Authors: Henry Kissinger
Other religions—especially Christianity
—have had their own crusading phases, at times exalting their universal mission with comparable fervor and resorting to analogous methods of conquest and forced conversions. (Spanish conquistadores abolished ancient civilizations in Central and South America in the sixteenth century in a similar spirit of world-conquering finality.) The difference is that the crusading spirit subsided in the Western world or took the form of secular concepts that proved less absolute (or less enduring) than religious imperatives. Over time, Christendom became a philosophical and historical concept, not an operational principle of strategy or international order. That process was facilitated because the Christian world had originated a distinction between “the things which are Caesar’s” and “the things that are God’s,” permitting an eventual evolution toward pluralistic, secular-based foreign policies within a state-based international system, as we have seen in the previous two chapters. It was also driven by contingent circumstances, among them the relative unattractiveness of some of the modern crusading concepts called on to replace religious fervor—militant Soviet Communism preaching world revolution, or race-based imperialisms.
The evolution in the Muslim world has been more complex. Certain periods have inspired hopes for a convergence of approaches. On the other hand, as recently as the 1920s, a direct line of political succession from the Prophet Muhammad was still asserted as a practical reality of Middle Eastern statecraft, by the Ottoman Empire. Since this empire collapsed, the response in key Muslim countries has been divided between those who have sought to enter the new state-based, ecumenical international order as significant members—adhering to
deeply felt religious beliefs but separating them from questions of foreign policy—and those who see themselves as engaged in a battle over succession to universal authority within a stringent interpretation of the traditional Islamic concept of world order.
Over the past ninety years, the exponents of each view have represented some of the outstanding figures of the era; among them are counted some of the century’s most farsighted statesmen and most formidable religious absolutists. The contest between them is not concluded; under some Middle Eastern governments, believers in state-based and faith-based universal orders coexist, if occasionally uneasily. To many of its faithful, especially in a period of resurgent Islamism—the modern ideology seeking to enforce Muslim scripture as the central arbiter of personal, political, and international life—the Islamic world remains in a condition of inescapable confrontation with the outside world.
In the early Islamic system, nonaggression treaties with non-Muslim societies were permissible. According to traditional jurisprudence, these were pragmatic arrangements of limited duration, allowing the Islamic party to secure itself from threats while gathering strength and cohesion. Based on a precedent set by the early Islamic state in entering truces with foes it eventually vanquished, they were limited to terms of specific duration, up to ten years, that could be renewed as needed: in this spirit, in the early centuries of Muslim history, “
Islamic legal rulings stipulate
that a treaty cannot be forever, since it must be immediately void should the Muslims become capable of fighting them.”
What these treaties did not imply was a permanent system in which the Islamic state would interact on equal terms with sovereign non-Muslim states: “
The communities of the dar al-harb
were regarded as being in a ‘state of nature,’ for they lacked legal competence to enter into intercourse with Islam on the basis of equality and reciprocity because they failed to conform to its ethical and legal
standards.” Because in this view the domestic principles of an Islamic state were divinely ordained, non-Muslim political entities were illegitimate; they could never be accepted by Muslim states as truly equal counterparts. A peaceful world order depended on the ability to forge and expand a unitary Islamic entity, not on an equilibrium of competing parts.
In the idealized version of this worldview
, the spread of peace and justice under Islam was a unidirectional and irreversible process. The loss of land that had been brought into
dar al-Islam
could never be accepted as permanent, as this would effectively repudiate the legacy of the universal faith. Indeed history records no other political enterprise that spread with such inexorable results. In time, a portion of the territories reached in Islam’s periods of expansion would in fact exit Muslim political control, including Spain, Portugal, Sicily, southern Italy, the Balkans (now a patchwork of Muslim and mainly Orthodox Christian enclaves), Greece, Armenia, Georgia, Israel, India, southern Russia, and parts of western China. Yet of the territories incorporated in Islam’s initial wave of expansion, the significant majority remain Muslim today.
N
O SINGLE SOCIETY
has ever had the power, no leadership the resilience, and no faith the dynamism to impose its writ enduringly throughout the world. Universality has proved elusive for any conqueror, including Islam. As the early Islamic Empire expanded, it eventually fragmented into multiple centers of power. A succession crisis following Muhammad’s death led to a split between Sunni and Shia branches of Islam, a defining division in the contemporary Islamic world. In any new political enterprise, the question of succession is fraught; where the founding leader is also regarded as the “Seal of the Prophets,” the final messenger of God, the debate becomes at once political and theological. Following Muhammad’s passing in 632, a
council of tribal elders selected his father-in-law Abu Bakr as his successor, or caliph, as the figure best able to maintain consensus and harmony in the fledgling Muslim community. A minority believed that the matter should not have been put to a vote, which implied human fallibility, and that power should have passed automatically to the Prophet’s closest blood relation, his cousin Ali—an instrumental early convert to Islam and heroic warrior whom Muhammad was held to have personally selected.
These factions eventually formed
themselves into the two main branches of Islam. For the proponents of Abu Bakr and his immediate successors, Muhammad’s relationship with God was unique and final; the caliphate’s primary task was to preserve what Muhammad had revealed and built. They became the Sunnis, short for the “people of tradition and consensus.” For the Party of Ali—Shiite-Ali (or Shia)—governance of the new Islamic society was also a spiritual task involving an esoteric element. In their view, Muslims could be brought into the correct relationship with Muhammad’s revelation only if they were guided by spiritually gifted individuals directly descended from the Prophet and Ali, who were the “trustees” of the religion’s hidden inner meanings. When Ali, eventually coming to power as the fourth caliph, was challenged by rebellion and murdered by a mob, the Sunnis treated the central task as the restoration of order in Islam and backed the faction that reestablished stability. The Shias decried the new authorities as illegitimate usurpers and lionized the martyrs who had died in resistance. These general attitudes would prevail for centuries.
Geopolitical rivalries compounded doctrinal differences. In time, separate Arab, Persian, Turkish, and Mughal spheres arose, each theoretically adhering to the same global Muslim order but increasingly conducting themselves as rival monarchies with distinct interests and distinct interpretations of their faith. In some cases, including much of the Mughal period in India, these included a relatively ecumenical and even syncretic approach stressing tolerance of other faiths and
privileging practical foreign policy over sectarian imperatives. When beseeched to wage jihad against Shia Iran by fellow Sunni powers, Mughal India demurred, citing traditional amity and an absence of casus belli.
Eventually, the momentum of the world project of Islam faltered as the first wave of Muslim expansion was reversed in Europe. Battles at Poitiers and Tours in France in 732 ended an unbroken string of advances by Arab and North African Muslim forces. The Byzantine defense of Asia Minor and Eastern Europe maintained, for four centuries, a line behind which the West began developing its own post-Roman ideas of world order. Western concepts began to be projected into Muslim-administered territories as the Byzantines marched back, temporarily, into the Middle East. The Crusades—forays led by orders of Christian knights into the historic Holy Land that Islam had incorporated in the seventh century—took Jerusalem in 1099, establishing a kingdom there that endured for roughly two centuries. The Christian
reconquista
of Spain ended with the fall of Granada, the last Muslim foothold on the peninsula, in 1492, pushing Islam’s western boundary back into North Africa.
In the thirteenth century, the dream of universal order reappeared. A new Muslim empire led by the Ottoman Turks, followers of the conqueror Osman, expanded their once-minor Anatolian state into a formidable power capable of challenging, and eventually displacing, the last vestiges of the Byzantine Empire. They began to construct a successor to the great Islamic caliphates of earlier centuries. Styling themselves the leaders of a unified Islamic world, they expanded in all directions by conflicts cast as holy wars, first into the Balkans. In 1453, they conquered Constantinople (Istanbul), the capital of Byzantium, geostrategically astride the Bosphorus Strait; next they moved south and west into the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus, becoming the dominant littoral power in the eastern Mediterranean. Like the early Islamic Empire, the Ottomans conceived of their political mission as universal,
upholding “
the order of the world
”; sultans proclaimed themselves “the Shadow of God on Earth” and “the universal ruler who protects the world.”
As its predecessors had a half millennium earlier, the Ottoman Empire came into contact with the states of Western Europe as it expanded westward. The divergence between what was later institutionalized as the multipolar European system and the Ottomans’ concept of a single universal empire conferred a complex character on their interactions. The Ottomans refused to accept the European states as either legitimate or equal. This was not simply a matter of Islamic doctrine; it reflected as well a judgment about the reality of power relations, for the Ottoman Empire was territorially larger than all of the Western European states combined and for many decades militarily stronger than any conceivable coalition of them.
In this context, formal Ottoman documents
afforded European monarchs a protocol rank below the Sultan, the ruler of the Ottoman Empire; it was equivalent to his vizier, or chief minister. By the same token, the European ambassadors permitted by the Ottomans to reside in Constantinople were cast in the status of supplicants. Compacts negotiated with these envoys were drafted not as bilateral treaties but as unilateral and freely revocable grants of privilege by a magnanimous Sultan.
When the Ottomans had reached the limits of their military capabilities, both sides occasionally found themselves drawn into alignments with each other for tactical advantage. Strategic and commercial interests occasionally circumvented religious doctrine.
In 1526, France, considering itself surrounded by Habsburg power in Spain to its south and the Habsburg-led Holy Roman Empire to its east, proposed a military alliance to the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. It was the same strategic concept that caused Catholic France a hundred years later to align itself with the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years’ War. Suleiman, viewing Habsburg power as the
principal obstacle to Ottoman ambitions in Eastern Europe, responded favorably, though he treated France’s King Francis I as an unmistakably junior partner. He did not agree to an alliance, which would have implied moral equality; instead, he bestowed his support as a unilateral act from on high:
I who am the Sultan of Sultans
, the sovereign of sovereigns, the dispenser of crowns to the monarchs on the face of the earth, the shadow of God on earth, the Sultan and sovereign lord of the White Sea and of the Black Sea, of Rumelia and of Anatolia, of Karamania … To thee who art Francis, king of the land of France.You have sent to my Porte, refuge of sovereigns, a letter … you have here asked aid and succors for your deliverance … Take courage then, and be not dismayed. Our glorious predecessors and our illustrious ancestors (may God light up their tombs!) have never ceased to make war to repel the foe and conquer his lands. We ourselves have followed in their footsteps, and have at all times conquered provinces and citadels of great strength and difficult of approach. Night and day our horse is saddled and our sabre is girt.
A working military cooperation emerged, including joint Ottoman-French naval operations against Spain and the Italian peninsula. Playing by the same rules, the Habsburgs leapfrogged the Ottomans to solicit an alliance with the Shia Safavid Dynasty in Persia. Geopolitical imperatives, for a time at least, overrode ideology.
Ottoman assaults on the European order resumed, the most significant of which reached Vienna in 1683. The siege of Vienna, broken
that year by a European army led by Eugene of Savoy, marked the high point of Ottoman expansion.
In the late eighteenth and, with increasing momentum, throughout the nineteenth century, European states began to reverse the process. The Ottoman Empire had gradually become sclerotic when orthodox religious factions at the court resisted modernization. Russia pressed against the empire from the north, marching toward the Black Sea and into the Caucasus. Russia and Austria moved into the Balkans from east and west, while France and Britain competed for influence in Egypt—a crown jewel of the Ottoman Empire—which in the nineteenth century achieved various degrees of national autonomy.