The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

  Exactly because the Ottomans in the nineteenth century felt the need to modernize their system, they made a series of administrative reforms which brought legal administration under direct state control. Malise Ruthven writes that “[t]he single most durable feature of the reforms turned out to be the removal of effective lawmaking authority from the scholars through the substitution of written legal codes for the common law of the Shari’a.” 4 By the elimination of their interpretative function with respect to God’s law, the scholars were deprived of their political influence, leaving the sultans, effectively, with absolute power. This, according to Feldman, then became the dominant political model for Sunni Muslims in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

  In what also had been meant by the Ottoman authorities to be a modernizing consolidation of public services under state administration, the institution of the waqf lost influence. The undermining of this independent trust or foundation which from medieval times had fostered public welfare through nonstate hospitals, schools, mosques, inns, and other public services and functions would, in turn, weaken what today might be called the mediating and accountable institutional “civil society” of the Muslim state, to the advantage of state power, although the institution of the waqf survives.

  Hence as the Ottoman state approached its end, the Young Turk reforms failed. The scandal and success of Atatürk was to make the revolutionary decision to establish a secular republic and abolish the caliphate in 1924, thus disestablishing Islam as state religion, breaking clerical power, forbidding distinctive religious garb (the veil and the fez), and making the army custodian of the lay state.*

  The questions of intellectual, social, and political modernization that Atatürk answered, if only partially, confront all the Islamic societies today. His secular state was presumably meant to leave religion behind, no doubt to wane away as, in his time, Christianity seemed to be doing in Western Europe. Quite the opposite has happened, in Islam as well as in Turkey itself, which nonetheless remains a secular and democratic state, the only one in the Islamic Near and Middle East, allowing exception for multiconfessional Lebanon, which is balanced precariously among predatory powers.

  Since the First World War, there has been little of that progress toward democracy that should have occurred elsewhere in the Islamic Middle East under the American ideology of democratic inevitability. The ambition of the Arab elites was modernization. It was also the ambition of the European mandatory powers that under the League of Nations system took effective power in the eastern Mediterranean in 1920. Later, after the Second World War, the residue of imperialism, the Cold War, and the Arab-Israeli wars contributed further to crippling that ambition. Yet it is the Muslim and Jewish peoples of the region who, for better or worse, must be held responsible for what has happened to them and will happen. In the absence of secular political reform, many Muslims now are turning to a recognizably utopian, and ultimately futile, form of revolt—that of the Islamists.

  Resistance to foreign intrusion and occupation is a primordial impulse in any society anywhere. It is a matter of defending communal integrity and identity. This ultimately lies behind the hostility toward the United States and the West that widely exists in the non-Western world. They are seen as propagating what seems a sterile and aggressive culture. The other ways by which men have organized their existence and sensibility have been shattered in the past three hundred years by the impact of Western science, industrialism, and imperial ambition. The consequence is a Westernization of international society that until recently was presented in the benign guise of an enriching, progressive, and above all inevitable “globalization,” but has today assumed to many a cruel and destructive character.

  Islamic civilization has been the greatest victim of this development. The shock cannot be underestimated. The Islamic reaction has fostered a present-day miasma of theories created elsewhere about an alleged inborn Islamic disposition to violence or terrorism (promoted by Western intellectuals who should know better, Huntington himself among them). The “war on terror” has fostered the use in serious matters of the vulgarized residue of such ideas, as in Bush administration and neoconservative rhetoric about “Islamo-Fascism.” It underlies the intellectually disreputable practice of some Western polemicists of casting political affairs in metaphysical language (e.g., “axis of evil”) that implicitly characterizes Muslim enemies as Satanic, which even among nonreligious Western audiences evokes a certain cultural atavism. This has tended to discourage (or in the America national case, even render “un-American”) dispassionate treatment of the actual, interest-based, and rational motivations and intentions of Islamic societies and states, thus thickening the fog of ignorance and malice within which Western government decisions have often been taken. The West’s political, military, economic, and cultural expansion, and the efforts of other societies to reject it, deal with it, or accommodate to it, have provided one of the underlying narratives essential to the understanding of contemporary events.

  The instinctive and direct response to Western intrusion has always been resistance, often armed resistance, as in the cases of the Indian army mutiny (the “Great Rebellion”) in 1857 and the rise of the Mahdiyya movement in the Sudan at roughly the same time, the one against colonial practices and the second against imperial conquest . The Sudanese fundamentalist government that came to power in 1986 and harbored al Qaeda in the 1990s, Feldman writes, “was led by the ideological descendants of the Mahdists [who ruled Sudan exactly a century earlier].” The Dervish armies of the “Messenger of Allah” and his successor stopped the East African advance of the British Empire for the better part of a decade, after the Mahdi Mohammad Ahmed had seized Khartoum in 1885 and massacred the British garrison (including General Charles [“Chinese”] Gordon, hero of the earlier T’ai P’eng [Taiping] Rebellion).* The “nationalist” inspiration and the fundamentalist religious motivations of the two movements, the Muslim and the Chinese, closely resembled one another.5

  A second form of reaction has been a loss of confidence in or rejection by the victim society of its own seemingly discredited local culture, with radical conversions to foreign values and techniques, as in the case of the Chinese “New Tide” movement at the National University in Peking, beginning in 1917. Its leader demanded adoption “of the new Western method in all things … not [confusing] the issue by such nonsense as ‘national heritage’ or ‘special circumstances.’”6 This obviously anticipated the Chinese Communist cultural capitulation to modernity, whose leaders made use of Marxism-Leninism, a “progressive” Western millenarian and revolutionary ideology that promised to be able to transport society into a new age, far in advance of not only the established and seemingly reactionary kingdoms and cultures of Asia but of the bourgeois capitalism and imperialism of the existing West as well. Thus the Chinese, Vietnamese, and other modern Asian Communist movements were inspired to believe they could, so to speak, leap over the imperialist and capitalist stages of Marx’s historical and revolutionary scheme to arrive in a postmodern future through adoption of Marxist-Leninist doctrine and organizing Communist societies. This failed dramatically.

  A third, and in the end inevitable, form of response has been the attempt to make a creative synthesis of the challenging foreign intrusions with existing norms and values. This is obviously the most logical (and historically necessary) response, and the most frequent, but it is not always the most successful. It usually has amounted to a form of abdication, although seeming otherwise, as the failures of the non-Western world demonstrate—from the commonplace hereditary dictatorships of the non-West today, through mafia capitalism, to the nations bribed into undergoing strip-mining of their national resources while their duly elected presidents possess châteaux in the Loire Valley or stately homes in England.

  Finally there is the phenomenon that may be described as “magical irrealism,” which was most common in Africa in the colonial period, in the form of nativist cults appropriating symbols and doctrinal
fragments from Western missionaries in the effort to “steal” the apparent magic that had given the foreigners their superior power. In its original form it still is not uncommon in Central Africa, and at its most sophisticated it could be seen in the Khmer Rouge movement in modern Cambodia, which took power in 1975 from an American-backed military regime after prolonged American bombing and invasions by Americans and both South and North Vietnamese forces had left the country in ruins.*

  The ambition of the Khmer Rouge was to rescue or to recreate a progressive version of Khmer civilization by forcing the people out of the cities and back onto the land, killing all the Western-educated Cambodians and eventually all those they could find who were educated at all; evacuating factories, closing schools, murdering professionals and “intellectuals”: in fact finally killing a tenth of the population. The successful Communist Vietnamese government in Hanoi eventually invaded Cambodia in 1978 to block the Khmer Rouge’s mad attempt to save Cambodia’s people by destroying modernity itself. (Hanoi’s intervention took place against American government objections; U.S. official hostility to the Vietnamese Communists remained stronger than resistance to a genocide provoked by past American policies.)7

  This was roughly the same period as the political hysteria of the Cultural Revolution and Red Guards movements in Maoist China, which were equally set on rejecting the culture of the Chinese past, destroying its schools and educated class and creating a fantasy version of modernism, with industry composed of backyard steel smelters and peasant factories.

  In the Islamic world, the violent defense of cultural identity and religion has taken place primarily in the Middle East and Central Asia, where the modern confrontation with the Western powers, and in recent years with the United States in particular, has been most intense and disruptive. It is customary in sympathetic Western circles, as well as in Islamic countries themselves, to blame modern Islam’s political crisis on Western imperialism and colonialism and to ignore the responsibility of Muslims themselves and of Islam as a religion for the obstacles to development that characterize the Muslim world’s current plight, but the matter is more complex.

  The crisis has been intensified politically by post-war geopolitical pressures and the Western pursuit of access to Middle Eastern energy resources, as well as by the destructive effect economic globalization has had on traditional subsistence, agricultural, and trading economies. The globalization of international communications and media, as well as of popular culture (mainly in the form, initially, of strictly censored international television and luxury consumer advertising to elite audiences, but recently turning into virtual saturation by satellite television, much of it Western, but increasingly of Arab origin), and the eruption in 2008 of Western capitalism’s own internal crisis, devastating to much ambitious development intended to create self-sufficient economies, have further contributed to the social and economic aspects of Islamic society’s problems. The privileged in Arab societies have tended to readily adapt themselves, at least superficially, to the Western world, essentially on the West’s own terms and usually at a cost to Islamic orthodoxy. The wealth of raw materials held by the energy-producing Muslim countries has led to flamboyant modernization in some parts of the region, but frequently without installing social and economic development that could survive the windfall from minerals, oil, and gas and benefit the entire society.*

  This superficial modernization, accompanied by a narrow liberalization among the privileged classes, has failed to make a serious difference to the basic problems presented by the Islamic religious and moral inheritance. The most powerful fundamentalist movement remains that of Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. The country is the main financier of integrist and fundamentalist schools and mosques in the region that teach according to the strict norms of Wahhabi doctrine. For nearly a century Washington has supported the Saudi government and, indirectly, Wahhabi fundamentalism, against such secular reform movements as Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1950s “Arab Socialism” and the originally modernizing and secular Ba’ath movement in Iraq and Syria. The secular reform parties were seen (no doubt correctly) as threatening American oil interests in the region and as actually or potentially sympathetic to Washington’s Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, supporter of radical liberation movements inside and beyond the Middle East.

  Islamic societies elsewhere, and the Muslim diaspora in Europe, have been affected by these developments, but the center of the intellectual—and theological—crisis remains the Middle East, where in modern times there have been several Islamic reform initiatives, some progressive, but most promoting return to strict interpretation of the Qur’an and to scrupulous observance of its teachings. The origins of fundamentalist reform are best known in the West because of the success of the Wahhabis, and by the more recent appearance of other versions of fundamentalism hostile to the Saudi monarchy.

  Islamic “Integrism,” as the term implies, calls on believers to make the Islamic religion “integral” to their lives. Fundamentalism is a mode of literal doctrinal or scriptural interpretation, just as it is in Christianity and Judaism. The militancy of both expresses the deep force of religious “nationalism” in Islamic societies, understanding nationalism in its widest sense as the impulse to defend a certain conception of collective identity as expressed in religion, culture, and political life—as in the case of the Taliban, to take the most visible current example.

  Hence the Western attempt to deal with this hostility through military intervention, control, and “nation-building,” as the United States (and NATO) are currently attempting to do, is a misconceived effort, all but certain to fail, whatever the superficial and transient successes. The intervention will fail because it offers only the illusion of relevant reform, while itself conveying still more of the disruptive force of Westernizing modernity, political change, and cultural and economic globalization. This has tragic or at best demoralizing consequences for the present-day Muslim societies that are the objects of American and NATO attention. It is not unlikely that the consequences for the invading countries may prove tragic as well, as a result of the hubris of an attempt to deliver a form of Western values at gunpoint .

  Contemporary fundamentalists are usually identified with the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century revivalist movement called Salafism, a reference to the first generation of Muslims (salaf means “ancestors” or “founders”). The Salafists held that the West had appropriated important Muslim principles, while Islam itself had grown weak. These ideas influenced the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Egypt in 1928, and as Wendy Kristianasen has written in a summary of its influence, it “rapidly grew into a vast, popular, social and political movement with hundreds of thousands of members across the Arab world.”8 It was anticolonial (and later, pro-Palestinian) and some of its members were to fight in the 1948 war to defeat the Zionists in partitioned Palestine. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas descend from the Brotherhood, whose members remain the principal political opposition in Jordan and Egypt. The Brotherhood was banned for a time in Egypt, indeed “nearly annihilated,” because it had opposed Gamal Abdel Nasser’s military coup d’état in 1952.9

  Nasser’s successor, Anwar el-Sadat, allowed it to reemerge, and after he was assassinated by radical Islamists in 1981 the Brotherhood renounced violence and declared its support for parliamentary government . It is today allowed to run electoral candidates in Egypt as independents, and it is estimated to have 2.5 million members and a much larger number of sympathizers there, but has done poorly in elections. The government calls it an “extremist” movement and exaggerates its current importance in order to encourage Washington’s tolerance of the absence of real democratic reform in Egypt . Egypt is a religiously heterodox country mixing Sunni and Shia traditions, with one third of its male Muslims also members of Sufi orders (and twice that number who celebrate Sufi festivals), plus Nubians, many Coptic Christians (10 percent of the total population) and anti-Muslim Bedouins, and secular no
nbelievers.

  President Nasser was responsible for hanging the man considered the most important intellectual and moral influence on modern Islamic radicalism, Sayyid Qutb, born in 1906. He traveled in the United States in the late 1940s and admired Western literature (especially the English Romantics) while rejecting Western society as dehumanized and dehumanizing. He found abhorrent the idea that Islam could or should borrow from Western thought or from Enlightenment ideas. He concluded that modern Arab society had fallen into a near-pagan state of jahiliya—of ignorance and the effective apostasy of leaders that would justify violence, just as Muhammad had found it necessary to fight the Meccan pagans before they would submit to Islam. He was imprisoned and executed in 1966 by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s police, but his prison writings provided the rationale for the assassination of President Sadat in 1981 and for subsequent Islamist attacks on government officials, Westerners, and tourists in Egypt.

  Qutb had been influential during and after the Second World War in introducing Nazi themes into Islamic Judeophobia, as well as simultaneously providing a note of Western philosophical “authenticity” to modern Muslim thought by encouraging resistance to social injustice, the deification of man, and religious prejudice. (His criticism of Jews was for the power they allegedly possessed and abused, not for their religious beliefs.) Malise Ruthven wrote in 2008 that Qutb’s version of Islam, like that of some others who had studied in the West and returned disillusioned, was untraditional, to an extent invented. Ruthven added that in modern fundamentalist religious movements in Christianity and Judaism as well as in Islam, the attraction has tended to be to people educated in the applied sciences and technology, such as engineering and computer programming, where the subject matter is fixed and unsusceptible to critical thinking, a matter of certitudes. This was the case for several of the 9/11 bombers, and for others involved in Muslim terrorist episodes.