The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (4 page)

In Ottoman times there was an important change. The qadi gained greatly in power and authority, and even the mufti was integrated into the public chain of authority. But the old attitude of mistrust of government persisted, and it is frequently expressed in proverbs, folktales, and even high literature.

For more than a thousand years, Islam provided the only universally acceptable set of rules and principles for the regulation of public and social life. Even during the period of maximum European influence, in the countries ruled or dominated by European imperial powers as well as in those that remained independent, Islamic political notions and attitudes remained a profound and pervasive influence. In recent years there have been many signs that these notions and attitudes may be returning, albeit in modified forms, to their previous dominance.

It is in the realm of politics—domestic, regional, and international alike—that we see the most striking differences between Islam and the rest of the world. The heads of state or ministers of foreign affairs of the Scandinavian countries and the United Kingdom do not, from time to time, foregather in Protestant summit conferences, nor was it ever the practice of the rulers of Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union, temporarily forgetting their political and ideological differences, to hold regular meetings on the basis of their current or previous adherence to the Orthodox Church. Similarly, the Buddhist states of East and Southeast Asia do not constitute a Buddhist bloc at the United Nations, nor for that matter in any other of their political activities. The very idea of such a grouping, based on religion, in the modern world may seem anachronistic and even absurd. It is neither anachronistic nor absurd in relation to Islam. Throughout the tensions of the Cold War and after, more than fifty Muslim governments—including monarchies and republics, conservatives and radicals, practitioners of capitalism and of socialism, supporters of the Western bloc, the Eastern bloc, and a whole spectrum of shades of neutrality—built up an elaborate apparatus of international consultation and, on many issues, cooperation.

In September 1969 an Islamic summit conference held in Rabat, Morocco, decided to create a body to be known as the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), with a permanent secretariat in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. This body was duly set up, and it developed rapidly in the 1970s. The OIC was particularly concerned with help to poor Muslim countries, support for Muslim minorities in non-Muslim countries, and the international position of Islam and of Muslims—in the words of one observer, the Islamic rights of man.

This organization now numbers fifty-seven member states, plus three with observer status. Two of these states, Albania and Turkey, are or aspire to be in Europe (Bosnia has only observer status); two, Surinam (admitted 1996) and Guyana (admitted 1998), are in the Western Hemisphere. The rest are in Asia and Africa, and with few exceptions gained their independence in the last half century from the Western European and, more recently, the Soviet empires. Most of them are overwhelmingly Muslim in population, though a few were admitted on the strength of significant Muslim minorities. Apart from these states, there are important Muslim minorities in other countries—some of them akin to the majority, as in India, some of them ethnically as well as religiously different, like the Chechens and Tatars of the Russian Federation. Some countries, like China, have Muslim minorities of both kinds. Many more countries are now acquiring Muslim minorities by immigration.

There were and are important limits to the effectiveness of the OIC as a factor in international politics. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, a flagrant act of aggression against a sovereign Muslim nation, evoked no serious protest and was even defended by some members. More recently, the organization has failed to concern itself with the civil wars in member states such as Sudan and Somalia. Nor has its record in regional matters been impressive. Between 1980 and 1988, two Islamic countries, Iraq and Iran, fought a devastating war, inflicting immense damage on each other. The OIC did nothing either to prevent or to end this war. In general, the OIC, unlike the Organization of American States and the Organization of African Unity, does not look into human rights abuses and other domestic problems of member states; its human rights concerns have been limited to Muslims living under non-Muslim rule, primarily in Palestine. The OIC should not, however, be discounted. Its cultural and social activities are important and are growing, and the machinery that it provides for regular consultation between member states may increase in importance as the Cold War and its disruptive effects recede into the past.

Turning from international and regional to domestic politics, the difference between Islam and the rest of the world, though less striking, is still substantial. In some of the countries that practice multiparty democracy, there are political parties with religious designations—Christian in the West, Hindu in India, Buddhist in the Orient. But there are relatively few of these parties, and still fewer that play a major role. Even with these, religious themes are usually of minor importance in their programs and their appeals to the electorate. Yet in many, indeed in most Islamic countries, religion remains a major political factor—far more indeed in domestic than in international or even in regional affairs. Why this difference?

One answer is obvious; most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim, in a way and in a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian. Admittedly, in many of these countries, Christian beliefs and the clergy who uphold them are still a powerful force, and although their role is not what it was in past centuries, it is by no means insignificant. But in no Christian country at the present time can religious leaders count on the degree of belief and participation that remains normal in the Muslim lands. In few, if any, Christian countries do Christian sanctities enjoy the immunity from critical comment or discussion that is accepted as normal even in ostensibly secular and democratic Muslim societies. Indeed, this privileged immunity has been extended, de facto, to Western countries where Muslim communities are now established and where Muslim beliefs and practices are accorded a level of immunity from criticism that the Christian majorities have lost and the Jewish minorities never had. Most important, with very few exceptions, the Christian clergy do not exercise or even claim the kind of public authority that is still normal and accepted in most Muslim countries.

The higher level of religious faith and practice among Muslims as compared with followers of other religions is part of the explanation of the unique Muslim attitude to politics; it is not the whole explanation, since the same attitude may be found in individuals and even in whole groups whose commitment to religious faith and practice is at best perfunctory. Islam is not only a matter of faith and practice; it is also an identity and a loyalty—for many, an identity and a loyalty that transcend all others.

On the surface, the importation of the Western notions of patriotism and nationalism changed all this and led to the creation of a series of modern nation-states, extending across the Islamic world from Morocco to Indonesia.

But all is not as it appears on the surface. Two examples may suffice. In 1923, after the last Greco-Turkish war, the two governments agreed to solve their minority problems by an exchange of populations—Greeks were sent from Turkey to Greece, Turks were sent from Greece to Turkey. At least, that is how the history books usually tell the story. The facts are somewhat different. The protocol that the two governments signed in Lausanne in 1923, embodying the exchange agreement, does not speak of “Greeks” and “Turks.” It defines the persons to be exchanged as “Turkish subjects of the Greek Orthodox religion residing in Turkey” and “Greek subjects of the Muslim religion residing in Greece.” The protocol thus recognizes only two types of identity—the one defined by being the subject of a state, the other by being an adherent of a religion. It makes no reference to either ethnic or linguistic nationality. The accuracy of this document in expressing the intentions of the signatories was confirmed by the actual exchange. Many of the so-called Greeks from the Anatolian Turkish province of Karaman spoke Turkish as their mother tongue but wrote it in the Greek script and worshiped in Orthodox churches. Many of the so-called Turks from Greece knew little or no Turkish and commonly spoke Greek—but they wrote it in the Turco-Arabic script. A Western observer, accustomed to a Western system of classification, might well have concluded that what the governments of Greece and Turkey agreed and accomplished was not an exchange and repatriation of Greek and Turkish national minorities but rather a double deportation into exile—of Muslim Greeks to Turkey, of Christian Turks to Greece. Until very recently, Greece and Turkey, both Westernizing democracies, one a member, the other an applicant for membership of the European Union, had a line for religion on their state-issued identity documents.

A second example is Egypt. There can be few, if any, nations with a better claim to nationhood—a country sharply defined by both history and geography, with a continuous history of civilization going back for more than five thousand years. But Egyptians have several identities, and for most of the last fourteen centuries, that is, since the Arab-Islamic conquest of Egypt in the seventh century and the subsequent Islamization and Arabization of the country, the Egyptian identity has rarely been the predominant one, yielding pride of place to the cultural and linguistic identity of Arabism and, for most of their history, to the religious identity of Islam. Egypt as a nation is one of the oldest in the world. Egypt as a nation-state is a modern creation, and still faces many challenges at home. At the present time, the strongest of these challenges in Egypt as in some other Muslim countries comes from radical Islamic groups, the kind now commonly if misleadingly described as “fundamentalist.”

From the lifetime of its Founder, and therefore in its sacred scriptures, Islam is associated in the minds and memories of Muslims with the exercise of political and military power. Classical Islam recognized a distinction between things of this world and things of the next, between pious and worldly considerations. It did not recognize a separate institution, with a hierarchy and laws of its own, to regulate religious matters.

Does this mean that Islam is a theocracy? In the sense that God is seen as the supreme sovereign, the answer would have to be yes indeed. In the sense of government by a priesthood, most definitely not. The emergence of a priestly hierarchy and its assumption of ultimate authority in the state is a modern innovation and is a unique contribution of the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran to Islamic thought and practice.

The Islamic Revolution in Iran, like the French and Russian Revolutions which it in many ways resembles, had a tremendous impact not only at home and among its own people but also among all the countries and peoples with whom it shared a common universe of discourse. Like the French and Russian Revolutions in their days, it aroused tremendous hope and enthusiasm. Like these revolutions, it has suffered its Terror and its War of Intervention; like them, it has its Jacobins and its Bolsheviks, determined to crush any sign of pragmatism or moderation. And like these earlier revolutions, and more particularly the Russian, it has its own network of agents and emissaries striving in various ways to further the cause of the revolution or at least of the regime that is seen to embody it.

The word
revolution
has been much misused in the modern Middle East, being applied to—or claimed for—many events which would more appropriately be designated by the French
coup d’état,
the German
Putsch,
or the Spanish
pronunciamiento.
The political experience of the English-speaking peoples, interestingly, provides no equivalent term. What happened in Iran was none of these but was in its origins an authentic revolutionary movement of change. Like its predecessors, it has in many ways gone badly wrong, leading to tyranny at home, terror and subversion abroad. Unlike revolutionary France and Russia, revolutionary Iran lacks the means, the resources, and the skills to become a major world power and threat. The threat that it does offer is primarily, and overwhelmingly, to Muslims and to Islam itself.

The revolutionary wave in Islam has several components. One of them is a sense of humiliation: the feeling of a community of people accustomed to regard themselves as the sole custodians of God’s truth, commanded by Him to bring it to the infidels, who suddenly find themselves dominated and exploited by those same infidels and, even when no longer dominated, still profoundly affected in ways that change their lives, moving them from the true Islamic to other paths. To humiliation was added frustration as the various remedies, most of them imported from the West, were tried and one after another failed.

After humiliation and frustration came a third component, necessary for the resurgence—a new confidence and sense of power. These arose from the oil crisis of 1973, when in support of Egypt’s war against Israel, the oil-producing Arab countries used both the supply and the price of oil as what proved to be a very effective weapon. The resulting wealth, pride, and self-assurance were reinforced by another new element—contempt. On closer acquaintance with Europe and America, Muslim visitors began to observe and describe what they saw as the moral degeneracy and consequent weakness of Western civilization.

In a time of intensifying strains, of faltering ideologies, jaded loyalties, and crumbling institutions, an ideology expressed in Islamic terms offered several advantages: an emotionally familiar basis of group identity, solidarity, and exclusion; an acceptable basis of legitimacy and authority; an immediately intelligible formulation of principles for both a critique of the present and a program for the future. By means of these, Islam could provide the most effective symbols and slogans for mobilization, whether for or against a cause or a regime.