While the foundations for radical fundamentalism were laid in the Arab world, there were related movements in India, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Each shared a basic conviction that contemporary Muslim states were ruled by godless governments and that society had been corrupted and weakened by the influence of the West. They wove a vision of the past that glorified the first four caliphs and the early Muslim community, but their reading of history was highly selective. The ecumenical spirit of the Abbasid court, the medieval philosophical tradition that celebrated interpretation and reason, the mystical traditions that emphasized God’s love, and the relaxed attitudes toward People of the Book were absent from their version of the past. Instead, they imagined a time when Islam was the alpha and the omega, when everyone from the caliph to the slave imbibed the piety of the Quran and the tradition of the Prophet, and then in return, God graced his believers with power, fortune, and security.
Muslim fundamentalist movements shared certain characteristics, but they were also deeply divided. Much like American Protestantism, Muslim fundamentalism of the twentieth century was decentralized and constantly changing shape. Groups would form, and then splinter. There was little agreement about tactics, and more to the point, no consensus about goals. Was the adversary the corrupt governments of Muslim states? Was it Israel? Was the goal the creation of new Muslim societies through revolution, through reform, through education, or through violence and chaos? Which enemy should be targeted—the so-called near enemy, such as secular Arab nationalists, Nasserists, local governments, and neighboring states? Or should it be the far enemy, such as the West in general or the United States as the most powerful Western country? Was the most pressing issue the plight of the Palestinians? Or was it the mass of disenfranchised Muslims who were forced to suffer under decadent monarchs like King Muhammad in Morocco, King Idris in Libya, the shah in Iran, the Hashemites in Jordan and Iraq (until 1958), and
under atheistic nationalists like Nasser in Egypt and the heirs to Atatürk in Turkey? Decade by decade, the appeal of fundamentalism grew, but so did the divisions. In the 1970s, the most violent took to calling themselves jihadis, because they believed that armed jihad against unbelievers— apostates and secular governments, Jews and Christians, “Zionists and Crusaders”—was incumbent on all good Muslims and that the means, no matter how violent, justified the end of reestablishing a moral society.
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Even the jihadis were not united, however. They came from different regions with different historical experiences. There were Afghan jihadis whose worldview was informed by the 1979 Soviet invasion and the subsequent U.S. aid for the mujahideen (the “freedom fighters”), and who turned Afghanistan into a Soviet Vietnam War. There were disaffected Saudis who were disgusted by the rampant materialism of the Saudi royal family and their unholy alliance with Western oil companies. There were Algerians who rejected the socialist Algerian revolutionaries who had fought a bitter independence war against France. There were Pakistanis who followed the teachings of an early-twentieth-century preacher named Maulana Maududi (who influenced Sayyid Qutb) and who wanted to establish the sharia as the sole legal code for Pakistan and for Muslims living in India. And there were Palestinian Islamic radicals who organized Hamas in order to contest both the state of Israel and the leadership of Yasser Arafat and the PLO. To add to the confusion, there were also Shi’ite jihadis, who looked to Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini rather than to Sayyid Qutb for inspiration and who created parties like Hezbollah (“The Party of God”) in Lebanon.
In short, while fundamentalism has been a significant force in the modern Muslim world, the notion that there is a single fundamentalist movement whose leader is Osama bin Laden is utterly incorrect. Even more troubling is the tendency of both jihadis and Western observers to read history through a fundamentalist lens. The result is a vision of the Islamic past where there is no separation between church and state, where reason is subservient to orthodox acceptance of revealed truths, and where there is no mention of the wild creativity of Córdoba and Baghdad, the eccentric individualism of Ibn Arabi and the philosophers, the piety of the Sufis or the modernist, Islamic synthesis of Abduh. This narrow version of the past is widely accepted by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, but that does not mean it is accurate.
The other unfortunate result of the contemporary obsession with
radicals and jihadis is that history is read backward in order to find the roots of the present. Of course, no matter how much we might try to look at the past neutrally, some “presentism” always creeps in. But in seeking to explain the origin of the current struggles over Israel or the clash between Muslim extremists and the West, people have magnified the role of fundamentalism and the prevalence of historical conflict and minimized those aspects of the past that don’t fit the mold of the present.
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In addition to misreading history, too many of us also misread the present and the recent past. Certainly, the creation of Israel ushered in a new and troubling period of relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and contemporary Islamic fundamentalism and its most violent offshoots did emerge from disgust with nationalism and Western-style modernization. But fundamentalism, violence, and the Arab-Israeli conflict are hardly the whole story of the modern world. Conflict is only part of the picture. Even the creation of Israel has a hidden history. If the main plot was war, the subplots were accommodation, coexistence, and cooperation.
JORDAN AND ISRAEL
UNTIL THE END
of the mandate period, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the daily interactions between Palestinians and Jewish settlers were often cordial and sometimes quite friendly. In fact, relations between Jewish settlers and Christian and Muslim Palestinians were warmer and more intimate than relations between the Crusader states and the local populace had been centuries before. There were joint business endeavors and shared agricultural projects. One early Jewish settler thought that the tension between Jews and Arabs could be decreased by marriage between the bedouin and the settlers. Chaim Weizmann, one of the leaders of the Zionist movement, met often with Arab leaders and tried to convince them to support an Arab-Jewish polity based on common interests rather than divided by different creeds. The socialist philosophy of the early Zionists tended to be hostile to organized religion. Judaism for them was an identity that owed more to ethnicity and history than religion. The Jewish immigrants were by and large agrarian laborers, who worked on farms bought from the Arabs, and tilled the soil alongside Arab farmers. Some Zionists, therefore, took the logical step of
imagining a state designed to serve the needs of laborers, Arab and Jew alike. Of course, these attempts at concord gave way to successive waves of violence, caused by dispossessed Palestinians who hoped to halt Jewish immigration and then by Zionists determined to establish a national home. Moderation always has a difficult time in the face of extremism, and is usually trumped by it. Palestine was no different.
Relations between the Jewish Agency and the neighboring states were marked by animosity, especially on the part of the Arabs, but here as well there were periods of calm and concord. The Christian Maronite leadership of Lebanon welcomed a Jewish state as a possible counterbalance to a Middle East dominated by Muslims. More than a few Maronite leaders in the 1930s and 1940s made overtures to the Zionists and discussed the possibility of future alliances should a Jewish state come into being. At the time, the Maronites were struggling for the termination of the French Mandate, much as the Zionists were fighting to end British rule. In light of their parallel goals, the Maronite patriarch even signed a treaty with the Jewish community of Palestine, promising support and economic aid, as well as diplomatic backing for unlimited Jewish immigration. In return, the Jewish signatories promised to abet the establishment of an independent Maronite-controlled Lebanon.
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The most extensive collaboration between the Jews of Palestine and their neighbors occurred with Jordan and King Abdullah. Transjordan had been formed at the Cairo Conference of 1921 when British diplomats, including most notably an imperious Winston Churchill, literally drew lines on a map to determine the states of the modern Middle East. There was almost nothing organic about the boundaries of Jordan, except for part of its western border, which ran along the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan Valley, from which the state gets its name. Having received his crown as a consolation prize after losing Arabia, Abdullah worked diligently to make Jordan into a viable state.
The separation of Jordan from Palestine and Syria had little grounding in history, and the region was inhabited largely by bedouin tribes who respected Abdullah’s Hashemite lineage but questioned his legitimacy as their ruler. His army was a British creation and was answerable to Sir John Glubb. While Glubb never shed his English identity, he became a loyal partisan of Abdullah. It was a particular sort of loyalty, tinged as it was with a patronizing attitude toward the Arabs and their capacity for self-government, but like T. E. Lawrence, Glubb felt at
home in the desert among the bedouin. He and his wife adopted bedouin and Palestinian children, and he saw no contradiction in serving both Abdullah and the British government. By 1948, Glubb could look back at his years in the desert with pride, and he led an army that was by far the most professional in the region.
Faced with the establishment of a Jewish state, Abdullah took a less adversarial stance than the other Arab leaders. Though he publicly sided with the Arab League in the months before Israel declared independence in May 1948, he secretly negotiated with the Israelis to arrange an equitable division of Palestine that would leave Jordan in control of what became the West Bank. There was even hope that he would not have to use his army. A young Golda Meir, who would later become Israel’s first and only female prime minister, disguised herself as an Arab woman and sneaked into Amman four days before Israel declared independence to try to conclude an agreement with Abdullah. But the king was unwilling to risk ostracism by the other Arab states. He told Meir that he “firmly believed that Divine Providence had restored you, a Semite people who were banished to Europe and have benefited by its progress, to the Semite East, which needs your knowledge and initiative But the situation is grave…. I am sorry. I deplore the coming bloodshed and destruction. Let us hope we shall meet again.”
There was some cynicism at work here. Abdullah recognized that Israel was not going to be pushed into the sea, and that sooner or later, the Arabs would have to come to terms with its presence. Confident in his army and in Glubb as a general, Abdullah believed that he could put pressure on the Israeli defense forces in the West Bank, and even threaten west Jerusalem. Abdullah described his strategy to a friend: “I will not begin the attack on the Jews and will only attack them if they first attack my forces. I will not allow massacres in Palestine. Only after order and quiet have been established will it be possible to reach an understanding with the Jews.” Throughout the summer of 1948, the Jordanian army hovered but, perhaps realizing it would lose if it confronted the Israelis too aggressively, never attempted to advance into the territory that had been assigned to Israel under the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan. The Jordanians kept civilian casualties to a minimum, and Israel regarded Abdullah as a respected adversary. It was an odd sort of war, and an odd relationship, which led one Israeli diplomat at the time to refer to Israel and Jordan as “the best of enemies.”
As a result, the government of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion embraced Abdullah’s willingness to talk. In the fall of 1948 and into 1949, there were multiple clandestine meetings between Israelis and Abdullah and his court. One of the negotiators was Moshe Dayan, who would later become Israel’s most famous general and whose rakish, one-eyed visage came to epitomize both the energy and the determination of the Israeli military. At the time, he was a junior member of a delegation led by Moshe Sharett, Ben-Gurion’s foreign minister and later prime minister himself. The meetings were cordial but often awkward. At dinner one evening, Sharett managed to offend Abdullah by correcting him about whether China had been a member of the League of Nations. As Dayan wryly remarked in his memoirs, “A king never errs, and Abdullah stood by the statement.” Other visits were laden with ceremony and formality, which tried the patience of the rough-and-tumble Dayan. “We would dine with the king prior to getting down to business and for an hour or so before the meal there would be political gossip of what was happening in the capitals of the world, an occasional game of chess, and poetry readings. In chess, it was obligatory not only to lose to the king but also to show surprise at his unexpected moves. And when he read his poems, in epigrammatic Arabic, one had to express wonder by sighing from the depths of one’s soul.”
As close as the Jordanians and the Israelis came to a formal peace treaty, in the end Abdullah would not break ranks with the rest of the Arab states. He could not afford to become isolated. The result was an entente with Israel but not an explicit peace. Though the king tried his best to keep the negotiations secret, too many high-level players were involved, and it was widely known that discussions had taken place.
Abdullah paid a high price. In 1951, while visiting Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, he was gunned down by a Palestinian Arab. His young grandson Hussein was walking just behind him and watched in horror. He soon succeeded Abdullah, and as King Hussein, continued the delicate balancing act that his grandfather had begun.
For nearly fifty years, King Hussein—who could use his mellifluous baritone to recite classical Arabic to his subjects and then speak in a beautiful English accent for an address at the United Nations—maintained respectful relations with the Israelis, even as his goals and theirs were often diametrically opposed. He was a voice of moderation in the Arab world, at times accused, like his grandfather Abdullah, of being a
pawn of the Western powers, and of the United States especially. He had to contend with a restive Palestinian population, and he lost the West Bank to Israel during the 1967 war. Yet Israel only reluctantly went to war with Jordan in 1967, and at no point did either Hussein or Prime Minister Golda Meir cease to describe each other as friends. To his dying day, through the most perilous times, during the extremism of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the 1960s and 1970s and the Palestinian uprising known as the
intifadah
in the 1980s, he remained true to his vision of a Middle East governed by peace. In 1994, that vision was at least partly vindicated, and Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty that led to formal diplomatic relations and agreements on everything from boundaries to water rights. Even as the accords between Israel and the Palestinian leadership disintegrated, the interaction between Israel and Jordan—ruled after 1999 by Hussein’s son Abdullah II—was marked by an unusual level of mutual respect.
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