A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  The Growth of Muslim Liberation Theology

  For all its symbolism and pious rhetoric, political Islam is less a religious tradition than a twentieth-century popular movement that arose in response to the military humiliations, political depredations and socio-economic discontents of recent history. Its followers were attracted to its politics not because their childhoods had been steeped in Koranic education, but because it proved to be the most potent protest movement around. Unlike nationalism, socialism and liberalism, Islamic activism was the first home-grown ideology in the Arab world. It gained wide currency in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s because it thrived in the one non-governmental institution no Arab regime dares ban: the mosque. Its discourse was couched in the same sacred terminology that the region’s regimes also used to underpin their legitimacy, and as a consequence was similarly hard to proscribe. And it peddled its message by means of sermons recorded on cassettes that were out of earshot of even the most totalitarian state. For the first time since independence, taxi-drivers could spend the day tuned into dissident voices, not the president’s men.

  Like its ideological forerunners, Islamic activism was the creation not of the poor, but of frustrated middle-class students. It first gained a following not in the shanty towns hugging North Africa’s cities, but on the campuses of universities and technical colleges. Arab students volunteered to fight the Afghan jihad, Arabic for ‘just struggle’, against the Soviet Union in much the same spirit as their left-wing European counterparts in the 1930s went off to fight the Spanish Civil War. Nor were they normally impoverished. The hijackers who knocked down New York’s World Trade Center were Western-educated high-flyers, and over three-quarters of them came from the Arab world’s wealthiest state, Saudi Arabia. Several of the Palestinian suicide bombers in 2002 were sons of Gazan millionaires. Usama bin Laden, one among scores of Arab-Afghan commanders, belonged to the richest non-royal family in Saudi Arabia. His cohort, a shy doctor named Ayman al-Zawahari, came from a gentrified family of lawyers and diplomats long resident in the upmarket Cairo suburb of Maadi. And their cohorts were almost entirely manned by graduates, among them the sons of former government ministers. This was no peasants’ revolt.

  Nor was its religious outlook especially traditionalist. Its fiercest opponents were the quietest divines of Sunni orthodox schools, the ulama, who opposed any bida’, Arabic for innovation, and in some notable instances still maintained the earth was flat. Unlike the clerics raised in religious schools, Islamist activists were schooled in the secular natural sciences, in particular medicine and engineering. Abdel Salam Faraj Atiya, the author of the Just War – An Absent Duty (the essay which sanctioned the assassination of Sadat) was an engineer, as was Usama bin Laden. They embraced Western tools of modern communications, and despite the orthodox prohibition on the human image (rigidly enforced by their hosts, the Taliban) Islamist activists had no problem with the mass-reproduction of bin Laden’s icon and video sermons. Whereas Sunni orthodoxy had throughout the ages enjoined submission to secular authority, the Islamists wanted to usurp it and purge the loyal clergy who legitimized it. And like Protestant Christianity in the age of the Reformation, the Islamists challenged the ulama’s monopoly on exposition of the scriptures and their accretions of tradition. They reinterpreted the eternal message of the Prophet Muhammad afresh, as if they were the first generation of Muslims, or aslaf. Accordingly, Islamists saw themselves as neo-aslaf: they subscribed not to a reactionary mindset, but to an activist and revolutionary ideology they called Salafia Jihadiya, or zealous Salafism.

  The movement rooted its grievances in the carve-up of the Sunni-led Ottoman Empire by Western powers, and the redistribution of its Arab heartland to non-Sunni sects. Following the Second World War, Britain and France bequeathed their mandates to the Jews in Palestine, a Maronite Christian president in Lebanon, and after much infighting to heterodox Alawites in Syria, whom key Sunni scholars considered non-Muslims. Even in the Ottoman core of Turkey, where the leaders professed to be Sunni, the ruling ideology adopted was avowedly secular. After 900 years of hegemony, Sunni elites found themselves booted from power, and subjugated.

  Ever since Kemal Atatürk abolished the Ottoman caliphate in the 1920s, the Muslim Brotherhood had preached the millenarian restoration of a caliphate holding sway over a borderless pan-Islamic state. But its followers were divided on what means justified that end. The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, sanctioned assassinating politicians, and was in turn assassinated. His successors participated in the Egyptian revolution in 1952, and Gamal Abdul Nasser offered their Supreme Guide, Sayyid al-Qutb, the post of education minister. But Qutb – a one-time literary critic – refused, and penned his most important tractate, Milestones on the Way, which remains the Islamist primer. Writing in an Egyptian torture camp, he argued that the region’s leaders had forfeited their membership of the Muslim community by dint of their corrupt rule and their refusal to apply God’s law, the sharia. As such they had led their subjects back into the jahiliya, the pre-Islamic age of ignorance, were therefore apostates, and should be put to death. In response to three assassination attempts, Nasser had Qutb strung from the gallows in 1965.

  Until Qutb, the Islamic movement in the Middle East had sought to propagate reform, if not reformation, by working within society. After his hanging, the Brotherhood split into a mainstream that preached non-violent opposition, and a revolutionary, clandestine sect dedicated to applying Qutb’s ‘liberation theology’. It was this avant-garde which emerged as the Egyptian Islamic Gihad. Unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, which sought to maximize its popular base, Gihad organized in secret cells to plot coups d’état. It espoused the subjugation of Christians, the use of force to impose the sharia, and the doctrine of takfir, the damnation of the ruling authority as apostates. Both the integrationists and the isolationists sought to establish an Islamic state, but the difference in their theology can be compared to the early Protestant debate between the broad church of Martin Luther and Calvin’s narrow enclave of pure faith. In Protestant Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood considered all Muslims eligible for salvation and preached to the Muslim umma, or nation; the jihadi militias saw true belief limited to the cells of their gamaa islamiya, normally translated as ‘Islamic group’, but perhaps better rendered as an Islamic vanguard’. The jihadis disagreed over whom to put on their hit list of apostates. Some argued that anyone working for the state was an apostate, depicting any writer published by the Ministry of Culture as being as much of an infidel as Israel’s Ariel Sharon. Others restricted takfir to just the ruler and his senior ministers.

  Though they grabbed most of the most headlines, the jihadi groups never comprised more than a small minority of the followers of political Islam. The Islamic liberals of North Africa, who preached tolerance and denounced the use of violence against fellow-Muslims, attracted far greater support. But the authorities boosted the extreme fringe by banning Islamist dissent in toto, and treating all its manifestations as a single fundamentalist scourge. Arab governments themselves argued that political Islam was like drugs – exposure to its soft form was a slippery slope to hardcore terrorism. Usama bin Laden, they cited by way of example, had started his political career as a Muslim Brotherhood acolyte.

  The jihadi ranks were undoubtedly swollen by the radicalism engendered by repeated bouts of police brutality against moderates from the Muslim Brotherhood. At the same time, both the Brotherhood and its more violent sister movement fed on the crushing defeat of secular Arab nationalism in the 1967 war with Israel, attributed in the words of a preacher in Mecca to Nasser’s pursuit of war with ‘an un-Islamic spirit’. Finally, throughout the 1970s, pro-US regimes across the region gave the Islamist movement a certain room for manoeuvre to counter what at the time appeared to be more threatening leftist dissent, often permitting the inflow of Saudi oil funds to their ranks. Successive Israeli governments fostered political Islam as an alternative to the Palestinian nationalist movement
. In Egypt, Sadat released Muslim Brotherhood activists from Nasser’s internment camps and allowed religious associations to organize on campus to counter socialist radicals. More broadly, the US encouraged the movement as a means to upset the underbelly of the Soviet Union in Muslim central Asia.

  Egypt’s flirtation with the Brotherhood came to an abrupt halt following Sadat’s assassination in 1981. But the support for the global movement continued. For the next ten years his successor, Hosni Mubarak, ensured a relative peace in Egypt by jailing hundreds of militants, and then sending many of them, including Ayman al-Zawahari, the future leader of Islamic Jihad, to Afghanistan to wage jihad.

  It is doubtful that the Egyptian government ever expected a rabble of errant Islamists to defeat the might of the Soviet Empire. But in February 1989 the last Russian troops withdrew from Afghanistan, leaving the Arab mujahideen victorious and equipped with a battle-hardened core skilled in modern guerrilla warfare. The numbers of recruits was staggering. Over 15,000 Saudi volunteers went to train in Usama bin Laden’s camps, many of them graduates and public-sector workers seeking a subsidized adventure holiday. Saudi Arabia, too, became a conduit for thousands from across the Muslim world, where on production of a tazkia, or personal reference from a Saudi imam, they would qualify for 75 per cent off a Saudi Airlines flight to Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province and gateway to Afghanistan. In 1980 Kamal Hassan Ali, Egypt’s minister of defence, announced a training programme for Islamist revolutionaries in army camps, and advertisements in the official Egyptian press called on the young to ‘join the caravan’ travelling to Afghanistan. On arrival in Peshawar, they were assigned to recruitment centres run by Arab volunteers, of whom the most charismatic was the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam. His Maktab al-Khadimat, or Services Bureau, attracted over 20,000 Arab mujahideen and formed the mainstay of the Arab jihad in Afghanistan. In 1986 bin Laden opened his own recruitment office, al-Qaeda or ‘the Base’, together with an adjoining guest-house, Beit al-Ansar. It had beds for 150, and a khaki marquee in the garden to cater for the overflow. Saudi, Pakistani, British and American military intelligence – welcoming the cheap supply of cannon-fodder to confront the ‘evil empire’ – also trained and armed the recruits.

  The Afghan campaign launched a worldwide network of Islamist militias tens-of-thousands strong and inspired millions more to believe in the seemingly God-blessed powers of the jihadis to vanquish worldly forces. If they could defeat the might of the Soviet Empire, they asked, what might they do to their own far weaker, unpopular and ungodly regimes? As Pakistan began disbanding the Arab recruitment centres following the Soviet withdrawal from Arghanistan, Middle East élites reeled in horror at the prospect of incoming hoards of mujahideen returning home on a mission to establish sharia states. Portcullises came down across the Arab world to keep out the returning ‘Arab Afghans’.

  The external Islamist threat to Arab regimes was compounded by the rapid internal spread of political Islam. In Yemen, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, Islamists had won a share of power, and in other states religious societies were threatening to replace the state as providers of education and welfare. Following earthquakes in both Algeria and Egypt in the early 1990s, Islamists proved more effective than the state in getting aid to the people, and whenever elections were allowed to proceed without state interference, Islamists topped the polls. In Egypt, they swept the board in elections for such key professional associations as the lawyers and engineers, and in Algeria, as noted, the Islamist party, FIS, won an outright majority in the first round of voting in December 1991. When the Algerian army cancelled the second round, imposed martial law, and banned the FIS, Islamists tried to instigate a mass uprising of Iranian proportions, and having failed fled to the hills. There they formed a military wing, the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS), declared a jihad and targeted state institutions. Hundreds more joined more extreme cells, collectively called the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which struck at state and society alike. From the spring of 1993, the GIA expanded their range of targets to include journalists, artists, musicians and foreigners. As their popular base narrowed, terror attacks grew increasingly random. Tactics such as the faux barrage, in which guerrillas disguised as soldiers stopped buses and slaughtered their passengers, paralysed normal life in Algeria. The GIA perpetrated a series of massacres in the outlying suburbs of the capital, Algiers, particularly during Ramadan, the holy month commemorating the Prophet’s victory at the battle of Badr against the infidels of Mecca. But the attacks on civilians highlighted the militants’ desperation and undermined popular support. Frustrated in the armed struggle and tempted by offers of a presidential amnesty, defections increased. A weary AIS came down from the mountains after negotiating a truce in January 2000, leaving a further 3,000 guerrillas from other groups still prowling the hills and killing some hundred a month.

  Fuelled by the clandestine return of Arab Afghans, jihadi groups elsewhere in the Middle East moved to emulate Algeria’s armed rebellion. In neighbouring Libya, mujahideen fought a desperate war from their redoubts in the Green Mountain in the east of the country. Further east, jihadi groups launched their first attack on tourists in Upper Egypt in May 1992, and killed the country’s leading secular author, Farag Fouda. Two groups led the violence: the Islamic Gihad, which targeted security force personnel and senior officials, and the less professional Gamaa Islamiya, whose targets in the name of Islam included civilians, particularly the soft but high-publicity targets of foreigners and Christians. The army retaliated with helicopter attacks and troop assaults targeting poor inner-city neighbourhoods suspected of harbouring the perpetrators. The increasingly lethal cycle of violence prompted militants to attempt the assassinations of the Egyptian president and several of his senior ministers. The violence only abated following popular outrage at the killing of fifty-eight tourists in the Valley of the Kings in Upper Egypt, abhorred even by the lawyers who for the past decade had acted as their clients’ mouthpiece. A series of military trials resulted in the execution of over sixty leaders, and the detention of a further 20,000 suspects without trial. Further battered by an international crackdown in the wake of the US embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998, the armed groups were simply too militarily weak to repeat the triumph of the Afghan jihad, and after the loss of over 1,000 lives the rebellion petered out.

  Much like Sharon’s crushing suppression of the second Intifada, the waning of violence allowed the Mubarak regime to claim that there was a military solution to the threat of Muslim militancy. But their cries of victory were dubious for two reasons. First, while they had won the battle against Islamist militias they had lost the war against their programme. To deflect the charge of apostasy, Middle East leaders peppered their speeches with the sacred language of their opponents. Saddam Hussein, a Baathist, for instance, reinvented himself as an Islamic nationalist. Middle East governments also adopted much of the Islamist agenda, conceding ground on religious personal law, particularly on issues of minority rights and equality for women, provided it did not threaten their power. In Egypt secular women’s organizations, like Nawal al-Sa’dawi’s Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, which sought to replace strict Islamic personal mores with Western standards of personal liberty, were banned. Local officials enforced unreformed Ottoman legislation that church restoration – even the repair of a church toilet – required a presidential decree; Coptic emigration increased from a trickle to a steady stream. In the face of Islamist opposition in Kuwait, a principality hitherto proud of its vibrant parliamentary system, the emir temporarily backed down on his Gulf War promise to introduce female suffrage. Shiites encountered tighter restrictions on entering the civil service and armed forces, though not to the extent of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which banned Shiites from the security forces altogether. And the Jewish communities in the Arab world, which dated back 2,500 years and numbered nearly a million on the eve of independence, were all but whittled away by the end of the second millennium. Rulers als
o sought to deflect their zeal abroad. Egypt’s state media received a green light to increase coverage of the intifada; religious leaders appeared on television preaching the sanctity of suicide bombing. ‘It is one of the highest forms of martyrdom,’ broadcast Ahmed al-Tayyeb, a senior religious official. Students in Cairo demanded that the authorities open their borders with Israel to enable volunteers to join the jihad. The handful who were shot trying were hailed as martyrs. Children, educated throughout the 1990s to believe in reconciliation with Israel, were in the age of the second intifada raised expecting to fight Jews, and perhaps Americans too.

  In the short term, the Islamization of divorce, clothing and family planning, coupled with the focus on holy struggles abroad, assuaged Islamist pressure, but longer term it fuelled their cause. Islamists led the crowds chanting angry denunciations not just of Sharon, but of their own passive leaders. Ten years after the outbreak of jihadi Arab revolts, the Middle East had become a more monochrome if angry place. As in Ottoman times, a person’s religious sect, rather than their state, was their badge of identity, and as the swathe of veils was intended to prove, Sunni revivalists were again the ascendant group.