Fear of bushy-bearded activists continues to motivate many in the West to shun them, even when they are democratically elected. Tough-minded secular strongmen are much preferred – such as Egypt’s clean-shaven military despot – who can keep the angry hordes at bay and try to bring their countries closer to the West. Many commentators continue to ignore or downplay a century of invasions, unequal treaties, assassinations, coups, corruption, and ruthless manipulation and interference while recycling such oppositions as backward Islam versus the progressive West, Rational Enlightenment versus medieval unreason, open society versus its enemies.
A deeper and broader explanation, however, lies in understanding how intellectuals, starting in the Enlightenment, constituted a network of power and why they invested their faith in enlightened despotism and social engineering from above. It is even more fruitful to attend to the devastating critic of their ideology and practice, Rousseau, whose ever-renewable vision of human beings alienated from themselves and enchained to each other has inspired revolts and uprisings from the French Revolution onwards. For plebeians and provincials, unaccommodated man spurned by modernity, also created the Islamic Revolution in Iran – what Michel Foucault called the ‘first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane’.
Civilizing the Natives
There was actually little talk about Islam from the first generation of leaders in Muslim countries. They had distinguished themselves as anti-imperialist activists: Atatürk, for instance, derived his charisma and authority as a nation-builder from his comprehensive defeat of Allied forces in Turkey. He went on to abolish the Ottoman office of the Caliphate soon after assuming power, pitilessly killing the political hopes of pan-Islamists around the world. He forbade expressions of popular Islam and arrested Sufi dervishes (executing some of them); he replaced Shariah law with Swiss civil law and Italian criminal law. This partisan of Comtean Positivism expressed publicly what many Muslim leaders, confronted with conservative opposition, may have thought privately: that ‘Islam, the absurd theology of an immoral bedouin, is a rotting cadaver that poisons our lives. It is nothing other than a degrading and dead cause.’
Adolf Hitler admired the Turkish leader above all for emasculating the backward elements in his society. ‘How fast,’ he wrote, ‘Kemal Atatürk dealt with the priests is one of the most amazing chapters of history!’ The Nazi leader, who venerated Atatürk as a trailblazing modernizer and nation-builder, a ‘shining star’, no less, claimed in 1938 that the Turkish despot ‘was the first to show that it is possible to mobilize and regenerate the resources that a country has lost’. ‘Atatürk was a teacher,’ Hitler said. ‘Mussolini was his first and I his second student.’
Bernard Lewis was most likely unaware of the Turkish leader’s fan base among Nazis and Fascists when he hailed Atatürk for taking, with his attempted obliteration of Islam, ‘the first decisive steps in the acceptance of Western civilization’. Nevertheless, Lewis as well as Atatürk was working with an ideal of civilization originally posited by salon intellectuals in the eighteenth century, and reworked by various modernizers of the twentieth century.
As Atatürk put it, ‘there are different countries, but only one civilization. The precondition of progress of the nation is to participate in this civilization.’ The leaders of modernizing Japan echoed him exactly. Late-modernizing nations and peoples internalized deeply a legacy of the Enlightenment, which transformed the ‘civilizing’ ideals of Parisian salons into a project, one that can be entrusted to a state, even one as despotic and imperialistic as that of Empress Catherine.
Civilization became, by the late nineteenth century, synonymous with progress and dynamism through individual and collective action – the triumph of the will. Fear of emasculation, cultural backwardness and decadence were counteracted by power-seeking ideological movements. Zionism and Hindu nationalism as well as Social Darwinism, New Imperialism, pan-Germanism, pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism manifested the same will to power and contempt for weakness. Pseudo-sciences, such as phrenology and eugenics, were respectable in Britain and America as well as in late-coming nations.
In its entry for ‘Civilization’ in 1910, the Encyclopedia Britannica entrusted the future of humanity to ‘biological improvement of the race’ and to man applying ‘whatever laws of heredity he knows or may acquire in the interests of his own species, as he has long applied them in the case of domesticated animals’. In Sweden, Denmark and Finland, tens of thousands, almost all women, were sterilized after 1935. The old and the unfit, it was widely felt, had to be weeded out in projects of rapid-fire self-empowerment. It’s not surprising that Hitler saw Atatürk as a trailblazer.
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Turkey pre-empted even the Soviet Union with its self-appointed elite outlining what could be and should be done in order to forge a collective instrument for action and change out of the passive masses. As though acting out Voltaire’s intolerance of uncivilized Turks, Atatürk banned the fez, denouncing it as an ‘emblem of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism, and hatred of progress and civilization’; he replaced the Muslim calendar, Arabic alphabets and measures with the European calendar, Roman alphabet and continental European weights and measures.
Much of the postcolonial world then became a laboratory for Western-style social engineering, a fresh testing site for the Enlightenment ideals of secular progress. The philosophes had aimed at rationalization, or ‘uniformization’, of a range of institutions inherited from an intensely religious era. Likewise, postcolonial leaders planned to turn illiterate peasants into educated citizens, to industrialize the economy, move the rural population to cities, alchemize local communities into a singular national identity, replace the social hierarchies of the past with an egalitarian order, and promote the cults of science and technology among a pious and often superstitious population.
The notion that this kind of modernization makes for enhanced national power and rapid progress and helps everyone achieve greater happiness was widely shared, regardless of ethnic or religious background or ideological affinity. India’s agnostic prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the atheistic Mao Zedong also saw themselves as modernizers in a hurry. Revolution, Mao warned menacingly, is ‘not a dinner party’; Nehru, a Fabian socialist, was anxious to change India’s ‘outlook and appearance and give her the garb of modernity’. Nehru’s admirer in neighbouring Pakistan, the Berkeley-educated Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and other left-leaning Muslim leaders were more than willing to invoke Islamic ideals of brotherhood and justice, but these were meant as broad, framing categories for more central progressive and modern concerns.
Often ostentatiously secular rather than devout, and Westernized in manner and appearance, they saw progress as an urgent imperative for their traditional societies; they hoped, above all, to make their societies strong and competitive enough in the dog-eat-dog world of international relations. Accordingly, all traditional institutions were brought to the tribunal of rationality and utility, and found wanting. Postcolonial leaders worked with the assumption that a robust bureaucratic state and a suitably enlightened ruling elite could quickly forge citizens out of a scattered mass of peasants and merchants, and endow them with a sense of national identity. The fin de siècle spirit of building a New Man and New Society through a rational manipulation of collective will prevailed across Asia and Africa, reflected even in the cultural sphere – in literature, songs and films that celebrated teachers, doctors and dam-builders.
Modern Head with Gothic Body
Postcolonial nation-building was an extraordinary project: hundreds of millions of people persuaded to renounce – and often scorn – a world of the past that had endured for thousands of years, and to undertake a gamble of creating modern citizens who would be secular, enlightened, cultured and heroic. Travelling through the new nation states of Asia and Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, Raymond Aron had already discerned the great obstacles in their way. In his view, there were n
ot many political choices before people who had lost their old traditional sources of authority while embarking on the adventure of building new nation states and industrial economies in a secular and materialist ethos. The rationalized societies, constituted by ‘individuals and their desires’, had to either build a social and political consensus themselves or have it imposed on them by a strongman. Failure would plunge them into violent anarchy.
As it turned out, the autocratic modernizers failed to usher a majority of their wards into the modern world, and their abortive revolutions from above paved the way for more radical ones from below, followed, as we have seen in recent years, by anarchy. There were many reasons for this, primary among them the legacy of imperialism – the division of the Middle East into mandates and spheres of influence, the equally arbitrary creation of unviable nation states, unequal treaties with oil-rich states – and the pressures of neo-imperialism. Even when free of such crippling burdens, the modernizers could never simply repeat Europe’s antecedent development, which, as we noted earlier, had been calamitously uneven, fuelled by a rush of demagogic politics, ethnic cleansing and total wars. Moreover, as Western Europe itself was transformed and empowered by its economic miracle in the post-war era, and the United States emerged as the most powerful country in history, the postcolonial world had to telescope into two or three decades the political and economic developments that had taken more than a century to unfold in both Europe and America.
The new nation states failed to be a tabula rasa, despite the systematic destruction, as in Turkey, of the past. The rationalized state manifested itself in ordinary lives less by social welfare institutions than by brutal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, such as Savak in Iran, a sinister ‘deep state’ in Turkey, and the Mukhābarāt of many Arab countries: many citizens found themselves forced into a ‘maze of a nightmare’, as Octavio Paz wrote, ‘in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason’.
Turkey may seem relatively fortunate in being able to build a modern state with a Gothic body out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Disorder remained the fate of many nations that had been insufficiently or too fervidly imagined, such as Pakistan; their weak state structures and fragmented civil society condemned them to oscillate perennially between civilian and military despots while warding off challenges from disaffected minorities and religious fanatics. And even their relative successes in approximating the Western model – introducing a semblance of civil order through the police, diminishing the power and privileges of old elites, clerical, feudal and aristocratic, or extending Western-style education – had ambiguous results.
The mullahs and landlords lost some of their autonomy, social function and hereditary status. Desires for a libertarian and egalitarian order grew within the nascent civil society, especially among young men educated in Western-style institutions. But new inequalities, created by the bureaucracies of the modern state and the division of labour and specialization required by industrial and commercial economies, accumulated on top of old ones.
The cultural makeover forced upon socially conservative masses aggravated a widely felt sense of exclusion and injury. The radical disruptions left a large majority of the unprivileged to stew in resentment against the top-down modernizers and Westernizers. A typical agitator spawned during these decades was Abu Musab al-Suri, the chief strategist and ideologue for al-Qaeda. Born in 1958, a year after Osama bin Laden, to a devout middle-class family in Aleppo, al-Suri dropped out of university in 1980 to join a radical group that opposed Syria’s secular nationalist Baath Party and advocated an Islamic state based on Shariah law. Working his way through various Islamist organizations in Asia and Africa, al-Suri ended up designing a leaderless and global jihad for uprooted men like himself.
A Militant Intelligentsia
Al-Suri, labelled by Newsweek the ‘Francis Fukuyama of al-Qaeda’, was more accurately the Mikhail Bakunin of the Muslim world in his preference for anarchist tactics. In his magnum opus, The Global Islamic Resistance Call (2004), al-Suri scorned hierarchical forms of political organization, exhorting a jihadi strategy based on ‘unconnected cells’ and ‘individual operations’ – a call answered by today’s auto-intoxicated killers. In mass-producing such malcontents and radicals through modernization, Muslim countries followed, as discussed earlier, a pattern established by Russia – the first country where autocrats decreed a tryst with modernity. Already in 1705, a Prussian envoy reporting on the drastic Westernizing venture of Peter the Great, anticipated the backlash against Muslim leaders of the twentieth century when he wrote that this ‘very vexed nation’ was ‘inclined to revolution because of their abolished customs, shorn beards, forbidden clothing, confiscated monastery property’.
In The Social Contract, Rousseau warned that Peter the Great, in trying to turn his Russian subjects into Englishmen and Frenchmen, exposed them to intellectual confusion and spiritual emptiness. In 1836 the Russian writer Pyotr Chaadaev confirmed Rousseau’s bleak diagnosis, pointing out in his Philosophical Letter that ‘we are like children who have not been taught to think for themselves: when they become adults, they have nothing of their own.’
Writing after a century and a half of modernization, Alexander Herzen was yet blunter. Everything that could be imported from the European bureaucracy ‘into our half-communal, half-absolutist country’ was imported, he lamented, ‘but the unwritten, the moral check on power, the instinctive recognition of the rights of man, of the rights of thought, of truth, could not be and were not imported’. Consequently, ‘the Chinese shoes of German make, which Russia has been forced to wear for a hundred and fifty years, have inflicted many painful corns’.
Secularized young men eagerly entering the modern world with their shorn beards found it in practice frustratingly obdurate and alienating: ‘the kingdom of bribes’, as the critic (and close friend of Herzen) Vissarion Belinsky denounced it in 1841, ‘religious indifference, licentiousness, absence of any spiritual interests, triumph of shameless impudent stupidity, mediocrity, ineptitude, where everything human, intelligent, noble, talented is condemned to suffer oppression, torment, censorship’.
Idealistic young men from the provinces suffered this ‘base reality’ most intensely, because as Belinsky, the gauche son of a provincial doctor and the grandson of a priest, wrote:
Our education deprived us of religion; the circumstances of our lives gave us no solid education and deprived us of any chance of mastering knowledge [contemporary Western thought]; we are at odds with reality and are justified in hating and despising it, just as it is justified in hating and despising us.
Belinsky was a member of the Russian generation of radicals who with their painful conscience, vision of a purified and reformed Russia, and messianic longings for certainty and salvation turned revolution into a religion. He moved from idolizing the Tsar and his benevolent authority – justified by highbrow Hegelian invocations of reality as the unfolding of the world spirit – to Jacobin radicalism and terroristic revolutionism: each station of the cross was reached with appropriate religious fervour. ‘Negation,’ he ultimately declared, ‘is my god.’
Belinsky died just before revolution broke out across Europe in 1848; its failure would turn even the liberal-minded Herzen into a Russian chauvinist of sorts. But Belinsky with his vacillating identity, and search for authenticity in some form of transcendental idealism, exemplified more vividly than his aristocratic friend the spiritual as well as social situation of his new class of educated Russians – the disaffected people situated between the government and the masses who would be the first in the world to be called the ‘intelligentsia’.
The first generation of Islamists everywhere – educated sons of peasants, clerics, small shopkeepers and workers – also emerged in the great gap between a minuscule governing elite and a peasant majority. The products of Western-style education, the Islamists no longer needed clerics to interpret religious scripture. They took it upon themselves to
articulate the broad disaffection bred in a modernizing society whose structures were not changing fast or beneficially enough, and where despotic arbitrariness was met by sly obsequiousness rather than resistance and revolt.
The most commonplace and potent accusation these spokesmen of the disgruntled levelled against their rulers was hypocrisy: this much-advertised promise of happiness through material comforts was deceitful since only a small minority can achieve it, at great expense to the majority. They invoked with special fervour, just as European and Russian revolutionaries had before them, the principles enshrined in their religious traditions as well as in modernity: justice and equality. They insisted, much to the horror of their conservative modernizing elites, that, as Belinsky wrote, ‘All men are to be brethren.’
The Mimic Men
This radical outcome was not unexpected. As early as 1847, Tocqueville had warned his modernizing compatriots in Algeria against eradicating the country’s traditional philanthropic and educational systems. The French writer appreciated the necessity of intermediate institutions between the rulers and the ruled. He saw religion as a necessary counterweight to a disruptive modern ideology of materialism; and he thought that a policy of civilizing the natives by uprooting them was certain to produce fanatical leaders in the future.
Nor was the sharp social divide between an abject mass of people and a quasi-Westernized elite unique to Muslim countries. The figure whom Hölderlin called the ‘stranger’ struggled with alien ways of life and thinking in all societies condemned to catching up with the West. Chaadaev spoke for many generations to come in Russia and elsewhere when he wrote, ‘We belong neither to the West nor to the East, and we possess the traditions of neither.’ His eloquent self-pity, which shook up Pushkin as well as Gogol and Tolstoy, inaugurated the Russian elite’s exploration of the peculiar psychology of the ‘superfluous’ man in a semi-Westernized society: a young man educated into a sense of hope and entitlement, but rendered adrift by his limited circumstances, and exposed to feelings of weakness, inferiority and envy while coerced into hectic national emulation.
Age of Anger Page 13