The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (9 page)

But there were certainly major negative consequences of imperialism and more broadly of Western or European influence, even in those countries that managed to retain their political independence, like Turkey and Iran. Notable among the effects of modernization are the strengthening of state authority by the reinforcement of the apparatus of surveillance, repression, and indoctrination, and at the same time the weakening or elimination of those intermediate powers that in the traditional order limited the effective power of autocratic rulers. Social change, and the breakdown of old social relationships and obligations, brought great harm to the society and created new and gaping contrasts, which modern communications made all the more visible. As far back as 1832, an acute British observer, a young naval officer called Adolphus Slade, noted this difference between what he called the old nobility and the new nobility.
³
The old nobility, he said, lived on their estates. For the new nobility, the state was their estate. This remains true in much of the region today.

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.

As early as 1914, Germany, then allied with the Ottoman Empire, tried to mobilize religious feeling among the Muslim subjects of the British, French, and Russian Empires against their imperial masters and therefore in favor of Germany. The effort produced meager results and was effectively ridiculed by the great Dutch orientalist Snouck Hurgronje in a famous article entitled “Holy War: Made in Germany.”
⁴

Where the Kaiser had failed, Hitler was for a while remarkably successful. In late March 1933, within weeks of Hitler’s accession to power, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, approached the German consul-general in Jerusalem, Dr. Heinrich Wolff, and offered his services. The consul, reporting this offer to Berlin, recommended that it be rejected or at least disregarded. As long as there was any hope of winning over the British Empire as an ally of Germany, there was no point in antagonizing the British by forming links with what was then a primarily anti-British movement. It was not until after the Munich Agreements in 1938, when Hitler finally gave up hope of recruiting the British into an Aryan alliance with Germany, that the overtures of the Palestinian leadership were accepted. From then on and throughout the war years their links were very close, and the mufti, from his office on the outskirts of Berlin, played a significant role in inter-Arab politics. In 1941, with German help via Vichy-controlled Syria, Rashid ‘Ali succeeded for a while in establishing a pro-Axis regime in Iraq. He was defeated by Allied troops and went to join the mufti in Germany. Even Anwar Sadat, by his own admission, worked as a German spy in British-occupied Egypt.
⁵

The defeat of Germany and the collapse of the Third Reich and its various agencies left an aching void. As many saw it, it was during the resulting interlude that in 1948 the Jews were able to set up their state and inflict a humiliating defeat on the Arab armies that were sent to prevent it. A new patron and protector, a replacement for the Third Reich, was urgently needed. It was found in 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 Bonaparte and Nelson was ended by Mikhail Gorbachev and the elder George Bush. At first, it seemed that the era of imperial rivalry had ended with the withdrawal of both rivals—the Soviet Union because it couldn’t, the United States because it wouldn’t play the imperial role. But before long events, notably the Iranian Revolution and the wars of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, forced the United States to involve itself more directly in the affairs of the region. Middle Easterners saw this as a new phase in the old imperial game. Americans did not, and showed that they had neither the desire nor the aptitude for an imperial role.

Muslim leaders, both in government and in opposition, reacted in different ways to this new situation. For some, the natural response was to seek a new patron—a successor to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, to whom they might turn for encouragement, support, and help in the war against the West. The West as a power bloc had meanwhile moved farther west and now consisted essentially of the United States, leaving an interesting new possibility for continental Europe to assume the opposing role. Some Europeans indeed, sharing for reasons of their own the rancor and hostility of the Middle East toward the United States, have shown willingness to accept this role. But though they may have the will, they lack the means.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, followed by the defeat of Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War of 1991, was a devastating blow to secular nationalist movements, notably that of the Palestinians, who once again, as in 1945, found themselves bereft of a great power patron and helper in their cause. Their Soviet protector was gone. Even their Arab financial backers in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, angered by enthusiastic Palestinian support for Saddam Hussein, for a while stopped their subsidies, leaving the Palestinians isolated, impoverished, and enfeebled. It was this situation that forced them to think the unthinkable and enter into a peace process with Israel. The PLO was rescued, in fundamentalist eyes ignominiously, by the Americans and the Israelis, and induced to enter into a demeaning dialogue with Israel.

All this gave greater plausibility to the fundamentalists’ view of the world, and greater appeal to their case. They—and notably Usama bin Ladin—interpreted the collapse of the Soviet Union in a different way. In their perception it was they, not America, that had won the Cold War. In their eyes, the Soviet Union was not the benign helper in the common struggle against the Jews and the Western imperialists but rather the fountainhead of atheism and unbelief, the oppressor of many millions of Muslim subjects, and the invader of Afghanistan. As they saw it, not implausibly, it was their struggle in Afghanistan that had defeated the mighty Red Army and driven the Soviets to defeat and collapse. Having disposed of the more ferocious and more dangerous of the two infidel superpowers, their next task was to deal with the other, the United States, and in this war the compromisers were tools and agents of the infidel enemy. For a variety of reasons, the Islamic fundamentalists believed that fighting America would be a simpler and easier task. In their view, the United States had become morally corrupt, socially degenerate, and in consequence, politically and militarily enfeebled. This perception has an interesting history.

CHAPTER IV

D
ISCOVERING
A
MERICA

For a long time, remarkably little was known about America in the lands of Islam. At first, the voyages of discovery aroused some interest—the only surviving copy of Christopher Columbus’s own map of America is a Turkish translation and adaptation, still preserved in the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul. A sixteenth-century Turkish geographer’s account of the discovery of the New World, entitled
The History of Western India,
was one of the first books printed in Turkey—in the eighteenth century. But interest was minimal, and not much was said about America in Turkish, Arabic, or other Muslim languages until a relatively late date. The American Revolution, unlike the French Revolution a few years later, passed almost unnoticed and was seen, if at all, as a familiar type of insurrection. A Moroccan ambassador who was in Spain at the time wrote what must surely be the first Arabic account of the American Revolution:

The English Ambassador left Spain because of the war that broke out between the Spaniards and the English. The cause of this was that the people of America were subjects of the English king and thanks to the revenue which he collected from them he was stronger than all the other Christian peoples. It is said that he increased the burden of taxes and imposts upon them, and sent them a ship laden with tea and compelled them to pay for it more than was customary. This they refused and they asked him to accept the money that was due to him from them but not to impose excessive taxes on them. This he refused and they rose in rebellion against him, seeking independence. The French helped them in their rebellion against the English, hoping in this way to injure and weaken the English king because he was the strongest of the different races of Christians on the sea.
¹

The sultan of Morocco signed a treaty of friendship with the United States in 1787, and thereafter the new republic had a number of dealings, some friendly, some hostile, mostly commercial, all of them limited, with other Muslim states.

The first recorded mention of America as a political symbol in the Islamic world was in Istanbul on July 14, 1793, when the newly arrived ambassador of the French Republic held a public celebration culminating in a salute of guns from two French ships moored at Seraglio point. According to the ambassador’s report, they hoisted the colors of the Ottoman Empire, of the French and American Republics, and “those of a few other powers who had not soiled their arms in the impious league of tyrants.”
²
A subsequent French ambassador in Istanbul, General Aubert du Bayet, (later Dubayet), who arrived in 1796, was himself in a sense an American, having been born in New Orleans and fought in the army of the United States. He devoted some effort to spreading the ideas of the revolution in Turkey.

But these were French, not American enterprises, and while the ideas of the French Revolution reverberated in Turkish, Arabic, and other thought and letters through the nineteenth century, the American Revolution, and the American Republic to which it gave birth, for long remained unnoticed and even unknown. Even the growing American presence—merchants, consuls, missionaries, and teachers—aroused little or no curiosity, and is almost unmentioned in the literature and the newspapers of the time. Textbooks of geography, mostly translated or adapted from European originals, include brief factual accounts of the Western Hemisphere; the newspapers include a few scattered references to events in the United States, usually referred to by a form of its French name,
États Unis,
in Arabic
It
z
n
or something of the sort. A school textbook published in Egypt in 1833, translated from French and adapted by the famous writer and translator Sheikh Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi (1801–1873) adds a brief description of the
It
z
n
“as a state (
dawla
) composed of several regions (
iql
m
), assembled in one republic in the land of North America. Its inhabitants are tribes who came . . . from England and took possession of that land. Then they freed themselves from the grasp of the English and became free and independent on their own. This country is among the greatest civilized countries in America, and in it worship in all faiths and religious communities is permitted. The seat of its government is a town called Washington.”
³
The concluding sentences are remarkable.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, somewhat more attention is given to America in textbooks and encyclopedias on the one hand and newspapers on the other, but it is still very limited, and seems to have been in the main confined to the non-Muslim minorities. References to America in the general literature area are on the whole neither positive nor negative but briefly descriptive. Missionaries were of course not liked in Muslim circles, but otherwise there seems to have been no mistrust, still less hatred. After the end of the Civil War, some unemployed American officers even found careers in the service of Muslim rulers, helping them to modernize their armies. American missionaries, though forbidden to proselytize Muslims, were able to turn some Orthodox Christians into Presbyterians and, more important, to provide modern secondary and higher education to growing numbers of boys and later girls, at first from the minorities, eventually from among the Muslims. Some of the graduates of these schools even went to the United States, to continue their education in American colleges and universities. These too, to begin with, came mainly from Christian minorities; they were followed in due course by increasing numbers of their Muslim compatriots, some of them even funded by the governments of their countries.

The Second World War, the oil industry, and postwar developments brought many Americans to the Islamic lands; increasing numbers of Muslims also came to America, at first as students, then as teachers, businessmen, or other visitors, eventually as immigrants. Cinema and later television brought the American way of life, or at any rate a certain version of it, before countless millions to whom the very name of America had previously been meaningless or unknown. A wide range of American products, particularly in the immediate postwar years, when European competition was virtually eliminated and Japanese competition had not yet arisen, reached into the remotest markets of the Muslim world, winning new customers and, perhaps more important, creating new tastes and ambitions. For some, America represented freedom and justice and opportunity. For many more, it represented wealth and power and success, at a time when these qualities were not regarded as sins or crimes.

And then came the great change, when the leaders of a widespread and widening religious revival sought out and identified their enemies as the enemies of God, and gave them “a local habitation and a name” in the Western Hemisphere. Suddenly, or so it seemed, America had become the archenemy, the incarnation of evil, the diabolic opponent of all that is good, and specifically, for Muslims, of Islam. Why?

Among the components in the mood of anti-Americanism were certain intellectual influences coming from Europe. One of these was from Germany, where a negative view of America formed part of a school of thought, including writers as diverse as Rainer Maria Rilke, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, and Martin Heidegger. In this perception, America was the ultimate example of civilization without culture; rich and comfortable, materially advanced but soulless and artificial; assembled or at best constructed, not grown; mechanical not organic; technologically complex but without the spirituality and vitality of the rooted, human, national cultures of the Germans and other “authentic” peoples. German philosophy and particularly the philosophy of education enjoyed a considerable vogue among Arab and some other Muslim intellectuals in the 1930s and early 1940s, and this philosophic anti-Americanism was part of the message. The Nazi version of German ideologies was influential in nationalist circles, notably among the founders and followers of the Ba‘th Party in Syria and Iraq. After the French surrender to Germany in June 1940, the French mandated territories of Syria and Lebanon remained under the control of the Vichy authorities and were therefore readily accessible to the Germans, serving as a base for their activities in the Arab world. Notable among these was the attempt—for a while successful—to establish a pro-Nazi regime in Iraq. The foundation of the Ba‘th Party dates from this period. These activities ended with the British (and Free French) occupation of Syria-Lebanon in July 1941, but the Ba‘th Party and its distinctive ideologies survived.