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January
2, 2002
David
Vest
Turn,
Turn, Turn
January
1, 2002
Kathy
Kelly
Iraq's
New Year
December
31, 2001
John Absood
An
Alternative to War in Iraq
Ramzi
Kysia
Iraq
Goes Radioactive
December
28, 2001
John Chuckman
Observing
George Bush
Suren
Pillay
Civilian
Bodies
Aaron
Lehmer
Inviting
Future Terrorism
December
27, 2001
Patrick
McNamara
Palestinian
Children Bear Brunt of Mideast Violence
Nelson
Valdés
A
Possible Scenario on the Location of bin Laden
Jensen
and Mahajan
Remember
the Afghan Dead
Philip
Farruggio
A
New Year's Resolution
Ramzi
Kysia
The
People of the Valley
December 26, 2001
John Chuckman
In
Praise of the Unspeakable
Sam Bahour
2002:
Year of the Twos
December 25, 2001
Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's
Human Rights Record
December 24, 2001
Sam Bahour
It
Happened One Morning
Yair Khilou
Why I Resisted
Being Drafted into the Israeli Army
Michael
Chisari
War
as Diversionary Tactic
Cockburn/St. Clair
Enron
and the Green Seal
December 21, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
War
Good for Bush
John Chuckman
The
First Victim in the
War on Terror
December 20, 2001
Lawrence
McGuire
Killing
Other People's Children
Miriam Rozen
Foundation
Without Representation?
Kenneth
Roth
A
Letter to Rumsfeld on
Military Tribunals
William Blum
Casualties:
Theirs and Ours
December 19, 2001
Marjorie
Cohn
Don't
Pre-Judge John Walker
Sam Bahour
Palestine
and You
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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January
2, 2002
Is There an Islamic Problem?
By M. Shahid Alam
It has become fashionable in some circles after
September 11 to excoriate Islam as the source of the problems
facing the Islamic world. The air is thick with theories which
claim that Islam has been paralyzed by a deadening obscurantism
since the twelfth century, and this paralysis will only end when
Muslims decide to replace Islam with secular humanism. It is
time these theories were deconstructed.
A Matter
of Timing
I will turn directly to the thesis of
the early demise of Islamic civilization: since the castigation
of Islam often hinges on how and when this happened.
First, and this is very important, this
thesis is quite wrong about the timing of the decline. It claims
that Islam lost its creative power in the twelfth century as
a result of the twin blows dealt by orthodox 'Ulama-the religious
scholars of Islam-and the Mongols. These ideas have an Orientalist
odor.
This canard was first challenged by Marshall Hodgson in The
Venture of Islam (1974). He believes that the brilliant works,
in architecture, philosophy, and the visual arts, created during
the sixteenth century-in Isphahan, Istanbul, Delhi and Agra-were
not inferior to the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance.
The scientific work did not face sudden death either. In fact,
George Saliba, in A History of Arabic Astronomy,
extends Islam's golden age to the fifteenth century. After the
Mongols are supposed to have devastated Eastern Islam, major
observatories were being set up as late as the fifteenth century.
The astronomical tables computed at these observatories, together
with the work of Ibn-Shatir (d. 1375), a time-keeper in the central
mosque of Damascus, were passed on to Europe, and are believed
to have contributed to the Copernican revolution.
Did Islam
Stumble?
If Islam did not suffer a decline in
the twelfth century, when did this happen? The beginnings of
this process, as well as its sources, must be sought not so much
in Islam as in Europe. It wasn't Islam that stumbled. Rather,
it was Europe that gathered speed and moved ahead, in gunnery
and shipping, starting in the sixteenth century.
Europe employed its maritime strength
to plunder the gold and silver of the Americas, create an Atlantic
economy, and dominate the commerce of the Indian Ocean. This
deepened Europe's commercial and financial capital, while squeezing
the trading profits of the major Islamic empires as well as the
smaller trading states in the Indian Ocean. Over time, Europe'
military advantage became decisive. And by the beginning of the
nineteenth centuryin India even before thatEurope started
its project of dismantling the Islamic polities in the Mediterranean
and the Indian Ocean.
Why couldn't Islamic-or other-polities
resist this growing European thrust? The Eurocentric narratives
would have us believe that this was fait accompli: the
simple working out of Europe's racial, geographic, climatic,
and cultural advantages over others. Asia and Africa could have
done little to resist.
A historical narrative tells a different
story. Their colonization of the Americas, their growing control
over the trade of the Indian Ocean, their mercantilist rivalries
and incessant wars-all rooted in the anarchy of nation states-accelerated
the dynamic of historical change in Europe, allowing it to outpace
the more centralized, mostly land-based empires in Asia and Africa.
Europe's advantages were historical-and, in part, accidental.
Thwarted
Recovery
This takes us to the troubling question
of Islam's failure-unlike India and China-to mount an adequate
recovery from the losses of the colonial epoch.
Why has Islam, which commanded several
power centers before the rise of Europe, failed to reconstitute
its lost power in the post-colonial period? Once again, those
who attribute this failure to Islam are inverting the order of
causation.
As recently as 1750, Islamic polities
stretched from Mauritania and the Balkans in the West to Sinjiang
and Mindanao in the East. But this power lacked an adequate social
base. In 1800 the Arab population in the Middle East was quite
thin. Elsewhere, in the Balkans and India, the Islamic empires
ruled over mostly non-Muslim populations. The early collapse
of Muslim power in India and the downsizing of the Ottomans in
Europe had much to do with these demographic drawbacks.
The Ottomans, the Maghreb and Egypt faced
another handicap: they were only a few day's sail from Europe.
This made them tempting targets for European capital and cupidity,
mixed with some of the old zeal for eradicating Islam. This mission
was taken up successively by France, Britain and Italy. An early
and determined Egyptian effort to industrializeinitiated
in 1810was dismantled by the British and French in 1840.
When the Egyptians mobilized again in the 1870s, it led to their
colonization in 1882. Britain, France and Israel mounted another
invasion of Egypt as recently as 1956.
This suggests some sobering reflections
for those who would blame the present troubles on Islam's antipathy
to modernity. Imagine if the Egyptian bid to industrialize had
not been dismantled by imperialist Britain and France;
it is then likely that an industrialized Egypt would eventually
have led the entire region to industrial growth, prosperity and
power. This thought experiment explains why Egypt's industrial
drive had to be aborted. An industrialized Middle East may have
renewed the old threat of Islam to Europe.
The disarray of the Arabs in the post-colonial
period goes back to two addi-tional factors: the Zionism and
oil. The Zionist movement was founded on a confluence of Jewish
and Western interests in the Middle East. In time, this led in
1917 to Britain's support for the creation of a Jewish state
in Palestine, the dismantling of the Ottoman empire in 1919,
the vivisection of the former Ottoman territories in the Levant,
the British mandate over Palestine, and the creation of Israel
in 1948. The Islamic Crescent had been splintered, and part of
it occupied by a Jewish colonial-settler state.
In the meanwhile, United States and Britain
were making arrangements in the Persian Gulf to ensure Western
control over the richest oil reserves in the world. They decided
to place the region under archaic, absolutist monarchies whose
survival, against the rising tide of nationalism, would depend
on United States. As part of this plan, when the Iranians overthrew
the monarchy in 1953, United States and Britain instigated a
coup to re-instated it. In 1967, with the decisive defeat of
Egypt, Syria and Jordan-leading to the occupation of Sinai, the
Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza-Israel cut short the career
of secular Arab nationalism. The Middle East straightjacket was
now securely in place.
The Iranian revolution of 1979 did not
loosen the straightjacket. On the contrary, by raising the specter
of Islamist power, this revolution paved the way for an 'Arab'
war against Iran, with the blessings of United States. In time,
after the collapse of Soviet Union, this led the corrupt Arab
regimes to form a grand alliance-under the aegis of United States
and Israel-to control and repress their Islamist movements. When
foolhardy Iraq dared to challenge this grand alliance, it was
bombed back to the stone age and crippled with comprehensive
economic sanctions.
A new 'cold war' had descended on the
Islamic world in the 1990s. Its rules were clear. The United
States would support the Islamic despots-of whatever stripe-so
long as they kept the lid on political Islam. If any country
dared to depart from the terms of this contract, it faced economic
and military sanctions; and, if these did not work, they would
be followed by swift and devastating reprisals. Iraq showed to
the Islamic world the price it would pay for challenging this
new contract. Similarly, Algeria stands as an example of what
happens when the democratic process threatens to empower Islamists.
An explanation of why the 'democratization'
of the 1990s bypassed the Islamic world might be found in this
new cold war. Most Western commentators think otherwise: they
choose to blame Islam. Their method is classic-damnation by accusation.
If Islam is obscurantist, anti-rationalist, fanatical, and misogynist,
then, it must also be opposed to democracy. The Orientalist
has spoken: the case is closed.
Those who believe that Islam is anti-democratic
need a short lesson in the modern history of constitutional movements
in Islam. Muhammad Ali of Egypt appointed his first advisory
council in 1824, consisting mostly of elected members. In 1881,
the Egyptian nationalist movement succeeded in convening an elected
parliament, but this was aborted only a year later by British
occupation. Tunisia had promulgated a constitution in 1860, setting
up a Supreme Council purporting to limit the powers of the monarchy.
But this was suspended in 1864 when the French discovered that
it interfered with their ambitions. Turkey elected its first
parliament in 1877, though it was dissolved a year later by the
Caliph; a second parliament was convened in 1908. Iran's progress
was more dramatic. It started with protests against a British
tobacco monopoly in the 1890s, and quickly led to an elected
parliament in 1906, with powers to confirm the cabinet. A year
later, however, the British and Russians carved up Iran into
their spheres of influence, a development that would lead to
the dissolution of the parliament in 1910. Nevertheless, the
constitutional movement persisted until it was suppressed in
1931 by a new dynasty brought to power by the British.
Compare these developments with the history
of constitutional movements elsewhere, not excluding Europe,
during the nineteenth century-and the world of Islam does not
suffer from the comparison. Incredible as this appears to minds
blinded by Eurocentric prejudice, Tunisia, Egypt and Iran were
taking the lead in making the transition to constitutional monarchies.
The 'resistance to democracy' in the Arab world even today does
not come from their population. Quite the opposite. It comes
from neo-colonial surrogates-brutal military dictatorships and
absolutist monarchies-imposed by a United States determined to
safeguard oil and Israel.
A New
Colonial Contract
The US-imposed straightjacket has deepened
the contradictions of global capitalism in the Islamic world:
a development that is pregnant with consequences which threaten
to spin out of control.
During the Cold War, the elite factions
in many Third World coun-tries-especially their military elites-competed
to win the US contract for re-pressing their populist movements.
As long as they did their job, they enjoyed a degree of autonomy
in managing their economies. A few of them in East Asia, the
most favored ones, became showcases of capitalist success. When
Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, this contract was terminated.
It was replaced by the Washington Consensus, enforced by the
International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization.
The elites in the periphery would now compete to open up their
economies for takeover by multinational corporations.
There are two versions of this new colonial
contract. Countries in the non-Islamic periphery are generally
encouraged to compete for the contract through the ballot box.
In countries that have strong Islamist movements, this option
is not available; they are allowed to keep their dictators and
monarchs. The excuse for this two-track policy is flimsy. It
is charged that the Islamist parties oppose democracy: that they
will use the ballot to shut down the ballot. The real reason
is Western nervousness over the Islamist's twin goals: introducing
an Islamic social order, and reversing the fragmentation of Islam.
This siege of the Islamic world is unlikely
to produce the desired results. On the contrary, it has engendered
contradictions that will only deepen over time. After the rout
of the Arab armies in 1967, the failure of secular, nationalist
movements to reverse Arab marginalization was becoming transparent.
In 1973, with appropriate offers of American 'aid', Egypt made
a separate peace with Israel. In abdicating its leadership of
the Arab world, Egypt wrote the obituary of Arab nationalism.
From now on, the historic task of liberating the Arab world would
be assumed by the Islamists.
Although defeated, the corrupt Arab regimes
remained ensconced in power. They owe their survival to the new
colonial contract which allowed them to keep their repressive
apparatus if they used it to wage war against their own people.
The turn around was quick, moving through capitulations at Camp
David and Oslo, normalization of ties with Israel, and capitulation
to the Washington Consensus. The war against Islam intensified.
The Islamist parties were banned, rooted out of professional
associations and trade unions, and eventually their leaders were
jailed, executed, or hounded out of the country.
This repression of Islamists has produced
two results. Nearly everywhere, it immobilized mainstream Islamists
who wished to work through the institutions of civil society:
through political parties, professional associations, the media,
the courts, and charities. The focus now shifted to the extremists
willing to engage in violent action to gain their ends. But the
extremists too had little crawl space under the repressive Arab
regimes. Those who survived were driven underground, or went
into exile in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or the Western countries.
At this point, some of them decided to change their strategy.
They would target their problems at its
source-and inflict damage on United States. They wanted to sting
the United States into lifting its siege of Islamic countries.
Alternatively, they hoped to start wars-like the one in Afghanistan-on
the chance that this would spark rebellions against the American
surrogates in the Islamic world.
Giving
Up 'False Notions'?
Of late, sagely voices-outside and inside
Islam-have been counseling Muslims to give up the 'false notions'
of Islam. I hope to have shown that the false notions we need
give up are the Orientalist narratives-of an Islam that has been
(mis)represented as irrational, misogynist, fatalist and fanatical.
Rational thinking did not begin with
the Enlightenment. In fact, several En-lightenment thinkers turned
to Islam to advance their own struggle against medieval obscurantism
and the intolerance of an organized clergy. It is time for alienated
Muslim intellectuals to tear the Orientalist veil that obscures
the face of Islam, re-enter the historical currents they have
abandoned, create a deeper understanding of the dynamics of derailed
Islamic societies, and lead them into an Islamic vision of a
world where all communities participate in a race to create works
of excellence.
The West too must give up its false notions
of Islam as the irreconcilable 'Other', that must forever be
battled and besieged. If Islam is a greater threat to the West
than India or China, that is because our actions-in large part-have
succeeded in preventing it from reconstituting its center, its
wholeness and history. More than a fifth of the world's population
seek their place in the world within a stream of history that
flows from the Qur'an. They want to live by ethical ideals that
in the past have produced nobility, magnanimity, sobriety, tolerance,
science, mathematics, philosophy, architecture and poetry. Islam
may do so again if only we lift the siege-and allow the light,
freshness and sweetness at its core to find expression again
in a contest of creative minds and soulful hearts, intertwined
with reason and mercy.
Shahid Alam is
a Professor of Economics at Northeastern University in Boston.
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