religion of the same kind as their own, and therefore as
their primary rival in the struggle for world domination”or, as
they would have put it, world enlightenment. It is surely
significant that the Koranic and other inscriptions on the Dome of
the Rock, one of the earliest Muslim religious structures outside
Arabia, built in Jerusalem between 691 and 692 A.D., include a
number of directly anti-Christian polemics: "Praise be to God,
who begets no son, and has no partner," and "He is God, one,
eternal. He does not beget, nor is he begotten, and he has no peer."
For the early Muslims, the leader of Christendom, the Christian
equivalent of the Muslim caliph, was the Byzantine emperor in
Constantinople. Later, his place was taken by the Holy Roman
Emperor in Vienna, and his in turn by the new rulers of the West.
Each of these, in his time, was the principal adversary of the jihad.
In practice, of course, the application of jihad wasn't always
rigorous or violent. The canonically obligatory state of war could
be interrupted by what were legally defined as "truces," but these
differed little from the so-called peace treaties the warring
European powers signed with one another. Such truces were made
by the Prophet with his pagan enemies, and they became the basis
of what one might call Islamic international law. In the lands
under Muslim rule, Islamic law required that Jews and Christians
be allowed to practice their religions and run their own affairs,
subject to certain disabilities, the most important being a poll tax
that they were required to pay. In modern parlance, Jews and
Christians in the classical Islamic state were what we would call
second-class citizens, but second-class citizenship, established by
law and the Koran and recognized by public opinion, was far
better than the total lack of citizenship that was the fate of non-
Christians and even of some deviant Christians in the West. The
jihad also did not prevent Muslim governments from occasionally
seeking Christian allies against Muslim rivals”even during the
Crusades, when Christians set up four principalities in the Syro-
Palestinian area. The great twelfth-century Muslim leader Saladin,
for instance, entered into an agreement with the Crusader king of
Jerusalem, to keep the peace for their mutual convenience.
Under the medieval caliphate, and again under the Persian and
Turkish dynasties, the empire of Islam was the richest, most
powerful, most creative, most enlightened region in the world,
and for most of the Middle Ages Christendom was on the
defensive. In the fifteenth century, the Christian counterattack
expanded. The Tatars were expelled from Russia, and the Moors
from Spain. But in southeastern Europe, where the Ottoman sultan
confronted first the Byzantine and then the Holy Roman Emperor,
Muslim power prevailed, and these setbacks were seen as minor
and peripheral. As late as the seventeenth century, Turkish pashas
still ruled in Budapest and Belgrade, Turkish armies were
besieging Vienna, and Barbary corsairs were raiding lands as
distant as the British Isles and, on one occasion, in 1627, even
Iceland.
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="}
Then came the great change. The second Turkish siege of Vienna,
in 1683, ended in total failure followed by headlong retreat”an
entirely new experience for the Ottoman armies. A contemporary
Turkish historian, Silihdar Mehmet Aga, described the disaster
with commendable frankness: "This was a calamitous defeat, so
great that there has been none like it since the first appearance of
the Ottoman state." This defeat, suffered by what was then the
major military power of the Muslim world, gave rise to a new
debate, which in a sense has been going on ever since. The
argument began among the Ottoman military and political élite as
a discussion of two questions: Why had the once victorious
Ottoman armies been vanquished by the despised Christian
enemy? And how could they restore the previous situation?
There was good reason for concern. Defeat followed defeat, and
Christian European forces, having liberated their own lands,
pursued their former invaders whence they had come, the
Russians moving into North and Central Asia, the Portuguese into
Africa and around Africa to South and Southeast Asia. Even small
European powers such as Holland and Portugal were able to build
vast empires in the East and to establish a dominant role in trade.
For most historians, Middle Eastern and Western alike, the
conventional beginning of modern history in the Middle East
dates from 1798, when the French Revolution, in the person of
Napoleon Bonaparte, landed in Egypt. Within a remarkably short
time, General Bonaparte and his small expeditionary force were
able to conquer, occupy, and rule the country. There had been,
before this, attacks, retreats, and losses of territory on the remote
frontiers, where the Turks and the Persians faced Austria and
Russia. But for a small Western force to invade one of the
heartlands of Islam was a profound shock. The departure of the
French was, in a sense, an even greater shock. They were forced
to leave Egypt not by the Egyptians, nor by their suzerains the
Turks, but by a small squadron of the British Royal Navy,
commanded by a young admiral named Horatio Nelson. This was
the second bitter lesson the Muslims had to learn: not only could a
Western power arrive, invade, and rule at will but only another
Western power could get it out.
By the early twentieth century”although a precarious
independence was retained by Turkey and Iran and by some
remoter countries like Afghanistan, which at that time did not
seem worth the trouble of invading”almost the entire Muslim
world had been incorporated into the four European empires of
Britain, France, Russia, and the Netherlands. Middle Eastern
governments and factions were forced to learn how to play these
mighty rivals off against one another. For a time, they played the
game with some success. Since the Western allies”Britain and
France and then the United States”effectively dominated the
region, Middle Eastern resisters naturally looked to those allies'
enemies for support. In the Second World War, they turned to
Germany; in the Cold War, to the Soviet Union.
And then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left the
United States as the sole world superpower. The era of Middle
Eastern history that had been inaugurated by Napoleon and
Nelson was ended by Gorbachev and the elder George Bush. At
first, it seemed that the era of imperial rivalry had ended with the
withdrawal of both competitors: the Soviet Union couldn't play
the imperial role, and the United States wouldn't. But most Middle
Easterners didn't see it that way. For them, this was simply a new
phase in the old imperial game, with America as the latest in a
succession of Western imperial overlords, except that this
overlord had no rival”no Hitler or Stalin”whom they could use
either to damage or to influence the West. In the absence of such a
patron, Middle Easterners found themselves obliged to mobilize
their own force of resistance. Al Qaeda”its leaders, its sponsors,
its financiers”is one such force.
III”"THE GREAT SATAN"
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="}
America's new role”and the Middle East's perception of it”was
vividly illustrated by an incident in Pakistan in 1979. On
November 20th, a band of a thousand Muslim religious radicals
seized the Great Mosque in Mecca and held it for a time against
the Saudi security forces. Their declared aim was to "purify Islam"
and liberate the holy land of Arabia from the royal "clique of
infidels" and the corrupt religious leaders who supported them.
Their leader, in speeches played from loudspeakers, denounced
Westerners as the destroyers of fundamental Islamic values and
the Saudi government as their accomplices. He called for a return
to the old Islamic traditions of "justice and equality." After some
hard fighting, the rebels were suppressed. Their leader was
executed on January 9, 1980, along with sixty-two of his
followers, among them Egyptians, Kuwaitis, Yemenis, and
citizens of other Arab countries.
Meanwhile, a demonstration in support of the rebels took place in
the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. A rumor had
circulated”endorsed by Ayatollah Khomeini, who was then in
the process of establishing himself as the revolutionary leader in
Iran”that American troops had been involved in the clashes in
Mecca. The American Embassy was attacked by a crowd of
Muslim demonstrators, and two Americans and two Pakistani
employees were killed. Why had Khomeini stood by a report that
was not only false but wildly improbable?
These events took place within the context of the Iranian
revolution of 1979. On November 4th, the United States Embassy
in Teheran had been seized, and fifty-two Americans were taken
hostage; those hostages were then held for four hundred and forty-
four days, until their release on January 20, 1981. The motives for
this, baffling to many at the time, have become clearer since,
thanks to subsequent statements and revelations from the hostage-
takers and others. It is now apparent that the hostage crisis
occurred not because relations between Iran and the United States
were deteriorating but because they were improving. In the fall of
1979, the relatively moderate Iranian Prime Minister, Mehdi
Bazargan, had arranged to meet with the American national-
security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, under the aegis of the
Algerian government. The two men met on November 1st, and
were reported to have been photographed shaking hands. There
seemed to be a real possibility”in the eyes of the radicals, a real
danger”that there might be some accommodation between the
two countries. Protesters seized the Embassy and took the
American diplomats hostage in order to destroy any hope of
further dialogue.
For Khomeini, the United States was "the Great Satan," the
principal adversary against whom he had to wage his holy war for
Islam. America was by then perceived”rightly”as the leader of
what we like to call "the free world." Then, as in the past, this
world of unbelievers was seen as the only serious force rivalling
and preventing the divinely ordained spread and triumph of Islam.
But American observers, reluctant to recognize the historical
quality of the hostility, sought other reasons for the anti-American
sentiment that had been intensifying in the Islamic world for some
time. One explanation, which was widely accepted, particularly in
American foreign-policy circles, was that America's image had
been tarnished by its wartime and continuing alliance with the
former colonial powers of Europe.
In their country's defense, some American commentators pointed
out that, unlike the Western European imperialists, America had
itself been a victim of colonialism; the United States was the first
country to win freedom from British rule. But the hope that the
Middle Eastern subjects of the former British and French Empires
would accept the American Revolution as a model for their own
anti-imperialist struggle rested on a basic fallacy that Arab writers
were quick to point out. The American Revolution was fought not
by Native American nationalists but by British settlers, and, far
from being a victory against colonialism, it represented
colonialism's ultimate triumph”the English in North America
succeeded in colonizing the land so thoroughly that they no longer
needed the support of the mother country.
It is hardly surprising that former colonial subjects in the Middle
East would see America as being tainted by the same kind of
imperialism as Western Europe. But Middle Eastern resentment
of imperial powers has not always been consistent. The Soviet
Union, which extended the imperial conquests of the tsars of
Russia, ruled with no light hand over tens of millions of Muslim
subjects in Central Asian states and in the Caucasus; had it not
been for American opposition and the Cold War, the Arab world
might well have shared the fate of Poland and Hungary, or, more
probably, that of Uzbekistan. And yet the Soviet Union suffered
no similar backlash of anger and hatred from the Arab
community. Even the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979”a
clear case of imperialist aggression, conquest, and
domination”triggered only a muted response in the Islamic
world. The P.L.O. observer at the United Nations defended the
invasion, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference did little
to protest it. South Yemen and Syria boycotted a meeting held to
discuss the issue, Libya delivered an attack on the United States,
and the P.L.O. representative abstained from voting and submitted
his reservations in writing. Ironically, it was the United States, in
the end, that was left to orchestrate an Islamic response to Soviet
imperialism in Afghanistan.
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="}
As the Western European empires faded, Middle Eastern anti-
Americanism was attributed more and more to another cause:
American support for Israel, first in its conflict with the
Palestinian Arabs, then in its conflict with the neighboring Arab
states and the larger Islamic world. There is certainly support for
this hypothesis in Arab statements on the subject. But there are
incongruities, too. In the nineteen-thirties, Nazi Germany's
policies were the main cause of Jewish migration to Palestine,
then a British mandate, and the consequent reinforcement of the
Jewish community there. The Nazis not only permitted this
migration; they facilitated it until the outbreak of the war, while
the British, in the somewhat forlorn hope of winning Arab good
will, imposed and enforced restrictions. Nevertheless, the
Palestinian leadership of the time, and many other Arab leaders,
supported the Germans, who sent the Jews to Palestine, rather
than the British, who tried to keep them out.
The same kind of discrepancy can be seen in the events leading to
and following the establishment of the State of Israel, in 1948.
The Soviet Union played a significant role in procuring the
majority by which the General Assembly of the United Nations
voted to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, and then gave Israel
immediate de-jure recognition. The United States, however, gave
only de-facto recognition. More important, the American
government maintained a partial arms embargo on Israel, while
Czechoslovakia, at Moscow's direction, immediately sent a supply
of weaponry, which enabled the new state to survive the attempts
to strangle it at birth. As late as the war of 1967, Israel still relied
for its arms on European, mainly French, suppliers, not on the
United States.
The Soviet Union had been one of Israel's biggest supporters. Yet,
when Egypt announced an arms deal with Russia, in September of
1955, there was an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response in the
Arab press. The Chambers of Deputies in Syria, Lebanon, and
Jordan met immediately and voted resolutions of congratulation to
President Nasser; even Nuri Said, the pro-Western ruler of Iraq,
felt obliged to congratulate his Egyptian colleague”this despite
the fact that the Arabs had no special love of Russia, nor did
Muslims in the Arab world or elsewhere wish to invite either
Communist ideology or Soviet power to their lands. What
delighted them was that they saw the arms deal”no doubt
correctly”as a slap in the face for the West. The slap, and the
agitated Western response, reinforced the mood of hatred and
spite toward the West and encouraged its exponents. It also
encouraged the United States to look more favorably on Israel,
now seen as a reliable and potentially useful ally in a largely
hostile region. Today, it is often forgotten that the strategic
relationship between the United States and Israel was a
consequence, not a cause, of Soviet penetration.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only one of many struggles
between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds”on a list that
includes Nigeria, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Chechnya,
Sinkiang, Kashmir, and Mindanao”but it has attracted far more
attention than any of the others. There are several reasons for this.
First, since Israel is a democracy and an open society, it is much
easier to report”and misreport”what is going on. Second, Jews
are involved, and this can usually secure the attention of those
who, for one reason or another, are for or against them. Third, and
most important, resentment of Israel is the only grievance that can
be freely and safely expressed in those Muslim countries where
the media are either wholly owned or strictly overseen by the
government. Indeed, Israel serves as a useful stand-in for
complaints about the economic privation and political repression
under which most Muslim people live, and as a way of deflecting
the resulting anger.
IV”DOUBLE STANDARDS
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="}
This raises another issue. Increasingly in recent decades, Middle
Easterners have articulated a new grievance against American
policy: not American complicity with imperialism or with
Zionism but something nearer home and more
immediate”American complicity with the corrupt tyrants who
rule over them. For obvious reasons, this particular complaint
does not often appear in public discourse. Middle Eastern
governments, such as those of Iraq, Syria, and the Palestine
Authority, have developed great skill in controlling their own
media and manipulating those of Western countries. Nor, for
equally obvious reasons, is it raised in diplomatic negotiation. But
it is discussed, with increasing anguish and urgency, in private
conversations with listeners who can be trusted, and recently even
in public. (Interestingly, the Iranian revolution of 1979 was one
time when this resentment was expressed openly. The Shah was
accused of supporting America, but America was also attacked for
imposing an impious and tyrannical leader as its puppet.)
Almost the entire Muslim world is affected by poverty and
tyranny. Both of these problems are attributed, especially by those
with an interest in diverting attention from themselves, to
America”the first to American economic dominance and
exploitation, now thinly disguised as "globalization"; the second
to America's support for the many so-called Muslim tyrants who
serve its purposes. Globalization has become a major theme in the
Arab media, and it is almost always raised in connection with
American economic penetration. The increasingly wretched
economic situation in most of the Muslim world, relative not only
to the West but also to the tiger economies of East Asia, fuels
these frustrations. American paramountcy, as Middle Easterners
see it, indicates where to direct the blame and the resulting
hostility.
There is some justice in one charge that is frequently levelled
against the United States: Middle Easterners increasingly
complain that the United States judges them by different and
lower standards than it does Europeans and Americans, both in
what is expected of them and in what they may expect”in terms
of their financial well-being and their political freedom. They
assert that Western spokesmen repeatedly overlook or even
defend actions and support rulers that they would not tolerate in
their own countries. As many Middle Easterners see it, the
Western and American governments' basic position is: "We don't
care what you do to your own people at home, so long as you are
coöperative in meeting our needs and protecting our interests."
The most dramatic example of this form of racial and cultural
arrogance was what Iraqis and others see as the betrayal of 1991,
when the United States called on the Iraqi people to revolt against
Saddam Hussein. The rebels of northern and southern Iraq did so,
and the United States forces watched while Saddam, using the
helicopters that the ceasefire agreement had allowed him to retain,
bloodily suppressed them, group by group. The reasoning behind
this action”or, rather, inaction”is not difficult to see. Certainly,
the victorious Gulf War coalition wanted a change of government
in Iraq, but they had hoped for a coup d'état, not a revolution.
They saw a genuine popular uprising as dangerous”it could lead
to uncertainty or even anarchy in the region. A coup would be
more predictable and could achieve the desired result”the
replacement of Saddam Hussein by another, more amenable
tyrant, who could take his place among America's so-called allies
in the coalition. The United States' abandonment of Afghanistan
after the departure of the Soviets was understood in much the
same way as its abandonment of the Iraqi rebels.
Another example of this double standard occurred in the Syrian
city of Hama and in refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila. The
troubles in Hama began with an uprising headed by the radical
group the Muslim Brothers in 1982. The government responded
swiftly. Troops were sent, supported by armor, artillery, and
aircraft, and within a very short time they had reduced a large part
of the city to rubble. The number killed was estimated, by
Amnesty International, at somewhere between ten thousand and
twenty-five thousand. The action, which was ordered and
supervised by the Syrian President, Hafiz al-Assad, attracted little
attention at the time, and did not prevent the United States from
subsequently courting Assad, who received a long succession of
visits from American Secretaries of State James Baker, Warren
Christopher, and Madeleine Albright, and even from President
Clinton. It is hardly likely that Americans would have been so
eager to propitiate a ruler who had perpetrated such crimes on
Western soil, with Western victims.
The massacre of seven hundred to eight hundred Palestinian
refugees in Sabra and Shatila that same year was carried out by
Lebanese militiamen, led by a Lebanese commander who
subsequently became a minister in the Syrian-sponsored Lebanese
government, and it was seen as a reprisal for the assassination of
the Lebanese President Bashir Gemayyel. Ariel Sharon, who at the
time commanded the Israeli forces in Lebanon, was reprimanded
by an Israeli commission of inquiry for not having foreseen and
prevented the massacre, and was forced to resign from his
position as Minister of Defense. It is understandable that the
Palestinians and other Arabs should lay sole blame for the
massacre on Sharon. What is puzzling is that Europeans and
Americans should do the same. Some even wanted to try Sharon
for crimes against humanity before a tribunal in Europe. No such
suggestion was made regarding either Saddam Hussein or Hafiz
al-Assad, who slaughtered tens of thousands of their compatriots.
It is easy to understand the bitterness of those who see the
implication here. It was as if the militia who had carried out the
deed were animals, not accountable by the same human standards
as the Israelis.
Thanks to modern communications, the people of the Middle East
are increasingly aware of the deep and widening gulf between the
opportunities of the free world outside their borders and the
appalling privation and repression within them. The resulting
anger is naturally directed first against their rulers, and then
against those whom they see as keeping those rulers in power for
selfish reasons. It is surely significant that most of the terrorists
who have been identified in the September 11th attacks on New
York and Washington come from Saudi Arabia and Egypt”that
is, from countries whose rulers are deemed friendly to the United
States.
V”A FAILURE OF MODERNITY
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="}
If America's double standards”and its selfish support for corrupt
regimes in the Arab world”have long caused anger among
Muslims, why has that anger only recently found its expression in
acts of terrorism? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
Muslims responded in two ways to the widening imbalance of
power and wealth between their societies and those of the West.
The reformers or modernizers tried to identify the sources of
Western wealth and power and adapt them to their own use, in
order to meet the West on equal terms. Muslim
governments”first in Turkey, then in Egypt and Iran”made
great efforts to modernize, that is, to Westernize, the weaponry
and equipment of their armed forces; they even dressed them in
Western-style uniforms and marched them to the tune of brass
bands. When defeats on the battlefield were matched by others in
the marketplace, the reformers tried to discover the secrets of
Western economic success and to emulate them by establishing
industries of their own. Young Muslim students who were sent to
the West to study the arts of war also came back with dangerous
and explosive notions about elected assemblies and constitutional
governments.
All attempts at reform ended badly. If anything, the modernization
of the armed forces accelerated the process of defeat and
withdrawal, culminating in the humiliating failure of five Arab
states and armies to prevent a half million Jews from building a
new state in the debris of the British Mandate in Palestine in
1948. With rare exceptions, the economic reforms, capitalist and
socialist alike, fared no better. The Middle Eastern combination
of low productivity and high birth rate makes for an unstable mix,
and by all indications the Arab countries, in such matters as job
creation, education, technology, and productivity, lag ever farther
behind the West. Even worse, the Arab nations also lag behind the
more recent recruits to Western-style modernity, such as Korea,
Taiwan, and Singapore. Out of a hundred and fifty-five countries
ranked for economic freedom in 2001, the highest-ranking
Muslim states are Bahrain (No. 9), the United Arab Emirates (No.
14), and Kuwait (No. 42). According to the World Bank, in 2000
the average annual income in the Muslim countries from Morocco
to Bangladesh was only half the world average, and in the nineties
the combined gross national products of Jordan, Syria, and
Lebanon”that is, three of Israel's Arab neighbors”were
considerably smaller than that of Israel alone. The per-capita
figures are worse. According to United Nations statistics, Israel's
per-capita G.D.P. was three and a half times that of Lebanon and
Syria, twelve times that of Jordan, and thirteen and a half times
that of Egypt. The contrast with the West, and now also with the
Far East, is even more disconcerting.
Modernization in politics has fared no better”perhaps even
worse”than in warfare and economics. Many Islamic countries
have experimented with democratic institutions of one kind or
another. In some, as in Turkey, Iran, and Tunisia, they were
introduced by innovative native reformers; in others, they were
installed and then bequeathed by departing imperialists. The
record, with the possible exception of Turkey, is one of almost
unrelieved failure. Western-style parties and parliaments almost
invariably ended in corrupt tyrannies, maintained by repression
and indoctrination. The only European model that worked, in the
sense of accomplishing its purposes, was the one-party
dictatorship. The Baath Party, different branches of which have
ruled Iraq and Syria for decades, incorporated the worst features
of its Nazi and Soviet models. Since the death of Nasser, in 1970,
no Arab leader has been able to gain extensive support outside his
own country. Indeed, no Arab leader has been willing to submit
his claim to power to a free vote. The leaders who have come
closest to winning pan-Arab approval are Qaddafi in the seventies
and, more recently, Saddam Hussein. That these two, of all Arab
rulers, should enjoy such wide popularity is in itself both
appalling and revealing.
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="}
In view of this, it is hardly surprising that many Muslims speak of
the failure of modernization. The rejection of modernity in favor
of a return to the sacred past has a varied and ramified history in
the region and has given rise to a number of movements. The
most important of these, Wahhabism, has lasted more than two
and a half centuries and exerts a significant influence on Muslim
movements in the Middle East today. Its founder, Muhammad ibn
Abd al-Wahhab (1703-87), was a theologian from the Najd area of
Arabia. In 1744, he launched a campaign of purification and
renewal. His purpose was to return the Muslim world to the pure
and authentic Islam of the Prophet, removing and, where
necessary, destroying all later accretions. The Wahhabi cause was
embraced by the Saudi rulers of Najd, who promoted it, for a
while successfully, by force. In a series of campaigns, they carried
their rule and their faith to much of central and eastern Arabia,
before being rebuffed, at the end of the eighteenth century, by the
Ottoman sultan, whom the Saudi ruler had denounced as a
backslider from the true faith and a usurper in the Muslim state.
The second alliance of Wahhabi doctrine and Saudi force began in
the last years of the Ottoman Empire and continued after the
collapse. The Saudi conquest of the Hejaz, including the holy
cities of Mecca and Medina, increased the prestige of the House
of Saud and gave new scope to the Wahhabi doctrine, which
spread, in a variety of forms, throughout the Islamic world.
>From the nineteen-thirties on, the discovery of oil in the eastern
provinces of Arabia and its exploitation, chiefly by American
companies, brought vast new wealth and bitter new social
tensions. In the old society, inequalities of wealth had been
limited, and their effects were restrained, on the one hand, by the
traditional social bonds and obligations that linked rich and poor
and, on the other hand, by the privacy of Muslim home life.
Modernization has all too often widened the gap, destroyed those
social bonds, and, through the universality of the modern media,
made the resulting inequalities painfully visible. All this has
created new and receptive audiences for Wahhabi teachings and
those of other like-minded groups, among them the Muslim
Brothers in Egypt and Syria and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
It has now become normal to designate these movements as
"fundamentalist." The term is unfortunate for a number of
reasons. It was originally an American Protestant term, used to
designate Protestant churches that differed in some respects from
the mainstream churches. These differences bear no resemblance
to those that divide Muslim fundamentalists from the Islamic
mainstream, and the use of the term can therefore be misleading.
Broadly speaking, Muslim fundamentalists are those who feel that
the troubles of the Muslim world at the present time are the result
not of insufficient modernization but of excessive modernization.
>From their point of view, the primary struggle is not against the
Western enemy as such but against the Westernizing enemies at
home, who have imported and imposed infidel ways on Muslim
peoples. The task of the Muslims is to depose and remove these
infidel rulers, sometimes by defeating or expelling their foreign
patrons and protectors, and to abrogate and destroy the laws,
institutions, and social customs that they have introduced, so as to
return to a purely Islamic way of life, in accordance with the
principles of Islam and the rules of the Holy Law.
VI”THE RISE OF TERRORISM
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="}
Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers may not represent
Islam, and their statements and their actions directly contradict
basic Islamic principles and teachings, but they do arise from
within Muslim civilization, just as Hitler and the Nazis arose from
within Christian civilization, so they must be seen in their own
cultural, religious, and historical context.
If one looks at the historical record, the Muslim approach to war
does not differ greatly from that of Christians, or that of Jews in
the very ancient and very modern periods when the option was
open to them. While Muslims, perhaps more frequently than
Christians, made war against the followers of other faiths to bring
them within the scope of Islam, Christians”with the notable
exception of the Crusades, which were themselves an imitation of
Muslim practice”were more prone to fight internal religious
wars against those whom they saw as schismatics or heretics.
Islam, no doubt owing to the political and military involvement of
its founder, takes what one might call a more pragmatic view than
the Gospels of the realities of societal relationships. Because war
for the faith has been a religious obligation within Islam from the
beginning, it is elaborately regulated. Islamic religious law, or the
Sharia, deals in some detail with such matters as the opening,
conclusion, and resumption of hostilities, the avoidance of injury
to noncombatants, the treatment of prisoners, the division of
booty, and even the types of weapons that may be used. Some of
these rules have been explained away by modern radical
commentators who support the fundamentalists; others are simply
disregarded.
What about terrorism? Followers of many faiths have at one time
or another invoked religion in the practice of murder, both retail
and wholesale. Two words deriving from such movements in
Eastern religions have even entered the English language: "thug,"
from India, and "assassin," from the Middle East, both
commemorating fanatical religious sects whose form of worship
was to murder those whom they regarded as enemies of the faith.
The question of the lawfulness of assassination in Islam first arose
in 656 A.D., with the murder of the third caliph, Uthman, by pious
Muslim rebels who believed they were carrying out the will of
God. The first of a succession of civil wars was fought over the
question of whether the rebels were fulfilling or defying God's
commandment. Islamic law and tradition are very clear on the
duty of obedience to the Islamic ruler. But they also quote two
sayings attributed to the Prophet: "There is no obedience in sin"
and "Do not obey a creature against his creator." If a ruler orders
something that is contrary to the law of God, then the duty of
obedience is replaced by a duty of disobedience. The notion of
tyrannicide”the justified removal of a tyrant”was not an Islamic
innovation; it was familiar in antiquity, among Jews, Greeks, and
Romans alike, and those who performed it were often acclaimed
as heroes.
Members of the eleventh-tothirteenth-century Muslim sect known
as the Assassins, which was based in Iran and Syria, seem to have
been the first to transform the act that was named after them into
a system and an ideology. Their efforts, contrary to popular belief,
were primarily directed not against the Crusaders but against their
own leaders, whom they saw as impious usurpers. In this sense,
the Assassins are the true predecessors of many of the so-called
Islamic terrorists of today, some of whom explicitly make this
point. The name Assassins, with its connotation of "hashish-
taker," was given to them by their Muslim enemies. They called
themselves fidayeen”those who are ready to sacrifice their lives
for their cause. The term has been revived and adopted by their
modern imitators. In two respects, however”in their choice of
weapons and of victims”the Assassins were markedly different
from their modern successors. The victim was always an
individual”a highly placed political, military, or religious leader
who was seen as the source of evil. He, and he alone, was killed.
This action was not terrorism in the current sense of that term but,
rather, what we would call "targeted assassination." The method
was always the same: the dagger. The Assassins disdained the use
of poison, crossbows, and other weapons that could be used from
a distance, and the Assassin did not expect”or, it would seem,
even desire”to survive his act, which he believed would insure
him eternal bliss. But in no circumstance did he commit suicide.
He died at the hands of his captors.
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="}
The twentieth century brought a renewal of such actions in the
Middle East, though of different types and for different purposes,
and terrorism has gone through several phases. During the last
years of the British Empire, imperial Britain faced terrorist
movements in its Middle Eastern dependencies that represented
three different cultures: Greeks in Cyprus, Jews in Palestine, and
Arabs in Aden. All three acted from nationalist, rather than
religious, motives. Though very different in their backgrounds and
political circumstances, the three were substantially alike in their
tactics. Their purpose was to persuade the imperial power that
staying in the region was not worth the cost in blood. Their
method was to attack the military and, to a lesser extent,
administrative personnel and installations. All three operated only
within their own territory and generally avoided collateral
damage. All three succeeded in their endeavors.
Thanks to the rapid development of the media, and especially of
television, the more recent forms of terrorism are targeted not at
specific and limited enemy objectives but at world opinion. Their
primary purpose is not to defeat or even to weaken the enemy
militarily but to gain publicity”a psychological victory. The most
successful group by far in this exercise has been the Palestine
Liberation Organization. The P.L.O. was founded in 1964 but
became important in 1967, after the defeat of the combined Arab
armies in the Six-Day War. Regular warfare had failed; it was
time to try other methods. The targets in this form of armed
struggle were not military or other government establishments,
which are usually too well guarded, but public places and
gatherings of any kind, which are overwhelmingly civilian, and in
which the victims do not necessarily have a connection to the
declared enemy. Examples of this include, in 1970, the hijacking
of three aircraft”one Swiss, one British, and one
American”which were all taken to Amman; the 1972 murder of
Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics; the seizure in 1973 of the
Saudi Embassy in Khartoum, and the murder there of two
Americans and a Belgian diplomat; and the takeover of the Italian
cruise ship Achille Lauro, in 1985. Other attacks were directed
against schools, shopping malls, discothèques, pizzerias, and even
passengers waiting in line at European airports. These and other
attacks by the P.L.O. were immediately and remarkably successful
in attaining their objectives”the capture of newspaper headlines
and television screens. They also drew a great deal of support in
sometimes unexpected places, and raised their perpetrators to
starring roles in the drama of international relations. Small
wonder that others were encouraged to follow their example”in
Ireland, in Spain, and elsewhere.
The Arab terrorists of the seventies and eighties made it clear that
they were waging a war for an Arab or Palestinian cause, not for
Islam. Indeed, a significant proportion of the P.L.O. leaders and
activists were Christian. Unlike socialism, which was discredited
by its failure, nationalism was discredited by its success. In every
Arab land but Palestine, the nationalists achieved their
purposes”the defeat and departure of imperialist rulers, and the
establishment of national sovereignty under national leaders. For a
while, freedom and independence were used as more or less
synonymous and interchangeable terms. The early experience of
independence, however, revealed that this was a sad error.
Independence and freedom are very different, and all too often the
attainment of one meant the end of the other.
Both in defeat and in victory, the Arab nationalists of the
twentieth century pioneered the methods that were later adopted
by religious terrorists, in particular the lack of concern at the
slaughter of innocent bystanders. This unconcern reached new
proportions in the terror campaign launched by Osama bin Laden
in the early nineties. The first major example was the bombing of
two American embassies in East Africa in 1998. In order to kill
twelve American diplomats, the terrorists were willing to
slaughter more than two hundred Africans, many of them
Muslims, who happened to be in the vicinity. The same disregard
for human life, on a vastly greater scale, underlay the action in
New York on September 11th.
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="}
There is no doubt that the foundation of Al Qaeda and the
consecutive declarations of war by Osama bin Laden marked the
beginning of a new and ominous phase in the history of both Islam
and terrorism. The triggers for bin Laden's actions, as he himself
has explained very clearly, were America's presence in Arabia
during the Gulf War”a desecration of the Muslim Holy
Land”and America's use of Saudi Arabia as a base for an attack
on Iraq. If Arabia is the most symbolic location in the world of
Islam, Baghdad, the seat of the caliphate for half a millennium
and the scene of some of the most glorious chapters in Islamic
history, is the second.
There was another, perhaps more important, factor driving bin
Laden. In the past, Muslims fighting against the West could
always turn to the enemies of the West for comfort,
encouragement, and material and military help. With the collapse
of the Soviet Union, for the first time in centuries there was no
such useful enemy. There were some nations that had the will, but
they lacked the means to play the role of the Third Reich or the
Soviet Union. Bin Laden and his cohorts soon realized that, in the
new configuration of world power, if they wished to fight
America they had to do it themselves. Some eleven years ago,
they created Al Qaeda, which included many veterans of the war
in Afghanistan. Their task might have seemed daunting to anyone
else, but they did not see it that way. In their view, they had
already driven the Russians out of Afghanistan, in a defeat so
overwhelming that it led directly to the collapse of the Soviet
Union itself. Having overcome the superpower that they had
always regarded as more formidable, they felt ready to take on the
other; in this they were encouraged by the opinion, often
expressed by Osama bin Laden, among others, that America was a
paper tiger.
Muslim terrorists had been driven by such beliefs before. One of
the most surprising revelations in the memoirs of those who held
the American Embassy in Teheran from 1979 to 1981 was that
their original intention had been to hold the building and the
hostages for only a few days. They changed their minds when
statements from Washington made it clear that there was no
danger of serious action against them. They finally released the
hostages, they explained, only because they feared that the new
President, Ronald Reagan, might approach the problem "like a
cowboy."
Bin Laden and his followers clearly have no such concern, and
their hatred is neither constrained by fear nor diluted by respect.
As precedents, they repeatedly cite the American retreats from
Vietnam, from Lebanon, and”the most important of all, in their
eyes”from Somalia. Bin Laden's remarks in an interview with
John Miller, of ABC News, on May 28, 1998, are especially
revealing:
We have seen in the last decade the decline of the American
government and the weakness of the American soldier, who is
ready to wage cold wars and unprepared to fight long wars. This
was proven in Beirut when the Marines fled after two explosions.
It also proves they can run in less than twenty-four hours, and this
was also repeated in Somalia. . . . The youth were surprised at the
low morale of the American soldiers. . . . After a few blows, they
ran in defeat. . . . They forgot about being the world leader and the
leader of the new world order. [They] left, dragging their corpses
and their shameful defeat, and stopped using such titles.
Similar inferences are drawn when American spokesmen refuse to
implicate”and sometimes even hasten to exculpate”parties that
most Middle Easterners believe to be deeply involved in the
attacks on America. A good example is the repeated official
denial of any Iraqi involvement in the events of September 11th. It
may indeed be true that there is no evidence of Iraqi involvement,
and that the Administration is unwilling to make false
accusations. But it is difficult for Middle Easterners to resist the
idea that this refusal to implicate Saddam Hussein is due less to a
concern for legality than to a fear of confronting him. He would
indeed be a formidable adversary. If he faces the prospect of
imminent destruction, as would be inevitable in a real
confrontation, there is no knowing what he might do with his
already considerable arsenal of unconventional weapons.
Certainly, he would not be restrained by any scruples, or by the
consideration that the greatest victims of any such attack would be
his own people and their immediate neighbors.
For Osama bin Laden, 2001 marks the resumption of the war for
the religious dominance of the world that began in the seventh
century. For him and his followers, this is a moment of
opportunity. Today, America exemplifies the civilization and
embodies the leadership of the House of War, and, like Rome and
Byzantium, it has become degenerate and demoralized, ready to
be overthrown. Khomeini's designation of the United States as
"the Great Satan" was telling. In the Koran, Satan is described as
"the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men." This is
the essential point about Satan: he is neither a conqueror nor an
exploiter”he is, first and last, a tempter. And for the members of
Al Qaeda it is the seduction of America that represents the
greatest threat to the kind of Islam they wish to impose on their
fellow-Muslims.
But there are others for whom America offers a different kind of
temptation”the promise of human rights, of free institutions, and
of a responsible and elected government. There are a growing
number of individuals and even some movements that have
undertaken the complex task of introducing such institutions in
their own countries. It is not easy. Similar attempts, as noted, led
to many of today's corrupt regimes. Of the fifty-seven member
states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, only one, the
Turkish Republic, has operated democratic institutions over a
long period of time and, despite difficult and ongoing problems,
has made progress in establishing a liberal economy and a free
society and political order.
In two countries, Iraq and Iran, where the regimes are strongly
anti-American, there are democratic oppositions capable of taking
over and forming governments. We could do much to help them,
and have done little. In most other countries in the region, there
are people who share our values, sympathize with us, and would
like to share our way of life. They understand freedom, and want
to enjoy it at home. It is more difficult for us to help those people,
but at least we should not hinder them. If they succeed, we shall
have friends and allies in the true, not just the diplomatic, sense of
these words.
Meanwhile, there is a more urgent problem. If bin Laden can
persuade the world of Islam to accept his views and his
leadership, then a long and bitter struggle lies ahead, and not only
for America. Sooner or later, Al Qaeda and related groups will
clash with the other neighbors of Islam”Russia, China,
India”who may prove less squeamish than the Americans in
using their power against Muslims and their sanctities. If bin
Laden is correct in his calculations and succeeds in his war, then a
dark future awaits the world, especially the part of it that
embraces Islam. {PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="
}
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sun Sep 22 2002 - 05:06:21 MDT