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ISLAM AND THE WEST: CLASH OF CIVILISATIONS?
Francis Robinson
[continued...]
Such feelings were no less strongly held in
the Arab world. Here a key focus was the Crusades,
which Carole Hillenbrand explores in the epilogue
to her brilliant book The Crusades: Islamic
Perspectives. They permeate, she declares,
"many aspects of modern life in the Arab
and wider Muslim world", 11
where they have left psychological
scars. They frequently referred to the Crusades
and drew parallels as they felt the weight
of European colonialism. The myth of Saladin
as the great leader of resistance to the West
and his victory over the Crusaders at Hattin
was a central theme in the Palestinian struggle
under the British Mandate.
12
Indeed, the Israeli state has come to be seen
as a modern version of the Latin Kingdom of
Jerusalem, which was established by what Sayyid
Qutb, the leader of the second phase of the
Muslim Brotherhood called "the Crusader
spirit which runs in the blood of all Westerners".
13
In his pronouncements Osama Bin
Laden, along with his fellow Islamist leaders,
conjured up this spirit of the Crusaders in
Arab and Muslim minds. In a fatwa of 20 February
1998 he proclaimed the formation of a "world
front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders":
The rule to kill Americans and their allies
- civilians and military - is an individual
duty for any Muslim ... to liberate the al
Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Holy Mosque
[in Mecca] from their grip, and in order for
their armies to move out of all the lands
of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten
any Muslim… 14
Bin Laden belongs to a long tradition
of protest against Western power in Muslim
lands, though in this case his words have
been followed by action.
The second development is that of an increasingly
active pan-Islamic consciousness in the Muslim
world since 1800 There are reasons for this
pan-Islamic sentiment which derive from Islam
itself. Muslims believe that their's is a
community, an ummah, created by God’s revelation
to man through Muhammad. Moreover, that revelation
tells them that they are the best community
produced for mankind. They believe that it
is an especial blessing to belong to this
community. The brotherhood of all those who
belong to the community, in total equality
before God, is a strong concept which is widely
celebrated from the salam in communal prayer
through to the shared experience of the pilgrimage
to Mecca. A concern to cherish and sustain
the community against all forms of divisiveness
is the underlying spirit of the shari’a, the
holy law. The classical traditions of biography,
moreover, were always designed to show the
role of individuals, first in sustaining and
enriching the community in their time and
second in transmitting that precious knowledge
to future generations as continuing manifestations
of the community. There is a special magic
in the community as expressed by Muhammad
Iqbal, writing at a time when it was threatened
by the growth of nationalism. In his Secrets
of Selflessness, published in 1918, he declared:
Our essence is not bound to any place;
The vigour of our wine is not contained
In any bowl; Chinese and Indian
Alike the shard that constitutes our jar,
Turkish and Syrian alike the clay
Forming our body; neither is our heart
Of India, or Syria, or Rum,
Nor any fatherland do we profess
Except Islam.
But 20th-century realities were destroying
this charismatic community:
Now brotherhood has been so cut to shreds
That in the stead of community
The country has been given pride of place
In men’s allegiance and constructive work;
The country is the darling of their hearts
And wide humanity is whittled down
Into dismembered tribes..
15
Iqbal, however, need not have been quite so
concerned. The community was being re-created
in a very special way in the age of the modern
nation state, using basic religious building
blocks. One pillar has been the great increase
in the numbers of those performing the pilgrimage
to Mecca in the 19th and 20th centuries- from
under one million in the 1920s to over ten
million in the 1970s. Growing wealth and the
great improvements in transport by land, sea
and air have facilitated this community-affirming
ritual. But most important has been the growth
of global news and communications systems,
from the expansion of the press in the mid-19th
century to the development of global radio
and television in the second half of the 20th.
The press flourished in British India as West
Asia came under European domination from the
1870s: when Russia and the Ottoman Empire
went to war in the late 1870s; when the British
invaded Egypt in 1882; when the Ottoman Empire
began to decline, from 1911 to 1924.
16
Such was the fervour and
excitement that many Muslims came to dream
about the wider Islamic world. Muslims adopted
headgear and other forms of dress to indicate
their identification with West Asia. For the
same purpose they stopped giving their children
names from regional languages in favour of
classical Islamic ones. Their writings revealed
how they identified with Muslims of other
countries. 17
During the second half of the 20 th
century this process has intensified, with
an especial focus on Iran, Iraq and Palestine.
Some of the crowds that have protested against
allied action in Afghanistan or Israeli action
in the West Bank will have been organised,
but large numbers will have protested spontaneously
out of fellow feeling for their Muslim brothers.
What this strong sense of community, of Islamic
brotherhood, means is that, although there
are many differences and distinctions amongst
Muslims, there is a level at which they will
unite, especially when confronted by bullying,
interference or invasion from outside. This
is reflected in the local press throughout
the Muslim world and among people talking
on buses and trains, in bazaars and villages.
Of course, power players in the Muslim world
have from time to time tried to hijack this
sentiment for their own purposes, as the Ottoman
Empire did with its pan-Islamic policies in
the late 19th century, as Saudi Arabia has
tried to do through their Islamic Conference
Organisation and the World Muslim League from
the 1960s, and as Osama bin Laden did during
2001, harnessing global communications technology
to his cause with no little skill. The third
development, and in many ways the most important,
has been the worldwide movement of Islamic
revivalism, which from the 18th century has
been expressed in many different ways through
differing social, economic, cultural and political
circumstances. It is important to recognise
that this movement has profound Islamic roots
and precedes the assertion of Western power
in the Muslim world. From the 19th century
onwards the movement has interacted powerfully
with the Western presence and is in varying
ways shaped by it. All the Islamic organisations
that have gained attention through the events
of September 11 have their roots in this revival
and this reaction. The fundamental concern
of this extraordinary movement has been the
renewal of Islamic society from within and
not assault on outside forces, an internal
struggle or jihad, not an external one.
At the heart of this Muslim revival lay a
return to first principles. In the spread
of Islam from West Africa to China and South
East Asia too many concessions had been made
to local religious practice, which compromised
the monotheism of God’s message to humanity
through Muhammad. It was necessary to go back
to first principles, to abandon much of the
medieval superstructure of learning and concentrate
on the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet,
to try to recreate the perfection of the Prophet’s
community in the oasis of Medina. At the same
time, there was an attack on all ideas about
the intercession of God in the affairs of
mankind, as represented by the shrines of
saints. From the late 18th century, the concept
that man alone was responsible for his salvation,
indeed that he must act on earth to achieve
it, steadily spread to many parts of the Muslim
world. This, as is the case with the Protestant
Reformation in Christianity, has released
vast amounts of energy. It represents a shift
in emphasis in the forms of Muslim piety from
an other-worldly to a this-worldly Islam.
18
There are three manifestations of this worldwide
Islamic movement which link directly to the
present. The first is the Wahhabi movement
of Arabia. This was the creation of an 18th
century scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab,
who preached a return to the Quran and the
traditions and removal of all religious practices
suggesting God’s intercession. His preaching
is the locus classicus of the Islamic revival
and the name Wahhabi is given to similar forms
of Islamic purism down to the present. The
message of this scholar, however, would not
have made much impact had he not teamed up
in 1744 with a petty chieftain of Central
Arabia, Muhammad ibn Saud. His message and
Saud’s ambitions proved an explosive mixture.
They underlay the creation of the first Saudi
empire, which was brought down by the armies
of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt in 1818. They subsequently
inspired the creation of the second Saudi
empire, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which
emerged in the 1920s.
This Saudi state became the corporate venture
of the Saudi family, dependent on the legitimisation
of Wahhabi ulama that we know today. There
has developed a constant and increasingly
abrasive tension between the family and state
interests of the Saudi family and the concerns
of the Wahhabi ulama to promote their Islamic
understanding and to assert their authority.
This situation has been exacerbated both by
the Western life-style and corruption of many
members of the royal family and by the state's
close association with the USA. The presence
of large numbers of Westerners in Saudi Arabia
since the Gulf War of 1990 has made matters
much worse. Other important factors are the
growing Saudi middle class who have no representation
and a growing population without jobs. As
the median age in Saudi Arabia is 19.7, the
situation will get worse, and the annual per
capita income has fallen from $28,000 in the
early 1980s to $7000 today.
The Saudi régime could not afford to permit
the US to use the Prince Sultan airbase during
the 2001 campaign in Afghanistan. It should
be no surprise that the Saudis should have
tried to gain Islamic credentials by supporting
Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist organisation,
or the Jama-at-i Islami of Pakistan, the Islamic
Salvation Front of Algeria or the Muslim Brotherhood
of Egypt. Nearly half of the highjackers of
September 11 were of Saudi origin, and one
of the stated objectives of Osama bin Laden,
that Saudi citizen banished from his country,
was the overthrow of the current Saudi régime.
The second manifestation of the Islamic revival
connected with the present is the emergence
of 'reformist Islam' in South Asia in the
19th century. This is a movement whose ideas
and organisation can be linked directly through
time to the Taliban. At the heart of South
Asia’s 'reformist Islam' was the Deoband madrassa,
founded in 1867 and called by some the most
important traditional Muslim university in
the world after Egypt’s al-Azhar. Deobandis
were tackling the problem of how to sustain
an Islamic society under British rule. They
debated how to sustain Islam in the relatively
novel situation in which they did not have,
and would not wish to have, state support.
The individual human conscience in search
of salvation, knowing how to act properly
as a Muslim, was to be the driving force sustaining
a Muslim society. They embarked on a concerted
effort to translate the Quran and other key
texts into Indian languages. For the first
time in the Muslim world the printing press
was harnessed seriously and with enormous
vigour to make these texts as widely available
as possible. Schools were set up on the Deoband
model: By 1967 there were said to be over
8,000 worldwide, all supported by private
subscription. This movement has come to be
seen as a form of 'Islamic Protestantism'
in which Muslims without power developed their
Muslim community by themselves. It was a self-sufficient
form of Islam which could operate outside
the colonial state, indeed, outside any state
at all. 19 The reformist
Muslims, the Deobandis, largely opposed the
creation of Pakistan - they did not need a
Muslim state to create their Islamic world.
Once it was created, they carried forward
their message both in Pakistan and Afghanistan,
where they had long-established madrassas.
By the 1980s and 1990s hundreds of Deobandi
madrassas had been established in Pakistan.
From at least the 1970s they were assisted
from outside by funds, in particular from
the Persian Gulf States and Saudi Arabia,
and also by revenue remitted by Pakistanis
working in the Gulf. The process was assisted,
too, by the Islamic government of General
Zia ul-Haq and by a Sunni Muslim urban élite
concerned to consolidate its hold over the
many Pakistanis who were moving from the countryside
to the towns. Given their long-term connections
with Afghanistan, it was natural after the
Soviet invasion of 1979 that the Deobandi
madrasas should perform a major role in assisting
the large numbers of refugees who fled to
Pakistan. Thus began the militarisation of
the madrassas as the Afghans, but also Pakistanis
and Arabs, fought their jihad against the
Russians. Once the Russians had been defeated,
it was but a short step from this to the next
stage:
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency
used the students from these madrassas, the
Taliban, to create a favourable régime in
Afghanistan and give Pakistan the strategic
depth to the North-West that it had long sought.
The Taliban were armed and trained, and in
1994 they invaded Afghanistan; by 1997 Pakistan
recognised the Taliban as the rulers of Afghanistan.
20
The irony is that the Taliban, the heirs of
a revivalist movement designed specifically
to fashion an Islamic society which could
exist without state power, should have been
the very first group of Sunni Muslim ulama
to achieve total and unfettered control of
a state- or at least the shattered remains
of what was the Afghan state. Pakistan has
been forced to assist in the destruction of
the monster it helped to create, as it is
now being pressed to curb the guerilla groups
whose action it has supported in Kashmir.
These are not actions which it will be easy
for the Jamiat ul-Ulama-i Islam (the Deobandi
party in Pakistani politics) and its sympathisers
to forgive. The third aspect of the great
Islamic movement of revival and reform which
reaches into the present is the ideology and
organisation of Islamism. Islamists are very
much a 20th century phenomenon. They find
the solutions of the reformers to the challenges
of the West and modernity unsatisfactory because,
by and large, they ignored modernity and dodged
the issue of power. The responses of Muslim
modernists, many of whom led nationalist movements,
were no less satisfactory. Certainly they
understood the issue of power, but in engaging
with the West they were deemed to be willing
to sacrifice too much that was essential to
Islam and Muslim culture. Islamists saw the
real danger as Western civilisation itself.
Their real enemies were the secular or modernist
élites in Muslim societies who collaborated
with Western political, economic and cultural
forces, and enabled Western influence to flourish
in their societies. Their prime aim was to
take power themselves so that their societies
could be sealed off from these corrupting
influences.
They would then be able to introduce their
Islamic system in which the Quran and the
shari’a were sufficient for all human purposes.
This was a system to match capitalism or socialism;
it envisaged the Islamisation of economics,
knowledge and so on - it was an ideology.
The founders of the Islamist trajectory in
Islamic revivalism were Maulana Maududi of
India and Pakistan (1903-1979), whose organisation
was the Jama-at-i Islami, and Hasan al-Banna
of Egypt, assassinated in 1949, who founded
the Muslim Brotherhood. From the 1970s Islamist
organisations had spread widely in the Muslim
world. Among the more notable organisations
were the Islamic Salvation Front of Algeria,
Hamas of Palestine and the Rifa Party of Turkey.
Amongst their notable successes were the dramatic
assassination in 1981 of Anwar Sadat, President
of Egypt, the steady Islamisation of the Pakistani
constitution and law, and, of course, the
Iranian Revolution. It is important to understand
that Islamism is in its way a profoundly 'modern'
movement, concerned to chart an Islamically-based
path of progress for Muslim societies. While
concerned to resist the West, its leaders
have been influenced by Western knowledge.
Sayyid Qutb who took over the leadership of
the Muslim Brotherhood from Hasan al-Banna
was much influenced by the French fascist
thinker, Alexis Carrell, and a visit to the
USA. Ali Shariati, ideologue of the Iranian
revolution, was much influenced by Sartre,
Fanon and Louis Massignon. Erbakan, the leading
Turkish Islamist politician was an engineer.
Bazargan and Bani-Sadr, early leaders of the
Iranian revolution were an engineer and an
economist. The followers of Islamist movements
are the displaced. More often than not they
have moved from countryside to city and look
for medical, educational and psychological
support, often in areas where the state is
failing. Anthropological studies have shown
that Islamism and its organisations often
provide the means by which both men and women
can come to participate in the modern economy
and state.
Classically, the prime concern of Islamist
groups has always been to effect change in
their own societies, to seize power if possible.
The one exception to this rule has been a
concern from the beginning with the fate of
Palestine. However, we are told that Osama
bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network contains members
of former Islamist groups and is in contact
with Islamist groups throughout the world.
This network, moreover, seems to have been
that which from the early 1990s has consistently
waged war on US targets in West Asia and the
US itself. We need to know why this change
has taken place. Is there, for instance, a
new strand of Islamism which sees the struggle
for power in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt
as one which can only be won by assaults on
the USA? Or are we dealing with the personal
vendetta of an evil genius brilliantly able
to make the anger and hunger for justice in
the Islamic world serve his purpose?
How far, then, does this scenario represent
the makings of a clash of civilisations, of
Islam and the West? It is possible to portray
the 1400 years of interaction between the
Islamic world and the West as a clash of civilisations,
of world views. We can refer to our Crusades
against Islam in West Asia and in Spain. We
can refer to the annual Ottoman campaign in
Europe, which took the form of holy war. We
can be blinded by the legacy of hundreds of
years of polemic against Islam just as Muslims
belittled European civilisation until the
19th century. But, alternatively, we could,
as more and more scholars are doing today,
note how much through history Christian and
Islamic civilisations have fruitfully interacted
and played a part in shaping each other.
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