Islam on the Move

The rise of Islam and of Islamic countries in the twentieth century resembles in certain aspects that of Russia. Both were first “put on the map,” that is, integrated within Western historical consciousness, by a Napoleonic invasion. In Russia it had awakened the progressively-minded young officers by the 1820s. And it was in Egypt, in 1799, when Arab intellects first began asking two questions caused by contact with the French military and members of the scientific expedition: Why are we deep in decadence? What are the conditions of a rebirth? The first question was easily answered, whether the answer was valid or not. The Arab world decayed under the long Ottoman rule (as early Russia had been ruled by the Tartars) which stifled its aspirations, art and science; even the religious expressions were jealously supervised by Istanbul. It was Napoleon’s expedition which awakened the Middle East from its long slumber, by giving the first jolt to the Turks in their own domain.

What about the rebirth? Now, almost two centuries later, these questions and their answers have awakened Islam, from Morocco to Indonesia, as well as the Arabic heartland. Again, like pre-Bolshevik Russia, the intelligentsia of the Moslem world is divided between the “westernizers” who want to adopt the techniques of modernization, and the “fundamentalists” who seek first the religious/political kingdom. We may yet see, as in Russia, the emergence of a third movement, a synthesis of these trends, which would forge some kind of Islamic unity, or at least vast regional units, like the khalifates in the Middle Ages—which for Baghdad, Cairo and Cordoba were not “middle ages,” but a first renaissance. Let us not fool ourselves: people who have known grandeur in their past keep dreaming of its restoration.

In Europe today there are large numbers of islamologists, political observers of Islam, refugees from Iran and journalists based in Arab countries, whose works, articulating Islam’s aspirations, are of the utmost interest. Names like Henry Corbin and Jacques Berque illustrate islamology on the highest academic level; the first class journalism of Bernard Levine, Péroncel-Hugoz and George Manoulakis penetrate the Islamic political mentality to its deepest layers; a philosopher like Dariush Shayegan writes analyses of Persian intellectual history of the highest caliber. All this mirrors the importance of the phenomenon which arouses passion and intellectual curiosity, political interest and erudite focus on the past.

I shall try to outline here the multi-faceted present and to make intelligent guesses about the future.

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The Islamic Perspective

On October 3, 1983, I gave a lecture in Buenos Aires about the situation in the Middle East. Answering a question, I remarked that Anwar Sadat’s regime, indeed his life, were in danger. On October 6, the press and the airwaves brought the news of his assassination, and I received phone calls in my hotel, calling me a wizard for having predicted this violent end. Or at least people thought I had some special sources of information.

Yet, it was not so difficult to look ahead to that day when exactly four years before, October 6, 1979, I was watching the military parade in Cairo—commemorating the war of 1973 with Israel—where Sadat, accompanied by Mubarak, took the salute. I talked at the time with Egyptian and other Arab journalists, unanimous about Sadat’s unpopularity for having gone to Israel. That gesture represented, in the eyes of Arabs, a sell-out of the Palestinians, and through them, of the causes of Islam. Israel was and is regarded as American real-estate, and America is regarded as the dog wagged by the Israeli tail. The visit thus meant, for example in the judgment of the Nasserite officers and the new bourgeoisie, the potential colonization by Israeli/American interests.¹

There was more to it, however, than Sadat’s visit. For decades, let us say since the 1930s, the Moslem world had come to understand a few realities about the modern West. In the early thirties, king Ibn Saud had told Hungarian Islam scholar, Gyula Germanus,² in Mecca, that the Western world was corrupt and decadent, and that Islam would soon have a chance of asserting itself. It was believed for a while that Mussolini and Franco, both of whom were anti-British, were conducting a realistic policy of recognition vis-à-vis the southern shores of the Mediterranean, and would redress the Western course. Others saw in various leftist revolutionary movements some unexpected turn. At any rate, Islam became increasingly anti-Western: for religious reasons first and always, that is from hostility to the infidel; for political reasons more and more, for resentment at foreign rule and the import of an alien culture.

Whether called capitalism or Marxism (the latter also a Western ideology), Western influence was judged to be contrary to the concept of the umma, the Islamic community transcending separatisms, and to the sharya, Islamic law based on the Koran and on the harsh justice inherited from the desert way of life that Mohammed had refashioned. Add to the pride of great achievements the memories of history and culture, when largely through Syria—first Greek, then Christian, finally Moslem—Hellenic philosophy and science spread as far as Spain, and fertilized speculation in Western universities from Padua to Oxford. Another decisive element was injected into the rich Moslem culture by Iran (Persia), a special chapter in this historical sketch, to which we will return.

All this must be kept in mind when we consider the present. Strictly speaking, there is no Moslem nationalism, rather a permanent inner pressure to fuse all the faithful into one community. Yet, a unifier has still not come, although candidates have not been lacking. He is cast as a typically Semitic messiah-figure: a religious-political savior. Note that the candidates so far—Nasser, Khadafy, now the militant ayatollah—have regarded themselves as the “sword of Islam,” but they were not Mohammed-like enough to fill the immense role. The West is misled when it assumes that these and other potential candidates are “socialists” or “Marxists.” These are Western terms, utilized by Arabs and by the entire Third World to partly imitate, partly scare the outsiders. Rather, they are desert raiders whose dream is to put together an empire which may, incidentally, fall apart the day after, as Mohammed’s and Omar’s religious-political construct soon divided into khalifates.

More important than modernist aspirations and ideologies are the integrist movements, emanating from several centers and rolling inexorably over the Moslem world. The process may take decades, and it will not be halted by political rivalries and dissensions, nor by the failure of unity (umma). It is a sui generis crusade, a basically religious movement that does not even claim it brings the masses closer to material well-being, and does not use slogans of political freedom, human rights, emancipation and progress. The strange thing is that while all profess allegiance to umma (Nasser, Khomeiny, Khadafy have tried it by conquest, regional alliance, or the fusion of two or more “islamic republics”), the Moslems accommodate themselves with life under separate sovereignties, somewhat like the kingdoms of medieval Europe which thought of themselves as members of one christiana respublica. And since all Moslems are supposed to be part of umma, it is not even surprising that after 1945 the first leaders were secular-nationalists, Mossadegh, Jinna, Nasser. Only now, since the war with Israel has crystallized the religious aspect, has a new leader appeared, in the person of Khomeiny. The secularized tendency did not seem to work out: it may have died with Sadat, and the coup de grace will be administered to it when Bourguiba too disappears from the scene.

In other words, religious fanaticism has returned, but, according to the color of the times, it has nationalist overtones and a vocabulary borrowed from both Left and Right. Politically, whether fundamentalists or reformists, Moslems are united on a certain number of propositions: the executive power in the hands of a “just despot,” himself controlled by an elected assembly with limited powers; the party-system is unacceptable; law is based on the sharya; usury is outlawed, taxes are limited to zakat, a charitable contribution. This system, with variations, is on the point of prevailing in an increasing number of Moslem countries (Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia), and where it is not officially confirmed, there the general tendency moves in that direction. Indonesia and Malaysia have declared themselves “Islamic States,” Pakistan promotes the idea through a referendum, Algeria, at the beginning a secular republic, has now an Islamic basic law, Senegal and Egypt are predicted soon to follow.

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Iran-The Special Case

One may see from this list already that Iran is a special case. Of all Moslem countries occupied by the early conquerors, Persia fell most reluctantly under Islamic rule. It had had a long Zoroastrian tradition, which at the time was a remarkably purer religion than that of any of its neighbors to the east, south and west (we speak of the pre-Christian era), such as Egypt, Hellas, Brahminism, Buddhism. There is little doubt, Joseph Campbell writes in his Oriental Mythology, that Zoroastrian Persia influenced the religious concepts of all its neighbors.³

The highly civilized and religiously refined Persians were compelled, in their military and imperial decadence, to submit to the faith brought along by barbarians from the desert. The submission was accomplished and Persia became a Moslem country—but with a difference. It remained rebellious to the generality of Islam, and preserved much of Zoroastrian spirituality and mysticism.⁴ The fact that in the Islamic world it is a sectarian, shiite nation, over against a sunnite majority, that it is racially not Semite but Aryan, and that its art, philosophy, and poetry do not blend with those of the surrounding Arab correligionists, suggests a separate course for Iran. In the context of what we are here describing, that is contemporary political choices, the separate way of Iran means a more radical attitude, more integrist and also less conformist. It is true, however, that the special role Iran plays in the Islamic world sets it somewhat apart and isolates it under Khomeiny as it was isolated under the Shah. Hence, Khomeiny’s shiite revolution is not likely to have a durable impact on the sunnite Moslems in other countries—except where shiites are a strong minority, as in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.

This is the real cleavage in Islam, politically speaking, but as we saw, this is inseparable from the basic religious choice. We may foresee that Iran’s theocratic regime will turn increasingly towards its Asian neighbors whom it will try to detach from Moscow’s dominion. This, in addition to geopolitical considerations, has determined the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the buffer zone between militant shiism and the Soviet Union as an Islamic power, having now some sixty million Moslems on its territory, a restless and self-assertive community with a high birth rate.

Meantime, sunnite, mostly Arabic, Islam, from Iraq to Morocco, tries to consolidate its secular regimes, but finds itself divided and weakened by the conflict between modernizers and fundamentalists, and also between those who put their card on a rapprochement with America and those who thoroughly distrust and dismiss the West, together with its values. The social base here, but also among the Asian Moslems, is the peasantry, with its solidly built tradition around the motherland, the family, the umma. It rejects individualism, the life for profit and pleasure, and suspects all leftist revolutionary movements. No ideology is strong enough to dislodge these deep-seated sentiments; the peasant base could only be enrolled under the integrist flag in the cause of Allah, and this is precisely what is being done. If, as is probable, the Khomeinists will not succeed, then the Moslem Brotherhood might; their sword is now double-edged: against the Washington-Tel Aviv axis, and simultaneously against the immoral Western/Christian infidel.

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Cultural Confusion

Let me repeat that neither the Khomein-ists, nor the Moslem Brotherhood aim at what we call a “revolution,” an action suggesting in the West a socio-economic betterment. This does not mean that the objectives of either movement may not produce a tremendous upheaval below Europe’s “soft underbelly.” What the Iranian philosopher, Dariush Shayegan, now in Parisian exile, writes about it, is worth our attentive reading^.5 I have had the opportunity to confirm some of his theses during visits in universities across Islam, in conversations with Arabs and Iranians, in interviews with politicians and journalists. Shayegan, considerably westernized, and a student of Corbin in both Teheran and Paris, believes that the intellectual contact of the Moslem intelligentsia with the West has confused several generations and has resulted in in-decision between the ancestral tradition and Western nihilism. The latter’s influence has eroded the Moslem “myth” and turned religion into an ideology, but an ideology with nostalgia for a partly, lost spiritual home. Therefore this modern spirit may create a new formula, a cry for justice in Allah’s name, but also a mission to destroy through a jihad (holy war) the fortresses of Western capitalism and unbelief. This formula whose application we are witnessing, is not a Marxist one, although Moscow may exploit it here and there for its own purposes. The comparison may seem far fetched, but the diagnosis at the back of the religious revolution is similar to Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of communism and the remedies he has suggested in several of his works: return to national and religious traditions and values, refusal of dehumanizing industrialization, and despotism if necessary, but not the atheistic, oppressive kind. In other words, the above-mentioned theme of “despotism with justice” and supervised by wise men, elected or spontaneously emerging from the community.⁶

Visits to Moslem capitals and big cities—Cairo, Fez, Tunis, Baghdad, Teheran, Dahran, Karachi, Kuala-Lumpur, Jakarta, Damascus, Amman—create the impression of an abandonment of tradition (in architecture, religious ritual, etc.) and chaotic “modernization” on the Western model, only with even less preoccupation with adequate urban planning. On the other hand, the countryside has remained by and large untouched, and its teeming millions very often present images as if taken from the Old Testament or anyway, from an immemorial past. One is tempted to meditate with fourteenth century Arab historian, Ibn Khaldoun, on the process of conquest of the opulent but aimlessly hedonistic city by the wild and penurious country. (Mao may have taken his own thesis from Ibn Khaldoun). The attractiveness of the Khaldounian model stops when we take a new phenomenon into account: the Moslem intelligentsia, which is Western-educated and city-dwelling, increasingly desperate and turning to militant formulas. It is a fact that they too are torn between the Western, mostly American slogans and gadgets, and a revolution á la Khomeiny. Yet, we should not misjudge this apparent confusion. The new Arab countries which have started out as secular, or even half-Christian States (Senegal, Nigeria, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon), are changing their legislation toward more conformity with the sharya, even when this means a drastic restriction of secular modes and freedoms. The chador may be resented by women of sophisticated background who used to make their purchases in Paris and New York. Mrs. Sadat, now isolated, used to play a feminist role. But they are a minority, and the “revolution,” under whatever flag, will blow them away as a class, as it did under Marxist regimes. While the days of the individual speculators and baksheesh-takers—in a word, the days of large scale corruption—are by no means over, the bourgeoisie, a small class considerably westernized, is on the way out. The new generation now in schools and universities may wear blue-jeans, but by and large it accepts the chador (used here as a symbol) as a restored contact with traditional ways. Its militancy is rather purely Islamic, as it witnesses the failure of the Western panaceas, secularism, liberalism, and socialism.

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Lessons for the West

Are there any lessons in this for the West, notably in the field of foreign policy?

First, we must realize, when we look at the new Islamic consciousness, that we are not dealing with a “Communist conspiracy,” nor with an “old man’s paranoia,” nor yet with a “terrorist nest”—three comfortable labels that Western opinion-makers, lacking imagination and political intelligence, usually glue on phenomena they do not understand. On the contrary, we are witnessing a historic mutation, the re-emergence of a fighting race, always easy to fanaticize, but which, in its intellectual elements, is able to produce out of its entrails important political figures and sharp-eyed visionaries.

In the second place, we should give due regard to the fact that the dispersion of Islam into many Arab and non-Arab nations is not necessarily a permanent obstacle to an eventual unity, unity at least for large-scale action. This has been possible even on the national level: Mossadegh’s standing up to British oil interests, temporarily a failure, became, twenty-five years later, a brutal upheaval by the religious class, able to succeed precisely because the action was not conducted for economic interests, but in spiritual terms. Another example was Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez canal, then Syria’s emergence as the key-power in the Middle-East. These successes were those of nationalism, combined with Islamic inspiration.⁷

The third point is the Moslem world’s humiliation by Israel’s repeated victory against one, two, or three Arab neighbors. Whether the PLO will remain the spearhead of the anti-Israeli struggle is not the point; all observers agree that the Palestinian issue has become the focus of Moslem militancy, now too late to dismantle. From this nucleus; all sorts of consequences will arise, perhaps the emergence of a unifying figure, a leader of holy wars. It is too easy to dismiss Moslem unity as a dream, and argue that the West, together with the Soviet Union, is able to “divide and rule.” We said, on the other hand, that in the case of Islam, unity does not mean the same thing as in other parts of the world. Here the common religion serves as an overarching communal attitude; a religious/national leader may activate and mobilize the masses, just as, in another context, “socialism” has been able to do so elsewhere.

This remark leads to the last point. The Western world has so completely evacuated any unifying myth and energizing belief from its mental structure, that it has lost the faculty of understanding psychological-religious motivations, whether among allies or enemies. Our governments are run by lawyers and businessmen of a positivistic mindcast, so that other issues are reduced and spelled-out by and for them on the lowest mentality-level in order to be dealt with. A symptom of this loss of comprehension is the Western assumption that “Arab politics is motivated by the oil interests,” and that the various power centers: Damascus, Rabat, Ryad, Teheran and Cairo are intent only on grabbing the loot.

In the age of decadence, empires—in this istance the “West”—always tend to misapprehend other people’s nature, because that is the comfortable way of seeing it. In the case here discussed, Western governments, unlike serious Western scholarship, are blind to Islam’s religious component. In a recent interview,⁸ Pakistani president, Zia-ul-haq, underlined once more the fact that the Shah had fallen under the influence of Western mirage-makers when he accelerated his country’s process of industrialization and modernization. He took no account, Zia says, of the religious nature of the Iranians, who in their mass repudiate the secular mode of thinking and living. It must be repeated that Islamic religion is perfectly compatible with warfare, terrorist raids (think of the eleventh-century hashishim), savage campaigns and crusades. Integrism, holy war, return to tradition, and the Moslem Brotherhood are stronger than the modernizing policies timidly pursued (after the fall of the Shah) by the various regimes. These policies, emanating from the cities, are now increasingly shaped by the countryside and the tribes, thus at least indirectly by the mullahs, marabouts, ulemas, imams—and integrist intellectuals. The modernizing, even technological trends are not absent; but it seems that the fundamentalists whose domination will be gradually asserted in the coming decades are determined to take from the West the machines, not the values.⁹

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Notes

1. In Cairo, at a journalist’s office, I was handed with ironical laughter Harvard Law Professor Roger Fischer’s book, Dear Israel, Dear Arabs, in which this naive “solver of conflicts” advises the antagonists to just settle and fall into each others’ arms. Fischer has already so “advised” Blacks and Whites in South Africa, and Moscow/Washington too.
2. The great scholar had converted to Islam, and made his pilgrimage at this time.
3. The second volume of The Masks of God (New York: Viking, 1962).
4. This aspect has been brilliantly studied by the dean of islamo-iranian studies, the recently deceased (1978) Henry Corbin.
5. Qu’est-ce qu’une révolution religieuse? (Paris: Les Presses d’aujourd’hui, 1982).
6. In John B. Dunlop’s book, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), there is a detailed description of the channels through which Russian nationalism has found expression under the Bolshevik regime: religion, the preservation of artistic patrimony, the protection of nature from vandalism by the State.
7. Make no mistake about it: what for Lebanon and Lebanese Christians is a tragedy today, is counted as a huge achievement by Islamic integrism, namely, the advance of Syria and Iran.
8. In Politique internationale, Paris, nr. 26, Winter 1984–1985.
9. It is hardly known that American oil company employees in Saudi Arabia are contractually obliged to send away their teenage children to school, so that they do not spread bad influences among Arab children.