analysis
Shamil Jeppie
The putative war between Islam and the West that is recycled these days in the media is a product of the fertile imaginations of ”Islamic” and ”Western” ideologists.
If this ”clash of civilisations” has any history, then it is very recent. What appears to be a fact of life with a centuries-old genealogy is in fact an effect of contemporary developments.
”Islamism” was hardly the stuff of revolution and radicalism in the immediate post-1945 period. Decolonisation mostly put in place elites disconnected from their people, and in the 1950s and 1960s many ideas were competing in which so-called fundamentalism was hardly a viable competitor.
In those days a variety of right- and left-wing nationalisms fought for hearts and minds. Secular Arab nationalism in the Middle East was the dominant discourse in Arab states, especially after Colonel Gamel Abdel Nasser took power in Egypt in 1952. Even then it was republican and anti-monarchical, not anti-Western.
He nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, provoking Britain, France and Israel to attack Egypt. It was only afterwards that Nasser turned to an aggressive Arab nationalism, embraced the Soviet Union and proceeded with nationalisation projects.
As part of a great experiment in proving to the world that the ”Arab nation” was truly united, Syria and Egypt entered a union in 1958 but this fell apart after a mere three years.
Subsequent acts of formal political union, a favourite of Colonel Moammar Gadaffi, have all failed.
The idea of ”the Arab nation” is a modern notion, having its more developed intellectual sources only in the inter-war years.
Egyptian politicians insisted on ”Egyptian nationalism” and Nasser turned to ”Arab nationalism” rather late; Suez is that turning point.
”Islam” was hardly a signifier of actual or even potential political power at all in those days. To limit the spread of secular, seemingly left-wing Arab nationalism, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia began a ”religious offensive” through which the Saudis sponsored the propagation of conservative religion (certainly not ”Islamic politics”) throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.
It was pan-Arabism, not Islamism, that drove Arab politics until the defeat of Arab armies in the June 1967 war against Israel. From then on there was a slow but gradual turn to Islam as a political ideology at universities and among the youth.
Egyptian president Anwar Sadat used religion to marginalise the Arab left and the Nasserists. He became known as the ”believer president”, while at the same time opening the country to the capitalist West and negotiating with Israel.
While Israel was viewed as the villain on the doorstep of the Arabs, it was also a convenient excuse to keep despotic rulers with huge military budgets in place.
But if Israel was used to legitimise despotism at home, then the Palestinians were hardly given a comradely ”socialist” or brotherly ”Islamic” welcome in most Arab states.
The Palestinian tragedy is deepened by the Arab states’ disregard for the rights of their Palestinian ”guests”. The massacre by the Jordanian army of Palestinians in 1970 is only the most brutal expression of this; day-to-day humiliations continue from Cairo to Kuwait.
The oil-rich states are prepared to throw money at the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Hamas, and use highly skilled Palestinian labour, but Palestinians remain completely voiceless in these states.
The first modern ”Islamic revolution” did not occur in an Arabic-speaking country but in a Persian land, where the Muslims are mostly from the minority Shi’a sect. Apart from Syria, the new revolutionary Iran had no friendly ties with any Arab state; indeed, Iran was at war with Iraq for most of the 1980s.
While the United States supported a repressive Saddam Hussein, the Arab, especially Gulf, states also heavily supported his secular Ba’athist regime, based on a particularly virulent form of Arab nationalism. These states acted thus to see revolutionary Iran defeated and prevent it from successfully exporting its revolution in the region.
But in the highly repressive Middle Eastern states, the ideas of ”Islamic” revolution spread nonetheless. Secular government was authoritarian, Arab nationalism a failure. At home, battles were fought between young men fired by revolutionary religion and authoritarian governments, while Afghanistan presented a good setting for engaging in war.
The export of revolution was, however, confined to the nation-state. Hizbullah, despite its image in the 1980s as the archetypal trans- national Shi’a movement, is in fact a Lebanese political party with representatives in the Lebanese Parliament playing by the rules of secular electoral politics.
Where governments were undertaking ”Islamisation” programmes they were not done ”against the West”. Indeed, two most blatant cases of Islamisation in the 1980s were Sudan and Pakistan, undertaken while fully dependent on Western aid, investment and military assistance.
Modern states with big or majority Muslim populations have emerged under largely similar conditions to other Third World states. They have the same problems: huge military budgets; mostly undemocratic, unrepresentative governments; huge class inequalities: bloated and corrupt bureaucracies, high levels of unemployment, low literacy levels, disregard for the rights of women.
Ideologists of ”Islam” are obsessed with the state and present their peculiar reading of religion to voiceless masses as the answer; those of ”the West” see ”Islam” as the cause of all problems and the enemy. Both need a bit of history.
Dr Shamil Jeppie teaches African and Middle Eastern history at the University of Cape Town