In the Path of God

Islam and Political Power

Daniel Pipes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351512916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Islamwissenschaft

Americans' awareness of Islam and Muslims rose to seemingly unprecedented heights in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, but this is not the first time they have dominated American public life. Once before, during the period of the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981, Americans found themselves targeted as a consequence of a militant interpretation of Islam. Daniel Pipes wrote In the Path of God in response to those events, and the heightened interest in Islam they generated. His objective was to present an overview of the connection between in Islam and political power through history in a way that would explain the origins of hostility to Americans and the West. Its relevance to our understanding of contemporary events is self evident. Muslim antagonism toward the West is deeply rooted in historical experience. In premodern times, the Islamic world enjoyed great success, being on the whole more powerful and wealthier than their neighbors. About two hundred years ago, a crisis developed, as Muslims became aware of the West's overwhelming force and economic might. While they might have found these elements attractive, Muslims found European culture largely alien and distasteful. The resulting resistance to Westernization by Muslims has deep roots, has been more persistent than that of other peoples, and goes far to explain the deep Muslim reluctance to accept modern ways. In short, Muslims saw what the West had and wanted it too, but they rejected the methods necessary to achieve this. This, the Muslim trauma, has only worsened over the years.

1

Understanding Islam in Politics

Much of the conventional wisdom about Islam and politics needs to be examined with skepticism.

—Michael C. Hudson

EVENTS in recent years have made clear the extraordinary role of Islam in world politics. As fundamentalist Muslims took power and achieved international importance in such states as Pakistan and Iran, understanding Islam became necessary to interpret their goals and ideology. Islam also gave direction to governments in Saudi Arabia and Libya, influenced electoral politics in democracies such as Turkey, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and posed important challenges to Communist regimes in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. Islam heightened domestic tensions in Nigeria, the Sudan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Burma, and it defined rebellions against the central government in Chad, Ethiopia, Cyprus, Lebanon, Thailand, and the Philippines. It fueled international conflicts between Turks and Greeks, Arabs and Israelis, Pakistanis and Indians, and Somalis and Ethiopians. In the Arab-Israeli dispute, for example, Islam helped account for the nature of Arab resistance to Israel’s existence, the intense involvement of such distant countries as Iraq and Libya, and the meaning of the call in the Palestine National Covenant for the establishment of a “secular and democratic” state in Palestine.

There has been an increasing need to understand the political impact of Islam. Proposals for solving the Arab-Israeli conflict must consider the special Islamic concern for the control of territory. American or Soviet negotiators seeking military bases in the Middle East must take into account vehement Islamic sensibilities against the presence of non-Muslim troops. NATO strategists must keep abreast of Islamic sentiments among Turkey’s population if they want to gauge the likelihood of the alliance’s southeast flank holding firm. As Muslims of the Soviet Union increase in number and grow out of their isolation, the Islamic drive for self-rule will probably shape their aspirations; in all likelihood, they will use religious institutions to organize against the regime and they will look to foreign Muslims for support. Even business interests need to watch Islam, for many key oil-exporting states entertain “powerful sentiments of grievance and resentment against the Christian West’’¹ which could seriously upset the oil market in coming years.

How Muslims feel and act has enormous international repercussions: they number about 832 million strong and make up roughly one-fifth of mankind; substantial groups of Muslims live in ninety-one countries and in them constitute a population of about 3.6 billion. Muslims control most of the oil available for export and they inhabit many of the globe’s most strategic areas. Yet the question of Islam in politics has been given little serious thought until recently and remains a largely obscure topic in the Western world. In my view, this is not so much because of the subject matter’s complexity but because of the many blinders that obstruct the vision of observers. For Westerners, the main problems have to do primarily with an historic animosity toward Islam and a disinclination to acknowledge the political force of religion. In the hope of clearing up some of these problems, this initial chapter discusses some obstacles that face a Westerner interested in understanding Islam and politics.

Impediments to a Westerner’s Understanding

Recognizing Religion’s Impact on Politics

For Westerners of the late twentieth century the notion that Islam—or any religion—acts as an autonomous political force may be a somewhat novel thesis. The influence of religion in the West has diminished so much during the past five hundred years that many persons, especially intellectuals, find it difficult to appreciate the political import of religion in other times and places. Developments such as the Iranian Revolution, the central role of the Catholic church in Poland, and the rise of fundamentalist pressure groups in the United States provoke much discussion, but the deeper, ongoing influence of religion tends to be ignored. Three obstacles are especially important in this: secularism, materialism, and modernization theory.

Secularization is a “process whereby religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance” and are increasingly restricted to the domain of private faith.² Since the early Renaissance the West has experienced a steady contraction of religion away from politics, ethics, education, and the arts; this process has gone so far that faith retains hardly any importance in the lives of many people. But secularization has not been universal, for some people in the West and many in other regions of the world, especially Muslims, are still deeply swayed by religious concerns. Secularized observers often disbelieve that the faith that they disdain can retain such force. For someone who views religion as a sign of ignorance and backwardness, the passions it arouses can be baffling. “To the modem Western mind, it is not conceivable that men would fight and die . . . over mere differences in religion; there have to be some other ‘genuine’ reasons underneath the religious veil.”³ For someone whose daily life is not touched by faith, understanding the power of religion in politics is difficult and requires an open mind and a willingness to see things from a different vantage point. There is a tendency to discount the power of religion. Khomeini’s rise to power is viewed as a result of economic discontent, of social tensions, political disenfranchisement, repression, charismatic leadership—anything but the fact that millions of Iranians believed this man could create a new order which, in fulfilling God’s commands, would solve Iran’s problems. More generally, “many commentators... believe that present Islamic activism is primarily nationalist or socialist or economically motivated movements dressed in the garb of religion.” Yet, “to ignore religious desires and to concentrate only on the economic drives or secularized political motives is to limit unnecessarily the scope of our understanding.”⁴

The philosophical doctrine of materialism impedes comprehension of religion in politics even more than secularism. This doctrine originated in the nineteenth century, when European intellectuals, expressing unlimited confidence in rationality and science, formulated elaborate theories to demonstrate how predictably mankind responds to its environment. One of these theories was Karl Marx’s historical materialism which emphasized the importance of changes in economic conditions. According to Marx, the system of labor (slave, serf, capitalist, or socialist) determines all other aspects of society, including its politics, social relations, and culture. Neo-Marxists later modified this theory to allow more flexibility, but Marxist thought continues to emphasize the role of economic relations, while discounting the importance of ideas (scornfully dismissed as “ideology”). Individuals may believe they are motivated by ideals—patriotism, religious fervor, justice, and humanitarian-ism—but materialists invariably discern hidden economic motives. They believe that a calculus of cost and benefit, often unconscious, determines most actions. For example, abolitionists in the United States thought they were motivated by morality to fight the slave trade, but the materialists would argue that slavery hurt their economic interests. So, too, material concerns spurred American rebels in 1776, French revolutionaries in 1789, and Nazi supporters in the 1930s.

The trouble with this is that the theory of materialism reduces humans to one-dimensional beings, and the truth is not so simple. Economic factors indisputably have a major role (and they had been quite neglected before Marx), but they do not singly determine behavior. One cannot ignore the wide range of emotions that are not tied to material self-interest: loyalties to family, tribe, ethnic group, language group, neighbors, nation, race, class, or religion sometimes overlap with material interests and sometimes run contrary to them. Material factors alone fail to account for the actions of a George III or a Hitler. They cannot explain the endurance of Communist rule so long after its economic deficiencies have become manifest. Nor can they explain why Japan, an island almost barren of natural resources, is so much better off than mineral-rich Zaire. Much less do material factors show why so many people willingly give up their lives for political causes they believe in.

Similar problems arise when economic motives are assigned to actions taken in the name of religion. Materialists dismiss faith as a camouflage for self-interested drives, and they consider it naive to accept religious impulses at face value. But how do material interests explain the wars of the Reformation that split communities and made family members into one another’s enemies? What possible gains could the early Mormons have expected as they left their homes and trekked to Utah? Though the Crusades, the long conflict in Ireland, and the recent proliferation of religious sects in South Korea all had economic dimensions, it is surely mistaken to view them primarily as economic phenomena. The Crusades, for example, were far more than an imaginative method of making work for the unemployed or a way to gain new markets; material factors alone could never have inspired such enormous undertakings, with such risks. And how would material factors explain the suicide massacre at the People’s Temple in Guyana?

Islam too must be understood as a potent force. Popular views in the West ascribe almost everything Islamic to “fanaticism,” as though this were an independent cause,⁵ but serious discussions usually discount the role of Islam in favor of material factors. For example, a collection of essays, published in 1978 under the title Muslim-Christian Conflicts: Economic, Political and Social Origins, ⁶ covers five countries (Lebanon, Egypt, the Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Cyprus), but not once in 245 pages do the authors ascribe clashes between Christians and Muslims to emotions arising from religious allegiance! As the book’s subtitle indicates, they interpret every conflict as a symptom of material grievances. But how would such grievances explain, for instance, what happened during one week in May 1982 in Lebanon: the explosion of a car bomb outside a mosque under construction, injuring four persons; the bombing of a West Beirut mosque near the house of a former Muslim prime minister; the assassination of a senior Islamic figure; the killing of a Maronite priest; and the suicide mission conducted in a Maronite church in Tripoli, killing three and injuring five? Whatever the economic relations between Muslims and Christians, these acts could have been inspired only by religious sentiments; similar examples can be found in all the other conflicts too. The mere fact of adherence to Islam has profound political consequences. If one-quarter of India’s people had not converted to Islam, the subcontinent would not have been split as it was; further, the millions of Muslims who abandoned their homes in India to move to Pakistan neither expected nor received material benefits for this transfer. Islam, like other religions, inspires impractical acts which cannot be ascribed to economic self-interest.

Modernization theory, an explanation of how nations develop, was articulated in the two decades following World War II, during a unique period of prosperity and self-confidence in the West, when science seemed invincible and progress irresistible. Modernization theory postulates that all nations must follow the lines laid down by the first countries to become modem, especially Britain and the United States. In the political sphere, this means rationalization, the civic society, and secularization. Religion is seen as an obstacle to modernization and its hold is expected to weaken as nations advance.

These ideas were already discredited before 1979, but the Iranian Revolution delivered a final blow. Modernization theorists could not account for the emergence of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the Iranians’ leader against the shah, whose revolt represented the first major political movement away from Western political ideals in the twentieth century. Until Khomeini, the leaders of all great social upheavals in modem times espoused objectives deriving at least in part from European thought, whether liberal, Marxist, fascist, or other. Prominent non-Western leaders such as Kemal Ataturk, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Ahmed Ben Bella, Kwame Nkruma, Robert Mugabe, Mahatma Gandhi, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung, Sukarno, and Fidel Castro espoused goals familiar to the West, notwithstanding their local flavor. They conceived of all aspects of public affairs—sovereignty, economics, justice, welfare, and culture—in ways that could be traced to European origins, and this encouraged many observers to assume that peoples everywhere in the world must emulate the West politically.

But Khomeini was different. Although unconsciously influenced by Western notions, he rejected them; his lack of interest in the West was symbolized by his spending four months in the tiny village of Neauphle-le-Chateau and never visiting Paris, a mere twenty miles away. Khomeini’s goals existed entirely within an Islamic context; further, he had no Western constituency and was indifferent to his image in Stockholm or Berkeley. Satisfied to live as his ancestors had, unfamiliar with the Western concepts of progress, he wished for nothing more than to return to the Islamic ways he supposed had once prevailed in Iran. Khomeini showed that the force of religion need not wane with the building of an industrial society, that secularism need not accompany modernization. Yet the discrediting of modernization theory did not signal its disappearance; the notion that religion is on the way out has been so widely disseminated that it may take decades before it loses force. Perhaps the time has come to suggest that secularization is a transient process peculiar to the West; not only will it not affect the rest of the world, but it is likely to be reversed even in the Occident: “An historian of the non-Westem world can hardly fail to see Western secularism as a sub-facet of specifically Christian history; indeed, of specifically Western Christian history.’’⁷

Together, secularization, materialism, and modernization theory cause the press and scholarship too often to ignore Islam’s role in politics. In recent times, Islam came to the attention of Western analysts in the mid-1950s, as the Soviet Union, threatening Western interests, built up links to Abdul Nasser’s government in Egypt and other countries of the Middle East. In response, European and American writers debated the relationship of Islam to communism. One school of thought saw Islam as a “bulwark against communism,” on the grounds that its emphatic monotheism precluded Muslims from accepting any ideology based on atheism; the other (and more subtle) view was that structural similarities made the transition from Islam to communism an easy one. As fears that the Middle East would accept Marxism-Leninism abated, however, interest in Islam among political observers subsided, and nationalism became the focus of attention. Discussion of Islam as a political factor then went into dormancy for about twenty years. Views expressed in a 1965 book, Islam and International Relations, summed up the attitudes of those times. One writer, Fayez A. Sayegh, stated that “at least with respect to ‘neutralism,’ . . . Islam has had little, if any noticeable influence upon the reasoning, planning, decision-making, or expression of Muslim policy makers.” The volume’s editor noted that most of the authors “maintained that Islam is actually of quite limited significance in shaping the attitudes and behavior of Muslim states in international relations today.”⁸ For years, politics in Muslim countries was discussed almost without reference to Islam.

Attention to Islam increased after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and even more after the 1973 conflict. In 1976, Bernard Lewis urged in “The Return of Islam” that more attention be paid to the phenomenon of Islam, criticizing “the present inability, political, journalistic, and scholarly alike, to recognize the importance of the factor of religion in the current affairs of the Muslim world.”⁹ Westerners were increasingly receptive to the role of Islam by the time Khomeini appeared. As he gained power, the Western world watched with amazement; Islam seemed capable of unleashing the most extraordinary forces. Then, overreacting to events in Iran, many in the Occident suddenly thought Islam capable of anything; “in a remarkably brief span of time, Islam has been elevated from a negligible coincidence of human geography, to a political force of global import.”¹⁰ Indeed, interest in Islam became excessive, leading one journalist to complain in 1981 that “where before Islam was largely ignored, now it is seen everywhere, even where it has no particular relevance.”¹¹ The war between Iraq and Iran which broke out in September 1980 was almost universally understood in terms of Shf'i-Sunni^* differences and the threat of Shi'i revolt in Iraq, though the cause of fighting had much more to do with a straightforward dispute over territory.¹²

But if Islam received too much attention in Iran, it remained underestimated elsewhere. In May 1981, the press portrayed disturbances in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo in purely nationalist terms, as Albanians versus Serbs, and stressed the Albanians' economic plight, without making any mention of the underlying Muslim-Christian tension. In other cases, the impulse toward materialistic interpretations prevailed: increased emphasis on religious law in Pakistan was portrayed as a function of economic travails, and the upsurge of the Muslim Breth...