The long read
Trump’s
dangerous delusions about Islam
The
president and his advisers paint Muslims as enemies of modernity. The
neglected history of an age of Middle Eastern liberalism proves them
wrong
by Christopher de
Bellaigue
Thursday 16 February
2017 06.00 GMT
The radical
Islamists and the Trumpists subscribe to complementary visions of
history that sharpen the conflict between them. Islamism of the kind
practiced by Islamic State and other jihadi groups is based on a
triumphal view of Muhammad’s mission, according to which Islam, as
the last of the revealed Abrahamic faiths, is destined to consume the
other two.
Western clashism, on
the other hand, derives from the picture of Islam as an aberrant
departure from Judeo-Christian civilisation that has for hundreds of
years set its face against the noble, Enlightenment ideals of
progress.
This view, which
takes the essence of Muslim identity to be its rivalry with the west,
was given much airtime by Bernard Lewis. Over a long career – he
turned 100 last year – he has depicted the wellspring of Muslim
aversion to modernity as deep and historical. According to Lewis, the
animus of Muslims for the west – the “Why do they hate us?”
question – is sour grapes, going back to the Ottoman failure to
take Vienna in 1529 and 1683. (For the past 300 years, Lewis wrote in
1990, “The Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat.”) In
the centuries that followed, Muslim jealousy and anger were
compounded by resentment at Europe’s record of scientific, military
and commercial achievement – and, more recently, by a hatred of
social freedoms found in the west.
The clashist view
denies the possibility of a sustained and fruitful engagement between
the lands of Islam and modernity
The clashist view,
in short, denies the possibility of a sustained and fruitful
engagement between the lands of Islam and the values and technologies
that we consider part and parcel of modernity, from modern
communications to feminism and representative democracy. It is
Islam’s rejection of this engagement that signals its hostility and
constitutes the threat its believers, however outwardly pacific, pose
to western liberal societies.
But the problem with
this argument is that such an engagement is more than a possibility:
it has already happened.
The “long” 19th
century, ending in 1914, is a crucial part of the history of the
Middle East that has been neglected or deliberately ignored by those
who insist on its impossibility, when the main centres of Muslim
culture and politics came thundering into the modern age – with a
burst of technological and social change far more rapid than Europe
had experienced. Furthermore, when that transformation hit the
buffers, after the first world war, the western powers helped bring
Islam’s liberal moment to a halt.
Not that you would
glean this from the partisans of the clash. Following a logic that
conveniently rationalises European attempts to colonise the
“backward” Middle East after the first world war, and has been
deployed with similar intent ever since, they do not acknowledge that
new societies were being formed in Iran, Egypt, Turkey and elsewhere,
still less the possibility that they constituted a dynamic and
creative force.
It is this blind
spot in the historical understanding that lends a spurious
respectability to claims of a Muslim hatred of progress as old as
progress itself. Only by eliminating the blind spot can the this
persistent caricature of Muslim failure and envy be challenged.
The history that has
been excised from the conventional account of “Muslim rage”
challenges the widespread belief that the sheer inability of Muslims
to deal with the modern world explains their antagonism for it. But
the modern Middle East was for long periods much more dynamic and
restless than is generally believed. Far from being a placid
backwater, by the turn of the century the region, in particular the
catalysing territories of Iran, Turkey and Egypt, had become a
maelstrom of modern ideas and technologies that gave rise to social
novels, political parties, feminism, nationalism and total war.
Hardly surprisingly, in this vortex of change traditionalists
complained that the that the ground was being cut away from their
feet, while progressives felt irresistibly alive.
Improved public
health and security led to steady population rises – especially in
the cities, which, with their concentrations of jobs and amenities,
became magnets for rural migrants. On the eve of the first world war
Istanbul’s population was higher than one million; only three
cities in the United States were bigger.
Culture and
lifestyles were transformed by new conceptions of autonomy and power.
As education spread, information ceased to be the monopoly of the
neighbourhood sheikh. Hundreds of new periodicals and newspapers
acquainted an expanding bourgeoisie with subjects of a bewildering
variety; the reader of an Istanbul newspaper in 1900 might encounter
dispatches on Darwinism, baldness and the condition of the Lapps.
Revolutionaries in
Iran and Turkey curtailed the powers of their hereditary rulers and
set up parliamentary democracies
In Cairo, Istanbul
and Tehran, upper-class women were increasingly able to decide the
details of their personal lives, marrying and travelling as they
wished, with a freedom that would have been unthinkable for their
mothers. Among the growing Cairene middle class, it quickly went from
being socially unacceptable to educate one’s daughter to being
socially unacceptable not to do so. As the harem fell into desuetude,
women went out, first to shop, then to study and finally to work.
They also began to dress with more freedom, and in 1909 one Egyptian
woman complained that the face veil had become “more transparent
than an infant’s heart”. It wouldn’t be long before some women
abandoned the veil entirely.
The hoary old
institution of slavery was virtually extinguished in just a few
decades; between 1877 and 1899 some 18,000 slaves were enfranchised
in Egypt alone, part of a trend that led to almost all Egyptian
slaves being freed by 1905.
After decades of
accelerated innovation – which saw the rapid introduction of the
printing press, quarantine and train travel – liberal modernity
reached a high-water mark in the Middle East in the first decade of
the 20th century. Revolutionaries in Iran and Turkey curtailed the
powers of their hereditary rulers and set up parliamentary
democracies; only the British invasion of Egypt in 1882 aborted a
similar, “constitutional” revolution on the Nile.
Intellectuals
influenced by western ideas provided support for the rapidly changing
politics and lifestyles. In Cairo the grand mufti – the highest
official of religious law — Muhammad Abduh, whose French was
described by a European friend as “faultless in its grammar, and
almost Parisian in its intonation”, dispensed controversial fatwas
permitting what Islam had hitherto forbidden (wearing a brimmed
European hat; eating meat slaughtered by Christian butchers). In the
Ottoman port of Salonica the father of modern Turkish nationalism,
Ziya Gökalp, gave classes on the cutting-edge science of sociology.
The climax of a rising tide of irreligion came in 1909, when a crowd
in Tehran witnessed the public execution of a reactionary ayatollah
who had opposed the constitutional revolution.
Naturally the rise
in democratic sentiment and religious scepticism aroused opposition
from sheikhs and royalists. They were able to appeal to a
considerable body of ordinary, less-educated Muslims, who fretted
that the new innovations were displeasing to God. Campaigns of
reaction were mounted, such as in 1908, when the reactionary shah of
Iran enlisted the help of a Russian force to bombard parliament into
silence – temporarily, as it turned out. Opposition to a dilution
of power is the default position of most absolute rulers, as the
west’s own slow, faltering history of democratisation had shown.
But an even more serious threat to the Middle East’s progressive
trend would come after the first world war, in the form of a new
ideology – Islamism – that used religious activism as a weapon
against the intensified incursions of the west.
This picture of a
Middle East that embraced many aspects of modernity should give the
lie to the caricature of centuries of incurable Islamic stagnancy.
But doubt must also be cast on a related idea, equally essential to
the clashists – that Muslims were universally sour and resentful
toward the European merchants, soldiers, consuls and commercial
agents who poured into the region in the 19th century. This is the
Muslim chip-on-the-shoulder theory, and it, too, is incomplete.
Surprisingly in view
of the current reciprocal rage, for much of the 19th century,
Europe’s prestige among many Middle Easterners was high. Freelance
French doctors built hospitals and French soldiers a modern army for
Muhammad Ali Pasha, Egypt’s great early reformer; and in 1882 the
influential educationalist and town planner Ali Mubarak published a
novel in which the son of a sheikh is talked out of taking his
father’s vocation by an wise English orientalist (yes, a wise
English orientalist), who urges him to devote himself to Egypt’s
development instead.
Ali Mubarak was part
of a generation of Muslim opinion-formers who formed their ideas
about human potential during periods of study in Europe, and who
returned home convinced that an injection of modern values would
revitalise the cultures of Islam. Faith in not only the message but
also the messenger was in evidence during Iran’s pro-democracy
revolution of 1906, which might not have happened as it did were it
not for the enlightened British diplomats who let thousands of
constitutionalists take refuge in the legation during their stand-off
with the shah, and who gave them lessons in representative government
within the same walls.
By 1914, however,
the benevolent Englishman and the disinterested Frenchman had
disappeared from view. (Russia, looming over Iran from the north, had
never been considered anything but scary.) In reality, this moment
had been long coming. Quite apart from the British occupation of
Egypt, which had caused much nationalist soul-searching among
Egyptians, the European powers had spent the latter part of the 19th
century acquiring rights to key sectors of the Middle Eastern
economy, such as transport and agriculture, and encouraging the
Turkish sultan, the Iranian shah and the Egyptian khedive to indebt
themselves to European financiers. In the Ottoman heartlands the
western powers looked after the interests of Ottoman minorities such
as the Armenians and Maronites; defending these clients gave the
Europeans leverage over the sultan.
But the European
powers’ pre-war involvement in this Middle East of sovereign
polities was positively benign compared to the colonial settlements
they tried to impose at the end of hostilities. The first world war
had finally destroyed the Ottoman empire. The powers now resolved to
extract maximum benefit from the chaos.
This meant denying
the Middle Easterners the self-determination for which they yearned,
and which, in many cases, the allies had promised them. Egypt, having
been led to expect self-government in return for support against
Germany, had to tolerate continued British control of its main asset,
the Suez canal. The Ottomans’ former Arab possessions were
parcelled out as “mandates” under the new League of Nations:
France got Syria and Lebanon while Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan
went to Britain. The mandate system was advertised as a form of
“trusteeship” for “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves
under the strenuous conditions of the modern world”. Naturally the
powers saw it as being in their best interests to ensure that the
peoples in question remained unable to “stand by themselves”.
Having been invaded
by the allies at the end of the war, Turkey avoided long-term
subjugation only thanks to nationalist forces led by Mustafa Kemal
(later Atatürk), a former officer in the Ottoman army; he kicked out
the allies and in 1923 set up a Turkish republic from the debris of
the empire. It was a similar, if less dramatic, story in neighbouring
Iran. There, nationalists put the kibosh on a British plan from 1919
which had aimed to impose a protectorate on the country. In 1925,
Reza Shah Pahlavi, Iran’s answer to Atatürk, seized the throne
assuring the British that he would not jeopardise their interests,
which increasingly centred on the oil industry in the south-west of
the country. But to his compatriots the shah promised to release Iran
from the grip of the powers.
In this way, over
the 1920s and 1930s the threat and reality of colonisation redefined
Muslim relations with the west along lines that anticipated today’s
combustible enmity. At the beginning of the century the efforts of
the political class in Turkey, Iran and Egypt had been directed at
nation building and the consolidation of parliamentary regimes. In
the 1920s and 1930s the paramount issue became getting rid of the
foreigners or keeping them at arm’s length. Of course the powers
objected. Britain and France argued that the mandates were not ready
for independence. Reza Shah was toppled by the allies in 1941 for
showing partiality to Nazi Germany. And in 1953, in a breach of
Iran’s sovereignty that would convince many Middle Easterners of
the west’s fathomless duplicity, and CIA and MI5 overthrew Muhammad
Mossadegh, Iran’s most successful constitutional politician for
half a century, as punishment for his temerity in nationalising the
oil industry.
The age of
colonisation in the Middle East was brief but devastating; its
reverberations were profound and enduring. Westernisers such as
Atatürk and Reza Shah reacted defensively to the threat of
colonisation by the technologically and organisationally more
advanced European powers by aping them in their most authoritarian
and nationalist manifestations. They built illiberal regimes that
frog-marched people towards a secular modernity similar to that of
Mussolini’s Italy, and turned the clock back on the Middle East’s
liberal moment.
The great many
Muslims in the Middle East who disliked these secular strongmen
showed another kind of reaction. They saw this illiberal – and
godless – modernity as a capitulation to all that was worst in the
west. So, a second form of defence emerged. This was Islamism – the
Islamism that is now the justification for travel bans, extreme
vetting and other security measures across the western world.
Islamism is the
harvesting of Islam for political use, and is sometimes prosecuted
violently, which in the eyes of many damns Islam itself as inherently
violent. But Islamism did not emerge from seventh-century Arabia; it
was a modern political reaction to the increasingly aggressive agenda
of the colonial powers after the first world war. If the 19th and
early 20th century witnessed a period of Enlightenment-style progress
in the Middle East, the advent of Islamism in the 1920s marked the
beginning of a current going the other way: Islam’s
counter-Enlightenment.
For all the
durability of hidebound, xenophobic expressions of the faith, Islam’s
liberal moment at the turn of the 20th century hadn’t faced a
challenge from any social and political programme that we would call
Islamist. Wahhabism, an austere revivalist dogma in opposition to
Ottoman reform, had not yet spread far beyond its birthplace in
Arabia, while Salafism, which advocates a “return” to the
conditions of early Islamic society, had yet to evolve into political
ideology. But the post-war Anglo-French settlement created a sump of
disgruntlement from which modern Islamism – including both of these
rebarbative creeds – rose to the surface.
In the late 1920s,
on the west bank of the Suez canal, where the lavish houses of the
foreign commercial agents stood in contrast to the hovels inhabited
by Egyptian workers, a gregarious, thick-set young teacher called
Hassan al-Banna set about turning Islam’s liberal moment on its
head.
That al-Banna
founded the Muslim Brotherhood in response to an approach by six
lowly employees of the local British garrison, “weary of this life
of humiliation”, indicates that the world’s most important
Islamist network had its roots in anti-colonial frustration. While in
al-Banna’s view there was little to be gained by reversing the
technological and even some of the social advances of past decades –
he expected women to play a big part in his movement, for example –
homespun qualities of piety, thrift and solidarity would liberate
Muslims from the materialist servitude into which they had been lured
by the west and its local collaborators.
This was the
message, spread by roving proselytisers – of whom al-Banna was the
most charismatic – that over the next decade expanded the original
group of six into a charitable and educational organisation boasting
hundreds of thousands of members and many overseas sister
organisations, notably in Palestine, where another colonial injustice
was being perpetrated by European and American supporters of Zionism.
In 1936 al-Banna
abandoned his habitual political abstinence and in a widely
circulated letter urged the youthful King Farouk – who had acceded
to the throne amid high hopes that he would guide Egypt to
independence and self-respect – no longer to follow the west, whose
politics had been “razed by dictatorships”, but to anoint the
country with the “purifying waters of pure Islam”.
Farouk turned out to
be the wrong man for such an appeal – even by the standards of
Middle Eastern monarchs he was unfeasibly louche and silly. (His
collection of red cars was known for its array of custom-made klaxons
and officials locked up their daughters whenever he was around). But
al-Banna’s letter would be of lasting significance because it
entrenched the idea that the west’s superficially attractive
ideology of progress could not be uncoupled from colonialism,
persecution and impiety. It was one of the founding documents of the
Islamic counter-Enlightenment.
Like many Islamists,
al-Banna was sceptical about democracy, a system of government that
was constantly touted by the west – which worked so poorly in Cairo
that it seemed only to generate new opportunities for western
meddling, all the while frustrating genuine schemes of national
regeneration.
Under Farouk, the
British and a corrupt political establishment, there seemed little
prospect of such a regeneration. During the second world war the
British used Egypt as an operational base, toppled a government they
didn’t like, and kept close tabs on undesirables such as al-Banna.
After the fighting was over, the Brothers activated their military
plans, attacking British installations and assassinating politicians
whom they considered insufficiently patriotic or hostile to the
infant state of Israel.
In the late 1950s
and the 1960s the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had risen to
power after leading a military coup against Farouk in 1952, jailed
and tortured thousands of Brotherhood members and sympathisers and
executed others who were considered particularly threatening to his
programme of secular development. Nasser enjoyed popularity as a
patriot – in 1956 he nationalised the Suez canal, and he briefly
presided over a political union with Syria, which had gained
independence from the French. But his prestige fell when he lost the
October 1973 war against Israel, and in 1981 his successor, another
military man, Anwar al-Sadat, was assassinated by Islamist soldiers
in his own army.
The
counter-Enlightenment that was spearheaded by the Muslim Brotherhood
would eventually spread throughout the Middle East. In 1979, the shah
of Iran was toppled in a revolution; much like the Muslim Brothers
themselves, the hardline clerics who remade Iran in the 1980s
distrusted western-style democracy and hankered for the traditional
values that the shah had abandoned in his zeal for modernisation.
The secular polity
that had been built by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was also Islamised
after the second world war, though this process was partly concealed
by the continued dominance of a westernising establishment led by the
Turkish army. The decline of this establishment was capped in 2002 by
the election of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamist Justice and
Development party – which is still in power today, President
Erdoğan (as he has become) showing all the severity of an Islamist
Vladimir Putin.
Militarism in Egypt;
one-man rule in Turkey; semi-theocracy in Iran; and chaos in much of
the rest of the Middle East – this is the picture almost a century
after the liberal experiment was ended by war and colonisation and
two roads to salvation presented themselves. Almost everywhere the
Islamists ended up commanding more popular support than the
authoritarians in uniform.
Just as Islamism in
its first iteration was sparked by western aggression and then
inadvertently fuelled by secular authoritarians, often allied to the
west, who were distrusted and disliked by many of their citizens, it
is hard to see how its bestial mutation into the jihadism of Islamic
State could have taken place without the invasion of Iraq.
It is of course
impossible to know what other shapes Islamism would have taken if the
Middle East’s liberal moment had not been ended by the first world
war and the imperial mop-up that followed. But the fact remains that
the history of Islamism is also the history of a hyperactive west,
blundering into the Middle East (and Afghanistan) not just once, but
over and over again.
Even accounting for
the new arrivals of recent years, Muslims amount to just 6% of
Europe’s population, and 1% of that of the US. But proportionality
of response is not considered a virtue among the new nationalists –
and even if the Muslim immigration figures were to start to fall, and
all fear of submergence under a Muslim tide was demonstrated to be
empirically groundless, who’s to say the populists would allow the
thrill of fear to abate?
What seems more
likely is that today’s proponents of harsh anti-Muslim measures
will find retroactive justification in any virulent reaction they
excite, leading to even more and harsher measures against Muslims –
much as the European powers whose interventions helped hasten the
collapse of the Islamic Enlightenment at the start of the last
century felt their actions were vindicated by the violence that
followed.
For those whose
primary concern is the perpetuation of cultural homogeneity, the
pressing question is a simple one: what is to be done with the
Muslims? The clashist version of history makes their antipathy to
modernity indisputable; integration and assimilation are therefore
impossible. This would seem to be the position of the 60% of Germans,
for example, who have been found in surveys to agree with Frauke
Petry’s AfD that Islam does not belong in their country.
We already know what
Trump’s reaction to the next atrocity will be: 'I told you so'
This is the kind of
polling that converts easily into action by a decisive
commander-in-chief. And it is surely legitimate to observe that
Islamism of a strident and intermittently violent sort has made
inroads in European societies, bringing a combative intolerance to
parts of the continent where the socio-economic indicators are in any
case low.
But the question for
anyone concerned for the overall health of society is a more
complicated one; the answer will have to address the actual threat of
jihadism, calm the fears of those who believe an intangible and
precious part of their culture is endangered, and revive the dimming
faith in the possibility of inclusive, multi-ethnic liberal
democracy.
We already know what
Trump’s reaction to the next atrocity will be. “I told you so,”
he will say, and give the screws a turn. Electronic tagging;
deportations; orders to shoot illicit refugees (a suggestion of the
AfD’s Petry) – the menu of vengeful retributions before the
clash-mongers is long and mouthwatering.
For those grappling
with the second of the two questions, the options are already
limited. The European refugee crisis has hardened the continent’s
heart, probably forever, and sectarian identity has been placed at
the heart of western political debate. All of this happened before
Trump entered the White House; under Obama, it was already hard
enough for anyone hailing from a Muslim-majority country to gain
entry to the US.
But as Trump and his
allies are eager to demonstrate, there is a vast difference between
the existing regimes of stringent border security – which
effectively served as a moratorium on any mass Muslim migration –
and the new environment of official vilification. The scapegoating of
Muslim communities in Europe and America is the road to pogroms, and
it is that road that we are starting down, even if we can still turn
back.
Relish for the clash
is in the air. Bannon is up for it. So are the jihadis; Trump is
doing their work for them, proving that the west hates Islam for
xenophobic reasons, which is what they said all along. The
entrenchment of clashism – as an observation presented to a few
academics in 1957 becomes the creed of a new ruling class – will
only draw more and more people into believing its truth. •
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