The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

  Nearly all of the Muslim nations except Iran (and Somalia, which in recent years has mostly lacked government) conduct normal political and economic relations with most if not all of the Western countries. The notion that the members of this global religious civilization are at “war” with Western civilization, or are vulnerable to political radicalization by a few thousand Arab mujahideen because of Middle Eastern and South Asian political issues—of which most of the global Muslim population knows little—is a Western fantasy.

  The Western countries are immensely more powerful in conventional military force than all of the Islamist movements put together, or of all the Muslim armies, even if those could somehow be mobilized into some grand effort to overrun the Western democracies. Of the Muslim world’s billion and a half people, fewer than one fifth are Arabs. The rest are Europeans, Africans, Indonesians (87 percent Muslim), Iranians, Chinese, Turks, Afghans, Indians, Pakistanis, and other Asians in the Malay peninsula and Southwestern and Central Asia. Most of these people are ignorant of or indifferent to Arabs, Israelis, and Americans and their allies. Their national and communal interests are multifarious and often conflicting, and they have never been under a single government nor had reason to consider themselves a collective political force in world affairs. They do not add up to something with which the United States or even Israel could be “at war.”

  This confused notion that a civilization—an historical, cultural, and religious entity—goes to war in the way nations go to war was responsible for the willingness of the American government, press, and public opinion—and international opinion generally—to interpret the attacks in New York and Washington in September 2001 as the opening acts in a war of Muslim civilization with Western civilization. It was responsible for the Bush administration claim that America was “going to war” not with a political or sectarian band of zealots but with “terror” or “terrorism,” which the president promised to confront and defeat wherever it might exist, so as to leave the world cleansed of this “evil” and ready for a global reign of democracy.

  As repeatedly has been said, terror and terrorism do not exist as historical entities, only as qualities attaching to human acts. In official discourse and popular opinion terror and terrorism were widely accepted as coded references to a generalized Islamic threat . Even at the time, all this could be seen as incoherent, and the actions and policy explanations of the Bush administration following the September 11 attacks offered little commonsense political and military justification for invasion and war against two Muslim states. The administration and press substitution of the expression “Islamic terrorism” for the unadorned term “terrorism”—a reaction to the radical religious motivations of al Qaeda terrorists—decisively contributed to a seemingly clarifying notion that what really was happening was the fulfillment of Huntington’s presumably prescient forecast of a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam.

  The reasons for such a war remained unexplained (as they had in Huntington’s original formulation of the theory). “Why do they hate us so?” George W. Bush dramatically asked at the time. His answer was that “they [meaning Muslims] hate our freedoms.” But Muslims asked the same question after the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Why this aggressive attack, seemingly on Muslims as a whole, who as nations had done nothing to harm the Western countries? Arabs had fought Turkish and European imperialism. The authors of previous Arab attacks on Western troops in Lebanon, or of the hijackings of Western aircraft or ships, were Palestinian militants fighting Israel, their national enemy, or a handful of politico-religious extremists of whom few Muslims had ever heard. The explanation for the invasion first of Afghanistan and then of Iraq seemed to be that the West now was dominated by Christian “crusaders” who hated all Muslims, and by Zionists.

  There is an authentic clash between Islamic and Western societies, but it is not Huntington’s clash of civilizations. Islam and the West are members of, although religious rivals within, the same civilization, that of Mediterranean monotheism.

  Islam considers itself to be a prophetic development of the monotheism of Jews and Christians, all of them of Abrahamic descent . Islam is the most recent of them, its prophet, Muhammad, having “completed” the revelation of man’s relationship to God that had begun in God’s dealings with Adam and subsequently with Abraham and had been further revealed by way of the person Christians believe to be God’s incarnate son, Jesus of Nazareth—whom Muslims revere as a prophet.

  European civilization, on the other hand, understands itself to be not only Christian but also Greek and Roman in origin and formation. It acknowledges its historical and cultural link to Islamic civilization by way of the tensions and conflicts of religious rivalry, above all in the Crusades, which left lasting impressions on both sides, and in the long Muslim presence in Spain and the Balkans that left those parts of Europe permanently changed.

  This essential connection between Western and Islamic history since the time of the Prophet Muhammad (570–632), and his followers’ claim to be the inheritors and completers of Jewish and Christian monotheism, is widely unknown, ignored, or misunderstood in the Christian (and Jewish) West, and this ignorance is gravely affecting the events of the twenty-first century.

  This is not a trivial point; it is not a quibble over the meaning of the term “civilization.” This relationship among the Mediterranean monotheisms has had global influence, in that their interrelated civilization was the dynamic actor in global society until late in the Western Middle Ages, when the essential elements in the growth of the modern world began to emerge in Europe and concurrently Islam entered into what most of its modern thinkers would acknowledge was a decline—a failure to meet the challenge of Western intellectual, cultural, and political development in and after the Renaissance and Enlightenment and in scientific and technological progress.

  The issue is important because Islam in the past was at least the match for and in many respects the superior of the West in many secular and scientific realms. Like the other Western monotheisms it is a millenarian religion. It sees existence as progressive and purposeful, leading to a redemptive conclusion of some sort. This is what sets the three apart from most of the other great civilizations—those in Asia, and the lesser civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa and Amerindian Central and South America—which tend to be understood by their members as whole in themselves, not incomplete, not waiting to be “finished” by the return of a prophet or arrival of a messiah, but fulfilled and meaningful in their own terms. The events, dynasties, and stages of civilization they have experienced usually are considered discrete—that is, more or less complete in themselves, succeeding one another in time but not in meaning, not proceeding, as in the Western case, from one stage to the next in a hierarchy of progress and time, nor understood to be directed toward some destined conclusion to which the members more or less consciously aspire and which is expected eventually to bring peace, or rest, or fulfillment, or perpetual life, or a golden age.

  The millenarian nature of the three monotheisms—meaning that they await a further and promised divine intervention in history, which will put an end to secular time—is fundamental to the great change in utopian thought and expectation that took place in the West at the time of the Enlightenment . It is essential to an understanding of the era of modern secular utopias in which we now live.

  Among the Western monotheisms, believing Jews still expect the Messiah’s arrival. Muslims await a general judgment followed by heaven or hell. In the Christian (or now de-Christianized, as many would argue) West, many continue to hold the millenarian expectation of the return of Jesus the Christ . Since the Enlightenment, dominant intellectual or political forces in what was Christian society have offered a number of specific theoretical or scientific propositions of human or civilizational progress and fulfillment, none of which has thus far fulfilled its utopian promise. Despite the catastrophic experience of the political totalitarianisms of the twentieth century,
the general expectation in the West seems to remain that democracy and capitalism, or democratic socialism, will gradually perfect society’s institutions, and scientific remedies will be found for human failings.

  The rivalry between Islam and the European West has existed since the desert Arabs in the seventh Christian century emerged from the Arabian peninsula to confront their neighbors with what they contended were new and final revelations of the monotheistic God. These prophecies provided the doctrinal foundation for a religion preaching and propagating “submission” (the translation of “Islam”) to the will of God in the fullness of his revelation in the Qur’an, acceptance of divine judgment, and seeking of salvation. Muhammad’s message inspired the prefeudal pastoral and agricultural peoples of Mecca and Medina to overrun and convert neighboring Syria and Iraq and go on successfully to challenge the Christian Byzantines, the Persians, the Egyptians, and the Western Christians. They proposed not only a seemingly progressive religion but a political association that demanded the payment of tribute on the one hand, but on the other hand guaranteed security of persons and property and offered communal autonomy.

  The Arabs of the great caliphates that developed in Damascus and Baghdad carried out a phenomenal military and imperial expansion that rapidly reached Kabul, Bukhara, and Samarkand in the east and in the eighth century took the Sind in what now is western Pakistan, took a part of Punjab, and invaded China. They blockaded Byzantine Constantinople and expanded westward along the southern coast of the Mediterranean. Carthage and eventually Tangier were seized, and peace and an alliance were made with the Berbers. Next was conquest of Spain by a mixed force of Arabs and Berbers, until resistance survived only in the mountains of Asturias. France was invaded, the Pyrenees were crossed, and Narbonne was taken, an expansion halted only at the battle of Poitiers (732–733), which was fought by the Frankish Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne. Charlemagne’s counterattack came in 778, but his forces were ambushed in the Pyrenees by the Basques; the event was chronicled in what we know as the Song of Roland, in which the knight Roland and the flower of Frankish chivalry perished. (This was five hundred years before the Crusades.)

  The astonishing political and military achievement of the Arabs in so rapidly establishing an empire extending from the Atlantic to Central Asia incorporated many separate peoples, including Christians and Jews, and adapted and made use of the intellectual and scientific achievements of Greek civilization, translated into Arabic. The version that emerged in Andalusia of this distinctive Muslim civilization was undoubtedly the most imposing achievement of the early Middle Ages, without counterpart among the more backward Christian Europeans until the time of the Renaissance, to which the Arab revival of classical civilization contributed. The American historian David Levering Lewis writes:

  Muslim Europe and Christian Europe faced each other in a delicate equipoise at the great Pyrenees divide. Andalusia’s golden age unfolded in the reign of the remarkable amir and [Umayyad dynasty] caliph ’Abd al-Rahman III. His palace city on the slopes of the Sierra de Córdoba, three miles northwest of the Andalusian capital, was an architectural hyperbole whose remains beggar Versailles as, in the caliph’s time, its colonnaded great halls, geometric gardens, and cascading fountains humbled generations of ambassadors and awed subjects … Córdoba’s seventy-odd libraries amaze modern scholars as much as they stunned literate Christians of the late tenth century. There would be nothing at all comparable elsewhere in the West to the city’s main library of 400,000 volumes.2

  In Muslim Andalusia, as later in the Muslim-controlled Balkans, Christians and Christianity were tolerated, merely taxed. Jews were treated well.* The empire the Arabs created, and that the Ottoman Turks eventually inherited (without Moorish Spain, the reconquering of which was completed by the taking of Grenada by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1492), lasted eleven centuries. The authority of the Sublime Porte finally collapsed as a consequence of Ottoman defeats in the Balkan Wars and the First World War, when Turkey was imperial Germany’s ally.

  This remarkable achievement remains a crippling legacy to Islamic society today. No possibility has seemed evident by which modern Arabs might emulate and reproduce these accomplishments of their past . The relative decline of Islamic society began in the late Middle Ages as the West European nations’ global explorations and conquests were launched, providing geographical and technological knowledge and advantages and advancing their development of social and political institutions, while Muslim society remained essentially feudal in organization.

  Because of Qur’anic teaching, Islam had difficulty in separating political from religious power, or philosophy from theology,* as the Christians did from very early in the history of church and state. This was vital to the West’s eventual development of independent scientific and political thought. The dual structure in Christian society, with religious authority proper to the pope, vicar of Christ on earth, and the emperor as inheritor of the autonomous political and secular authority of Caesar, had its basis in the teaching of Christ in the New Testament concerning the things of God and the things of Caesar. The emperor ruled a political order, derived from the Roman system in which Christianity had begun, in possession of generally acknowledged legitimate and autonomous political power. He deferred to papal authority in religious matters, but only in that . Governing was a matter for the lay orders or estates of society, including the emperor or king, who was invested with the “divine rights” of monarchy acknowledged by the Church. Even though the Catholic Church maintained into the 1960s a position of theoretical condemnation of democracy, on grounds that morality cannot be subjected to majority vote, at the Second Vatican Council in 1965 it abandoned that position in its Declaration on Religious Freedom. It did so on the revisionist philosophical grounds argued by the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray: that the free exercise of individual conscience is a supreme value.

  Islamic political society today generally remains confined within a religious dogma that is considered immutable, as presented in the original Arabic text of the Qur’an, the canonical version of which was determined in the seventh century (651–652).* The long-term consequences have been lasting economic and scientific backwardness, as documented by Muslim scholars and intellectuals in the Arab Human Development Report issued in 1999 under the auspices of the United Nations Development Program. Its uncompromising analysis of the backwardness of education and thought in the Muslim world noted the historical emphasis on authority in Muslim life and education and a traditional fear of “chaos” and schism that tends to induce hostility to innovation and intellectual questioning. A Syrian intellectual is quoted as saying that “the role of thought has been to explain and transmit … not to search and question.” Theology has been limited to elucidation rather than analysis and extrapolation.

  The long tradition of collective Muslim political existence, begun with the great Arab caliphates in Damascus, Baghdad, then in Spain, culminated in the Ottoman Empire, which at its fullest extent in the early nineteenth century was the largest of all existing state systems, without really being a state or modern at all. It was ruled by a family, the House of Osman, by no rigid code but through a grand vizier named by the family and given absolute powers. He acted through secretaries and local councils in a manner closer to empires of antiquity than to nineteenth-century Europe, being in many ways flexible and tolerant, not asking ideological conformity, religious conversion, or social confirmation but only obedience, tribute, and taxes. The system was open to the ascension of talent among the conquered, and social status, even of slaves, was no necessary obstacle to success; members of the governing imperial household were “slaves” of the sultan and many, the descendants of conquered peoples, actually were slaves.

  It was a system that could not survive, although until late in the nineteenth century it was more successful than the Hapsburg empire in dominating its “internal nations.” The Young Turk movement, begun mainly by exiles in Europe, was re
sponsible for a revolution in 1908 that forced the sultan to restore the constitution and hold elections and was meant to reconstitute the empire on a liberal and national basis. It contributed instead to dissension among nationalities and to unrest in the army. Meant to reform the system as a whole, it actually proved a step toward its disintegration. In 1916, the Hashemite Grand Sharif of Mecca, Hussein, proclaimed himself king of the Arabs and launched the successful Arab Revolt against the Turks (with the British officer T. E. Lawrence—“of Arabia”—as a military advisor to Hussein’s son Faisal, who commanded the irregular Arab army, which functioned in cooperation with British forces taking orders from Cairo).

  At the end of the Great War, the military hero Mustapha Kemal Pasha (later called Kemal Atatürk) refused to accept the empire’s dismemberment, as imposed by the Allies’ Treaty of Sèvres in August 1920, and led Turkish troops in expelling the American, French, and Italian occupation forces in Turkey and in defeating a subsequent Greek intervention. His creation of the homogeneous and secular modern Turkish nation-state was to have no parallel elsewhere in the post-imperial Islamic world.

  The legal scholar Noah Feldman notes that premodern Islamic societies were mostly governed by a division of authority between military officers, sometimes non-Arabs, and religiously trained legal scholars, and he says this informal compact, comparable to, but different from, feudal arrangements in the West, conferred legitimacy on the rulers on condition that they upheld the authority of the scholars. The system encouraged “stability, executive restraint, and legitimacy.” Through their near monopoly on legal affairs in a state where God’s law was accepted as paramount, the scholars built themselves into a powerful and effective check on the ruler. To see the Islamic constitution as containing the balance of powers so necessary for a functioning, sustainable legal state is to emphasize not why it failed, as all forms of government eventually must, but why it succeeded so spectacularly for as long as it did.3