By Eric Vandenbroeck
and co-workers
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 Atatürk, 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
façade, 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.
Just as the Egyptian
president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had built his reputation on standing up to
"Western imperialism;' introduced large numbers of Soviet troops into
Egypt when the War of Attrition he launched against Israel (1969-70) went sour,
so Ayatollah Khomeini, the high priest of Islamic imperialism, bought weapons
from even the "Great Satan," the United States, in his effort to
subvert the Middle Eastern political order and to establish a universal
"Empire of Allah." Saddam Hussein used Western support to survive his
eight-year war against Iran (1980-88), while Osama bin Laden cooperated with
the United States against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and sought
asylum in Britain following his expulsion from Sudan in the mid-1990s. (The
Times, London, Sept. 29, 2005.)
But the rethoric remains the same, similar to modern
jihadists like Mawdudi and Qutb*,
Khomeini viewed human history as a millenarian struggle between the forces of
Islam and the forces of jahiliya, which include all
Muslim states that are not governed in accordance with the Shari'a,
and took the early caliphate as a model for a future Islamic government. (*For
an extensive overview of these and others see also)
Like pan-Arab
ideologues, Khomeini viewed Western imperialism as the latest manifestation of
the millenarian struggle between the House of Islam and the House of War. But
while the former invoked past Muslim imperial -- glories as a justification for
the creation of a united pan-Arab empire, Khomeini viewed them as a precedent
for the unification of the worldwide, Muslim community.
As the only country
where a true Islamic government had been established, ran Khomeini's line of
reasoning, Iran had a sacred duty to serve as the core of the umma and as the
springboard for worldwide dissemination of Islam's holy message: "The Iranian
revolution is not exclusively that of Iran, because Islam does not belong to
any particular people .... We will export our revolution throughout the world
because it is an Islamic revolution. The struggle will continue until the calls
'there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah' are echoed
all over the world." (Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, 1985, pp. 327-28.)
A follower of Qutb and later spokesperson for bin-Laden Ayman
al-Zawahiri, wrote around the same time: We must move the battle to the enemy's
grounds to burn the hands of those who ignite fire in our countries.
(al-Zawahiri, Knights under the Prophet's Banner, translated by
FBIS-NES-2002-0108, Dec. 2, 2001, pp. 78.)
Bin Laden's
proclamation of jihad was no novelty in and of itself: declaring a holy war
against the infidel has been a standard practice of countless imperial rulers
and aspirants since the rise of Islam. Nor does bin Laden's perception of
jihad as a predominantly military effort to facilitate the creation of the worldwide
Islamic umma differ in any way from traditional Islamic thinking,
When people see a
strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse; bin
Laden told a Saudi cleric visiting him in his Mghan
hideout shortly after 9/11. "In Holland, at one of the centers, the number
of people who accepted Islam during the days that followed the operations was
more than the people who accepted Islam in the last eleven years. I heard
someone on Islamic radio who owns a school in America say: "We don't have
time to keep up with the demands of those who are asking about Islamic books to
learn about Islam." This event made people think [about Islam] which
benefited Islam greatly." (Bin Laden's Recorded Statement, December 27,
2001," al-Jazeera Television; wwwfas.org/irp/world/para/ubl-video.htm)
"God willing,
the end of America is close:' he next prophesied in a videotaped interview
shown by alJazeera on December 12,2001. "Its end is not dependent on the survival of this slave to
God. Regardless if Osama is killed or survives, the awakening has started,
praised be God. This was the fruit of these operations."
In fact the next
contender is already making his preparations:
While focusing on the
wiping "Israel off the map" by the next jihadist leader in waiting,
the world media have largely ignored other
statements Iran's President Ahmadinejad made at the same time, for example:
We are in the process
of an historical war between the World of Arrogance [i.e. the West] and the
Islamic world, and this war has been going on for hundreds of years. ...In this
very grave war,… Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and
Zionism? But you had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable,
and surely can be achieved...
Currently under way
in Iran Hassan Abbassi is the architect of the
so-called "war preparation plan". During his lecture for the same
audience, Abbassi has said: The Americans are not
ready to send a million men (to defeat the Islamic Republic)," Abbasi
said. "Even economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic will fail
thanks to opposition from the Western public opinion and the refusal of most
countries to implement (them).
But it is not only
the US that Abbasi wants to take on and humiliate. He has described Britain as
"the mother of all evils". In his lecture he claimed that the US,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and the Gulf states were all
"children of the same mother: the British Empire." As for France and
Germany, they are "countries in terminal decline", according to
Abbasi. "Once we have defeated the Anglo-Saxons the rest will run for
cover.
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