Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (12 page)

After sacking Baghdad, Hulagu began to rebuild. He encouraged technological experimentation and constructed an observatory at Maragh—although by then, leading Arab clerics perceived all Mongol activities as demonically anti-Islamic and so ruined the observatory themselves. Despite converting to Islam, the Mongols still valued Genghis Khan’s Yasa code of laws over Islamic Sharia. Arab theologians denounced the Mongol embrace of Muslim faith as false and dangerous.

Ibn Taymiyah, the son of a cleric who had fled from Baghdad to Damascus in 1268, issued a religious decree
(fatwa)
against the Mongols, declaring them apostates who must be driven out and destroyed through violent rebellion. He led resistance to the Mongol invasion of Damascus in 1300, calling for holy war
(jihad)
and martyrdom
(ishtihad)
against Mongol “infidels”
(kuffar)
to save the soul of Islam from contamination (
jahiliyah).
To recover the Golden Age of Arab civilization also required opposing the Shi’a for deviating from the true and pure way
(salafiyah)
of Mohammed and his original band of followers. (Shia Islam rejects the legitimacy of the Sunni caliphs and holds that Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, was the first of a line of the Prophet’s descendants, known as Imams, possessing special spiritual powers). The Mu’tazila and even Ash’ari forms of Sufism also had to be rejected for emphasizing personal revelation and interpretation over literal truth.

Ibn Taymiyah was a Koranic literalist, accused of anthropomorphism and imprisoned in 1306 in Cairo’s citadel for taking a reference to Allah’s hand, foot, and face too concretely. “What can my enemies possibly do to me?” He taunted them: “My paradise is my heart…. For me, prison is a place of retreat; execution is my opportunity for martyrdom.” Seven hundred years later, the radical Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb would suffer imprisonment and execution for his verbal assault on the “Mongols” of the new age, corrupt Muslim regimes suborned by European influence and the narrow interests of secular nationalism over the entire community of believers
(ummah).
For those who instigated the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and who came to constitute the core of Al Qaeda, Ibn Taymiyah’s philosophy and Sayyid Qutb’s example became the touchstones of modern jihad.

The physical and psychological impact of the Mongol invasion on the Arab Islamic Empire is somewhat comparable to the Germanic conquest of the Western Roman Empire. It took nearly a thousand years for Europe to recover, and eventually surpass, the Greco-Roman world’s level of learning and knowledge.
⁵
Modern jihadis argue that it’s about time the Muslim world finds itself again. By that they basically mean a reunification of all Islamic societies through a process of “re-Arabization,” and “regrowth” into the lands of the infidel.

REAWAKENING TO THE DREAM

The first “Arab Reawakening” began in the early eighteenth century, in the terribly austere Arabian heartland, which had produced Mohammed. Like the ninth-century religious reformer Ibn Hanbal, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Al Wahab (1703–1792) preached strict obedience to the Koran and Hadith (the Prophet’s sayings) and rejection of innovations that religion didn’t justify. Al Wahab allied himself with Mohammed Ibn Sa’ud, the ruler of a small market town, Dir’iyya. Together, Al Wahab and Ibn Sa’ud dedicated their struggle to expand the rule of Sharia to all Arabs and then to all Muslims. The Saudi-Wahabi alliance adopted military drill and training tactics that were becoming standard in European armies, while instilling moral fervor with a literal and uncompromising interpretation of the Koran akin to the religious fervor of the ancient Hebrew tribes of the Kingdom of Judah in the seventh century B.C.

The Wahabis invaded Syria and Iraq but were eventually crushed by Egyptian and Ottoman troops who had learned the hard way from Napoléon that “God is on the side of the army with the best artillery.” Shortly after World War I, however, the Saudis conquered nearly the whole of Arabia, driving out the rival Hashemites. (The British installed the defeated Hashemite princes as rulers of the newly created kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq, whose borders were drawn by a stroke of the pen—largely by Winston Churchill and T. E. “Lawrence of Arabia” Lawrence, at the Cairo Conference of 1921.)
⁶

From Napoléon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the Franco-British-Israeli attempt to retake the Suez Canal in 1956, European power and dominance in the area surpassed even that of the thirteenth-century Mongols. The Ottomans had rescued Islam for a pincer movement by Christian powers: Russia from the north, Venice from the west, Portugal from its trading bases in India to the east. Like the samurai of Japan, the Ottomans tried to close off their society from European influence, but only succeeded in delaying the inevitable and weakening themselves.

Britain seized Aden on the Arabian peninsula in 1839, and occupied Egypt in 1882. France annexed Algeria in 1834 and secretly split Morocco with Spain in 1904. Upon the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the League of Nations ratified Britain’s right to maintain its armies in the area and to rule Transjordan and Iraq, while France received rights to Lebanon and Syria.

In 1916, Britain and France had secretly agreed to this division of the Middle East, though this was a double-cross of the Arabs, who had been promised one nation stretching from the gates of Persia to the Mediterranean as a reward for fighting the Ottoman Turks. Then, with Lord Balfour’s Declaration in 1917, Britain compromised herself with yet another compact, this time with the Jews. For their help, Britain would give them a homeland in Palestine; and so Transjordan would be separated into two mandates, Jordan and Palestine. The mandates for Britain and France were to prepare their wards for democracy, though in fact this was classic colonial rule.
⁷
After World War II, the appetite for colonialism waned and each mandate became an independent nation. The roots of the current confessional and territorial conflicts in the region emanate from these divisions.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, so let’s back up for minute. Following the French Revolution and the invasion of Egypt by Napoléon, the Ottoman Turks began opening embassies in Europe, importing military expertise and books, and sending students to European cities and universities. In Europe the “Young Ottomans” began criticizing the regime and smuggling clandestine published materials into Turkey. In 1729, Istanbul acquired its first printing press, but thirteen years later all printing was stopped as being potentially too subversive. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came the “Young Turks”: secular, liberal, and nationalist. As with the Young Ottomans, the influence of the Young Turks was often most keenly felt in the ranks of up-and-coming military officers. They saw themselves as patriots devoted to Turkish nationalism rather than to the Islamic Caliphate. They wanted to emulate European innovation so that the Ottoman state, known as the Sick Man of Europe, could renew itself and better compete on the world stage.

ISLAM AND NATIONALISM: A FAILED MARRIAGE

After the Ottoman collapse, and the dismantling in 1923 of the last Islamic Caliphate by Turkey’s secularist modernizer, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, political ambitions in the region diverged along two paths. The first political path, secular and nationalist (pan-Arab) as opposed to religious and imperial (restoration of the Muslim Caliphate), initially predominated. Christian Arabs spearheaded this attempt at an “Arab National Reawakening” modeled on European success.
⁸
By the 1960s it seemed to Bernard Lewis that “in our time, that stamp [of common identity impressed by Islam] is growing dim” in the Middle East and elsewhere.
⁹
But Western models—whether nationalism, fascism, socialism, or communism—utterly failed to bring prosperity or even security to the Middle East or elsewhere in the Muslim world during the second half of the twentieth century.

It’s far from clear if greater long-term success will come about through recent American attempts to revive this general approach in Iraq and Afghanistan with a hybrid model inspired by democratic liberalism and native confessional politics, and, of course, our insatiable need for “black gold” and “strategic depth.” Already by 1942, the United States had 45 percent of the world’s known reserves but was depleting these reserves at a faster rate than the rest of the world. In contrast, Saudi production at the time was increasing about tenfold per year. As State Department economic adviser Herbert Feis noted: “In all of the surveys of the situation, the pencil came to an awed pause and one point and one place—the Middle East.”
¹⁰
By February 1943, Roosevelt had decided that the defense of the Middle East was “vital to the defense of the United States”
¹¹
and that the region’s oil reserves should come under U.S. control for the indefinite future, given that the center of world oil production was inexorably shifting from the Gulf-Caribbean region to the Middle East and Persian Gulf. With the dawning realization (since about 1969)
¹²
that exponential growth in oil production would not likely continue into the twenty-first century, despite the world’s largest economies and emerging markets needing it to continue, competition for Middle East oil has only become more acute.
¹³

The Bush administration’s initial plans for Iraq on the model of the post–World War II Marshall Plan for Germany or General MacArthur’s reconstruction of Japan seemed unwise
before
the Iraq war began.
¹⁴
The United States was able to generate civil societies in Germany and Japan because both countries were ethnically homogeneous, highly nationalistic, and economically well developed. This permitted rapid political consensus and quick reconstruction of industrial infrastructure. Rather than execute the emperor of Japan as the war criminal he was, MacArthur wisely reinstated him as a benign national figurehead to facilitate this process. Iraq, however, is a colonial construction forced upon an ethnic hodgepodge in the aftermath of World War I. In 1921, Britain arranged a “plebiscite” in order to give Iraq to Faisal Ibn Hussein, son of the King of the Hejaz (Saudi Arabia), as compensation for Faisal being kicked out of Syria by the French. In 1968, the nationalist Baath Party seized power, forsaking its earlier pan-Arabism for a fictitious unity based on descent from ancient Mesopotamia in order to keep newfound oil wealth to itself.

The emergence of liberal democracy historically requires a high degree of nationalism as a primary source of social identity. Nationalism depends on social and economic mobility across cultural boundaries, which generally comes with industrialization. Without institutions to override primary confessional loyalties, liberal democracy has not proven strong at dealing with rival claims of long-standing ethnic communities living on traditional territory in multicultural settings.

This doesn’t mean that democracy can’t take root in such settings, but implementing it isn’t at all easy. Simply providing an institutional framework for democracy—like elections, a constitution, and courts—may be meaningless if not organically based in local society, history, and culture, just as putting the subjects of British colonies in wigs and inserting them into an English-style courtroom did not ensure that the rule of law would prevail after independence. Fostering the creation of a large and stable middle class is probably necessary, though not sufficient (the one significant finding from political science is that maintaining a stable democracy requires maintaining a large and stable middle class). Opening up economic opportunity helps, but not if the path to economic improvement is widely perceived as undermining local moral values and inciting a collapse of traditional cultures.

RELIGIOUS COMEBACK: ISLAMIC REVIVALISM

The second political path taken after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was inspired by Wahabism, which has aimed at uprooting and expelling the interests and influence of “infidels” in Muslim lands. Many of the muftis and mullahs (and even Shi’a ayatollahs)—all former state functionaries who originally embraced European innovations in commerce, technology, education, and government—turned against what they (often rightly) perceived as neocolonial attempts to dominate implementation of those innovations in Islamic lands for mostly European, rather than Arab or Muslim, benefit. They rejected the “trickle-down” theory of modernization.

In 1928 Egypt’s Hassan Al Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Musulmiyah). Through extensive charitable and educational operations, it sought to enroll people into a major political opposition group. With strong ties to Wahabism but also to Sufi mysticism, the Brotherhood campaigned against political and social injustice and British imperial rule, while painting a picture of Islam that restored the broken links of tradition by connecting them to modernity. By the end of the 1940s, the Brotherhood numbered 1 million members.

It flexibly organized itself into paramilitary cells that could hide and disperse when stronger forces prevailed, but which could unite when conditions permitted political opposition. The cell structure itself was thoroughly modern, inspired by the success of fascist and communist cell organizations in Europe. This enabled the brotherhood to survive the assassination of its founder and to spread throughout the Middle East and beyond. It still commands large and even growing support (judging from recent elections in Egypt) despite numerous crackdowns over the years by various Middle Eastern governments. The Palestinian Hamas is basically a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, formed by joining part of the Jordanian Brotherhood (in the West Bank) with part of the Egyptian Brotherhood (in Gaza) after these parts had become separated from their parent organizations by the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War.