-----
/ o o \
====OO=====OO===
http://pnews.org/
Progressive News & Views (since 1982)
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
--
Islam's Imperial Dreams
Muslim political ambitions aren't a reaction to Western encroachments.
BY EFRAIM KARSH
Tuesday, April 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
When satirical depictions of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper
sparked a worldwide wave of Muslim violence early this year, observers
naturally focused on the wanton destruction of Western embassies,
businesses, and other institutions. Less attention was paid to the words
that often accompanied the riots--words with ominous historical echoes.
"Hurry up and apologize to our nation, because if you do not, you will
regret it," declared Khaled Mash'al, the leader of Hamas, fresh from the
Islamist group's sweeping victory in the Palestinian elections:
This is because our nation is progressing and is victorious. . . . By
Allah, you will be defeated. . . . Tomorrow, our nation will sit on the
throne of the world. This is not a figment of the imagination but a fact.
Tomorrow we will lead the world, Allah willing. Apologize today, before
remorse will do you no good.
Among Islamic radicals, such gloating about the prowess and imminent
triumph of their "nation" is as commonplace as recitals of the long and
bitter catalog of grievances related to the loss of historical Muslim
dominion. Osama bin Laden has repeatedly alluded to the collapse of
Ottoman power at the end of World War I and, with it, the abolition of the
Ottoman caliphate. "What America is tasting now," he declared in the
immediate wake of 9/11, "is only a copy of what we have tasted. Our
Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years, of
humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its
sanctities desecrated." Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's top deputy, has
pointed still farther into the past, lamenting "the tragedy of
al-Andalus"--that is, the end of Islamic rule in Spain in 1492.
These historical claims are in turn frequently dismissed by Westerners as
delusional, a species of mere self-aggrandizement or propaganda. But the
Islamists are perfectly serious, and know what they are doing. Their
rhetoric has a millennial warrant, both in doctrine and in fact, and taps
into a deep undercurrent that has characterized the political culture of
Islam from the beginning. Though tempered and qualified in different
places and at different times, the Islamic longing for unfettered
suzerainty has never disappeared, and has resurfaced in our own day with a
vengeance. It goes by the name of empire.
"I was ordered to fight all men until they say, 'There is no god but
Allah.' " With these farewell words, the prophet Muhammad summed up the
international vision of the faith he brought to the world. As a universal
religion, Islam envisages a global political order in which all humankind
will live under Muslim rule as either believers or subject communities. In
order to achieve this goal, it is incumbent on all free, male, adult
Muslims to carry out an uncompromising "struggle in the path of Allah," or
jihad. As the 14th-century historian and philosopher Abdel Rahman ibn
Khaldun wrote, "In the Muslim community, the jihad is a religious duty
because of the universalism of the Islamic mission and the obligation [to
convert] everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force."
As a historical matter, the birth of Islam was inextricably linked with
empire. Unlike Christianity and the Christian kingdoms that once existed
under or alongside it, Islam has never distinguished between temporal and
religious powers, which were combined in the person of Muhammad. Having
fled from his hometown of Mecca to Medina in 622 c.e. to become a
political and military leader rather than a private preacher, Muhammad
spent the last ten years of his life fighting to unify Arabia under his
rule. Indeed, he devised the concept of jihad shortly after his migration
to Medina as a means of enticing his local followers to raid Meccan
caravans. Had it not been for his sudden death, he probably would have
expanded his reign well beyond the peninsula.
The Qur'anic revelations during Muhammad's Medina years abound with verses
extolling the virtues of jihad, as do the countless sayings and traditions
(hadith) attributed to the prophet. Those who participate in this holy
pursuit are to be generously rewarded, both in this life and in the
afterworld, where they will reside in shaded and ever-green gardens,
indulged by pure women. Accordingly, those killed while waging jihad
should not be mourned: "Allah has bought from the believers their soul and
their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the path of
Allah; they kill and are killed. . . . So rejoice in the bargain you have
made with Him; that is the mighty triumph."
But the doctrine's appeal was not just otherworldly. By forbidding
fighting and raiding within the community of believers (the umma),
Muhammad had deprived the Arabian tribes of a traditional source of
livelihood. For a time, the prophet could rely on booty from non-Muslims
as a substitute for the lost war spoils, which is why he never went out of
his way to convert all of the tribes seeking a place in his Pax Islamica.
Yet given his belief in the supremacy of Islam and his relentless
commitment to its widest possible dissemination, he could hardly deny
conversion to those wishing to undertake it. Once the whole of Arabia had
become Muslim, a new source of wealth and an alternative outlet would have
to be found for the aggressive energies of the Arabian tribes, and it was,
in the Fertile Crescent and the Levant.
Within twelve years of Muhammad's death, a Middle Eastern empire,
stretching from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to northern Syria, had come
into being under the banner of Islam. By the early 8th century, the
Muslims had hugely extended their grip to Central Asia and much of the
Indian subcontinent, had laid siege to the Byzantine capital of
Constantinople, and had overrun North Africa and Spain. Had they not been
contained in 732 at the famous battle of Poitiers in west central France,
they might well have swept deep into northern Europe.
Though sectarianism and civil war divided the Muslim world in the
generations after Muhammad, the basic dynamic of Islam remained
expansionist. The short-lived Umayyad dynasty (661-750) gave way to the
ostensibly more pious Abbasid caliphs, whose readiness to accept non-Arabs
solidified Islam's hold on its far-flung possessions. From their imperial
capital of Baghdad, the Abbasids ruled, with waning authority, until the
Mongol invasion of 1258. The most powerful of their successors would
emerge in Anatolia, among the Ottoman Turks who invaded Europe in the
mid-14th century and would conquer Constantinople in 1453, destroying the
Byzantine empire and laying claim to virtually all of the Balkan peninsula
and the eastern Mediterranean.
Like their Arab predecessors, the Ottomans were energetic empire-builders
in the name of jihad. By the early 16th century, they had conquered Syria
and Egypt from the Mamluks, the formidable slave soldiers who had
contained the Mongols and destroyed the Crusader kingdoms. Under Sultan
Suleiman the Magnificent, they soon turned northward. By the middle of the
17th century they seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe, only to be
turned back in fierce fighting at the gates of Vienna in 1683--on
September 11, of all dates. Though already on the defensive by the early
18th century, the Ottoman empire--the proverbial "sick man of
Europe"--would endure another 200 years. Its demise at the hands of the
victorious European powers of World War I, to say nothing of the work of
Mustafa Kemal Atatrk, the father of modern Turkish nationalism, finally
brought an end both to the Ottoman caliphate itself and to Islam's
centuries-long imperial reach.
To Islamic historians, the chronicles of Muslim empire represent a model
of shining religious zeal and selfless exertion in the cause of Allah.
Many Western historians, for their part, have been inclined to marvel at
the perceived sophistication and tolerance of Islamic rule, praising the
caliphs' cultivation of the arts and sciences and their apparent
willingness to accommodate ethnic and religious minorities. There is some
truth in both views, but neither captures the deeper and often more
callous impulses at work in the expanding umma set in motion by Muhammad.
For successive generations of Islamic rulers, imperial dominion was
dictated not by universalistic religious principles but by their prophet's
vision of conquest and his summons to fight and subjugate unbelievers.
That the worldly aims of Islam might conflict with its moral and spiritual
demands was evident from the start of the caliphate. Though the Umayyad
monarchs portrayed their constant wars of expansion as "jihad in the path
of Allah," this was largely a faade, concealing an increasingly secular
and absolutist rule. Lax in their attitude toward Islamic practices and
mores, they were said to have set aside special days for drinking
alcohol--specifically forbidden by the prophet--and showed little
inhibition about appearing nude before their boon companions and female
singers.
The coup staged by the Abbasids in 747-49 was intended to restore Islam's
true ways and undo the godless practices of their predecessors; but they
too, like the Umayyads, were first and foremost imperial monarchs. For the
Abbasids, Islam was a means to consolidating their jurisdiction and
enjoying the fruits of conquest. They complied with the stipulations of
the nascent religious law (shari'a) only to the extent that it served
their needs, and indulged in the same vices--wine, singing girls, and
sexual license--that had ruined the reputation of the Umayyads.
Of particular importance to the Abbasids was material splendor. On the
occasion of his nephew's coronation as the first Abbasid caliph, Dawud ibn
Ali had proclaimed, "We did not rebel in order to grow rich in silver and
in gold." Yet it was precisely the ever-increasing pomp of the royal court
that would underpin Abbasid prestige. The gem-studded dishes of the
caliph's table, the gilded curtains of the palace, the golden tree and
ruby-eyed golden elephant that adorned the royal courtyard were a few of
the opulent possessions that bore witness to this extravagance.
The riches of the empire, moreover, were concentrated in the hands of the
few at the expense of the many. While the caliph might bestow thousands of
dirhams on a favorite poet for reciting a few lines, ordinary laborers in
Baghdad carried home a dirham or two a month. As for the empire's more
distant subjects, the caliphs showed little interest in their conversion
to the faith, preferring instead to colonize their lands and expropriate
their wealth and labor. Not until the third Islamic century did the bulk
of these populations embrace the religion of their imperial masters, and
this was a process emanating from below--an effort by non-Arabs to escape
paying tribute and to remove social barriers to their advancement. To make
matters worse, the metropolis plundered the resources of the provinces, a
practice inaugurated at the time of Muhammad and reaching its apogee under
the Abbasids. Combined with the government's weakening control of the
periphery, this shameless exploitation triggered numerous rebellions
throughout the empire.
Tension between the center and the periphery was, indeed, to become the
hallmark of Islam's imperial experience. Even in its early days, under the
Umayyads, the empire was hopelessly overextended, largely because of
inadequate means of communication and control. Under the Abbasids, a
growing number of provinces fell under the sway of local dynasties. With
no effective metropolis, the empire was reduced to an agglomeration of
entities united only by the overarching factors of language and religion.
Though the Ottomans temporarily reversed the trend, their own imperial
ambitions were likewise eventually thwarted by internal fragmentation.
In the long history of Islamic empire, the wide gap between delusions of
grandeur and the centrifugal forces of localism would be bridged time and
again by force of arms, making violence a key element of Islamic political
culture. No sooner had Muhammad died than his successor, Abu Bakr, had to
suppress a widespread revolt among the Arabian tribes. Twenty-three years
later, the head of the umma, the caliph Uthman ibn Affan, was murdered by
disgruntled rebels; his successor, Ali ibn Abi Talib, was confronted for
most of his reign with armed insurrections, most notably by the governor
of Syria, Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufian, who went on to establish the Umayyad
dynasty after Ali's assassination. Mu'awiya's successors managed to hang
on to power mainly by relying on physical force, and were consumed for
most of their reign with preventing or quelling revolts in the diverse
corners of their empire. The same was true for the Abbasids during the
long centuries of their sovereignty.
Western academics often hold up the Ottoman empire as an exception to this
earlier pattern. In fact the caliphate did deal relatively gently with its
vast non-Muslim subject populations--provided that they acquiesced in
their legal and institutional inferiority in the Islamic order of things.
When these groups dared to question their subordinate status, however, let
alone attempt to break free from the Ottoman yoke, they were viciously put
down. In the century or so between Napoleon's conquests in the Middle East
and World War I, the Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in
response to the nationalist aspirations of their European subjects. The
Greek war of independence of the 1820's, the Danubian uprisings of 1848
and the attendant Crimean war, the Balkan explosion of the 1870's, the
Greco-Ottoman war of 1897--all were painful reminders of the costs of
resisting Islamic imperial rule.
Nor was such violence confined to Ottoman Europe. Turkey's Afro-Asiatic
provinces, though far less infected with the nationalist virus, were also
scenes of mayhem and destruction. The Ottoman army or its surrogates
brought force to bear against Wahhabi uprisings in Mesopotamia and the
Levant in the early 19th century, against civil strife in Lebanon in the
1840's (culminating in the 1860 massacres in Mount Lebanon and Damascus),
and against a string of Kurdish rebellions. In response to the national
awakening of the Armenians in the 1890's, Constantinople killed tens of
thousands--a taste of the horrors that lay ahead for the Armenians during
World War I.
The legacy of this imperial experience is not difficult to discern in
today's Islamic world. Physical force has remained the main if not the
sole instrument of political discourse in the Middle East. Throughout the
region, absolute leaders still supersede political institutions, and
citizenship is largely synonymous with submission; power is often
concentrated in the hands of small, oppressive minorities; religious,
ethnic, and tribal conflicts abound; and the overriding preoccupation of
sovereigns is with their own survival.
At the domestic level, these circumstances have resulted in the world's
most illiberal polities. Political dissent is dealt with by repression,
and ethnic and religious differences are settled by internecine strife and
murder. One need only mention, among many instances, Syria's massacre of
20,000 of its Muslim activists in the early 1980's, or the brutal
treatment of Iraq's Shiite and Kurdish communities until the 2003 war, or
the genocidal campaign now being conducted in Darfur by the government of
Sudan and its allied militias. As for foreign policy in the Middle East,
it too has been pursued by means of crude force, ranging from terrorism
and subversion to outright aggression, with examples too numerous and
familiar to cite.
Reinforcing these habits is the fact that, to this day, Islam has retained
its imperial ambitions. The last great Muslim empire may have been
destroyed and the caliphate left vacant, but the dream of regional and
world domination has remained very much alive. Even the ostensibly secular
doctrine of pan-Arabism has been effectively Islamic in its ethos,
worldview, and imperialist vision. In the words of Nuri Said, longtime
prime minister of Iraq and a prominent early champion of this doctrine:
"Although Arabs are naturally attached to their native land, their
nationalism is not confined by boundaries. It is an aspiration to restore
the great tolerant civilization of the early caliphate."
That this "great tolerant civilization" reached well beyond today's Middle
East is not lost on those who hope for its restoration. Like the leaders
of al Qaeda, many Muslims and Arabs unabashedly pine for the reconquest of
Spain and consider their 1492 expulsion from the country a grave
historical injustice waiting to be undone. Indeed, as immigration and
higher rates of childbirth have greatly increased the number of Muslims
within Europe itself over the past several decades, countries that were
never ruled by the caliphate have become targets of Muslim imperial
ambition. Since the late 1980's, Islamists have looked upon the growing
population of French Muslims as proof that France, too, has become a part
of the House of Islam. In Britain, even the more moderate elements of the
Muslim community are candid in setting out their aims. As the late Zaki
Badawi, a doyen of interfaith dialogue in the UK, put it, "Islam is a
universal religion. It aims to bring its message to all corners of the
earth. It hopes that one day the whole of humanity will be one Muslim
community."
Whether in its militant or its more benign version, this world-conquering
agenda continues to meet with condescension and denial on the part of many
educated Westerners. To intellectuals, foreign-policy experts, and
politicians alike, "empire" and "imperialism" are categories that apply
exclusively to the European powers and, more recently, to the United
States. In this view of things, Muslims, whether in the Middle East or
elsewhere, are merely objects--the long-suffering victims of the
aggressive encroachments of others. Lacking an internal, autonomous
dynamic of its own, their history is rather a function of their unhappy
interaction with the West, whose obligation it is to make amends. This
perspective dominated the widespread explanation of the 9/11 attacks as
only a response to America's (allegedly) arrogant and self-serving foreign
policy, particularly with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
As we have seen, however, Islamic history has been anything but reactive.
>From Muhammad to the Ottomans, the story of Islam has been the story of
the rise and fall of an often astonishing imperial aggressiveness and, no
less important, of never quiescent imperial dreams. Even as these dreams
have repeatedly frustrated any possibility for the peaceful social and
political development of the Arab-Muslim world, they have given rise to no
less repeated fantasies of revenge and restoration and to murderous
efforts to transform fantasy into fact. If, today, America is reviled in
the Muslim world, it is not because of its specific policies but because,
as the preeminent world power, it blocks the final realization of this
same age-old dream of regaining, in Zawahiri's words, the "lost glory" of
the caliphate.
Nor is the vision confined to a tiny extremist fringe. This we saw in the
overwhelming support for the 9/11 attacks throughout the Arab and Islamic
worlds, in the admiring evocations of bin Laden's murderous acts during
the crisis over the Danish cartoons, and in such recent findings as the
poll indicating significant reservoirs of sympathy among Muslims in
Britain for the "feelings and motives" of the suicide bombers who attacked
London last July. In the historical imagination of many Muslims and Arabs,
bin Laden represents nothing short of the new incarnation of Saladin,
defeater of the Crusaders and conqueror of Jerusalem. In this sense, the
House of Islam's war for world mastery is a traditional, indeed venerable,
quest that is far from over.
To the contrary, now that this war has itself met with a so far determined
counterattack by the United States and others, and with a Western
intervention in the heart of the House of Islam, it has escalated to a new
stage of virulence. In many Middle Eastern countries, Islamist movements,
and movements appealing to traditionalist Muslims, are now jockeying
fiercely for positions of power, both against the Americans and against
secular parties. For the Islamists, the stakes are very high indeed, for
if the political elites of the Middle East and elsewhere were ever to
reconcile themselves to the reality that there is no Arab or Islamic
"nation," but only modern Muslim states with destinies and domestic
responsibilities of their own, the imperialist dream would die.
It is in recognition of this state of affairs that Zawahiri wrote his now
famous letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, in
July 2005. If, Zawahiri instructed his lieutenant, al Qaeda's strategy for
Iraq and elsewhere were to succeed, it would have to take into account the
growing thirst among many Arabs for democracy and a normal life, and
strive not to alienate popular opinion through such polarizing deeds as
suicide attacks on fellow Muslims. Only by harnessing popular support,
Zawahiri concluded, would it be possible to come to power by means of
democracy itself, thereby to establish jihadist rule in Iraq, and then to
move onward to conquer still larger and more distant realms and impose the
writ of Islam far and wide.
Something of the same logic clearly underlies the carefully plotted rise
of Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, the (temporarily thwarted) attempt
by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to exploit the demand for free
elections there, and the accession of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. Indeed,
as reported by Mark MacKinnon in the Toronto Globe & Mail, some analysts
now see a new "axis of Islam" arising in the Middle East, uniting
Hizballah, Hamas, Iran, Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood, elements of Iraq's
Shiites, and others in an anti-American, anti-Israel alliance backed by
Russia.
Whether or not any such structure exists or can be forged, the fact is
that the fuel of Islamic imperialism remains as volatile as ever, and is
very far from having burned itself out. To deny its force is the height of
folly, and to imagine that it can be appeased or deflected is to play into
its hands. Only when it is defeated, and when the faith of Islam is no
longer a tool of Islamic political ambition, will the inhabitants of
Muslim lands, and the rest of the world, be able to look forward to a
future less burdened by Saladins and their gory dreams.
Mr. Karsh is head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College, University
of London, and his new book, "Islamic Imperialism: A History," on which
this article is based, is about to be published by Yale. This article
originally appeared in the April issue of Commentary.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110008181
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
M A I L I N G L I S T S
(1) pnews-news - NEWS mailing list - (text only)
Send "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" as subject
----> pnews-news-request(at)inyourface.info
=======================================================
(2) pnews-views - VIEWS mailing list- (text only)
OPEN discussion - "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" as subj
Send to ------> pnews-views-request(at)inyourface.info
=======================================================
(3) fightback - articles and pointers distribution list
(html/text) - expert informed opin., credentialed authors
----> http://pnews.org/dada/
========================================================
(4) ATTN: WEBMASTERS - Link Exchange/improve site rank
----> links_only-subscribe(at)googlegroups.com - or, go to:
-----> http://groups.google.com/group/Links_Only
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
