From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  It now seems grotesquely apt that the attack was led by a radicalized young man from Cairo. Mohammed Atta exemplified all the major trends of Muslim countries in recent decades: demographic explosion, urbanization, and the rise of a DIY Islam which is as radical as it is private and political. In many countries, especially in the Middle East and South Asia where modernization failed or was not even properly attempted, hundreds of millions of Muslims have long inhabited a netherworld fantasy of religious-political revenge. Trying and failing to enter the modern world defined by the West, they ended up not only uprooting themselves but also hating the West – the source of so much upheaval and trauma in their lives. So it is not surprising that the vicious perpetrators of mass murder on 9/11 had millions of silent supporters. Recalling the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, the Muslim narrator of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist evoked a widely felt sentiment when he said, ‘I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased.’

  Remarking on a similar feeling of gratification among Turks in Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk argued that ‘the Western world is scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world’s population’. ‘The problem facing the West’, he wrote, ‘is not only to discover which terrorist is preparing a bomb in which tent, which cave, or which street of which city, but also to understand the poor and scorned and “wrongful” majority that does not belong to the Western world.’63

  The catastrophically misconceived ‘global war on terror’ sparked an even bigger conflagration, intensifying, as Pamuk feared, ‘the hostility toward the West felt by millions of people in the Islamic countries and poverty-stricken regions of the world – people living in conditions that give rise to feelings of humiliation and inferiority’.64 Unwittingly parodying many earlier Western interventions in Asia, in 2002 the Bush administration pledged to bring ‘democracy, development, free markets and free trade to every corner of the world’, a mission that, informed by neither history nor irony, soon met with fierce local resistance and universal opprobrium. In particular, the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, radicalized Muslims across a vast swathe of territory. Opening up new theatres of conflict within Africa, Europe and East Asia, the global war on terror seemed to ring in a fully fledged ‘clash of civilizations’. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that many ‘in predominantly Muslim nations in 2006 expressed ill will toward the United States and other Western countries, frequently ascribing to them such traits as “violent” and “selfish”’.

  Such rage against the West has diminished since then, together with the ideological intensity of Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan which have become more about saving face than about spreading freedom and democracy. Yet the widespread conviction among many Muslims today is that the West failed in its many aggressive wars on Islam and bankrupted itself in the process. It has given a new boost to the preachers of global Islam whose ideology, disseminated through TV evangelists, YouTube videos, web sites and audio recordings, seems to have as many takers among Muslim immigrants in Europe as among their home populations. Indeed, millenarian Islam has a special appeal among Muslims in the West who are convinced that their host countries are moral as well as political failures and who now look to Islam for new sources of moral and religious authority in their secular surroundings.

  Though it has benefited few Muslims, economic globalization has, paradoxically, boosted old Islamic ideals of integration by shrinking time and space. Besides, the failure of nationalism has meant that for many people in Muslim countries, transnational networks override national loyalties. Wahhabi Islam continues to make inroads in places as far off as Malaysia and Indonesia. Austere versions of Arabian Islam continue to gain ground among the lower-middle classes in Pakistan through its new electronic media. Revolutionary Iran – and political Islam in general – plays a major role in the internal politics of Iraq and Lebanon. With overwhelmingly young populations, Arab countries such as Egypt and Tunisia are now trying to build representative democracy. Failure, which is not inconceivable, will provoke yet another generational shift to hardline Islamist ideas and organizations. Islam remains a gigantic powder keg, likely to blow up any time.

  THE TRIUMPHS OF THE NATION-STATE: TURKEY, THE SICK MAN, REVIVES

  By evolving into a strong modern nation, Turkey seems to have been the exception to the main trends of extremism and chaos in the Muslim world. Rather, it seems to have pre-empted most of them. Confronted with Western encroachments on its territory and sovereignty, it underwent the pangs of modernization early in the nineteenth century with the Tanzimat regulations. It then seems to have fortuitously lost the burdensome flab of a multinational empire and worked itself into a lean nation-state, ensuring its survival and dignity in a West-ordained global order.

  This self-renewal was accomplished by a new energetic ruling class of educated and secular-minded Turks rather than the more tradition-minded sultans and viziers. The central figure was an army officer, Mustafa Kemal ‘Atatürk’, the hero of Turkish resistance to the European powers during and after the First World War. Born in a European province of the Ottoman Empire and exposed to the simplistic notions of nationalism and science common among educated Turks of his generation, Atatürk wanted, as he wrote in 1918, ‘to carry out the social revolution in our social life in the form of a sudden coup’.65 It helped that until his late thirties he had barely set foot in Anatolia – the heartland of conservative Turkish Islam – and he moved briskly and brutally after consolidating power in 1922. He dissolved the caliphate, the symbolic seat of Islamic authority, in 1924; shut religious organizations and schools in the following year; replaced Sharia with Western legal codes in 1926; and amended the constitution in 1928 to dethrone Islam as the state religion. This ferocious assault on traditional practice was followed by the substitution of the Latin for the Arabic alphabet and of Turkish for the Arabic call to prayer, and by the banning of fezzes, veils and other icons of Islamic culture.

  The end of the caliphate, the holy office that the Ottoman sultans had revived in the last decades of their rule, shocked and appalled Muslims all over the world. They had hoped for a Turkish ruler to lead them to victory and vindication against the foreign infidels. But Atatürk, who had not been above using pan-Islamism to consolidate the fragile nation-state of Turkey against the West, now refused to oblige. As he saw it, Turkey’s spiritual leadership of the Muslim community was impractical. How could Turkey with its few million Muslims hope to determine the internal affairs of India and the Malay Peninsula, both places still under Western rule? His drastic measures were also partly based on a growing Young Turkish impatience with the clergy, who had resisted the reforms of Ottoman rulers, and Sultan Abdulhamid’s own futile flirtation with pan-Islamism. ‘Islam, this absurd theology of an immoral Bedouin,’ Atatürk once blurted out, ‘is a rotting corpse that poisons our lives.’

  Atatürk saw modernization as synonymous with wholesale secularization and Westernization, and he went to absurd lengths to promote Western dress and ‘reform’ Turkish music. One of his adopted daughters, who bombed Kurdish rebels wearing a military uniform, was turned into the model ‘Republican’ woman. He hoped naively that science would eventually vanquish religion, and that nationalism would step in to provide new identities to Turkish Muslims. Still, the contrast with Arabs idly fantasizing about the past glory of Islam, beseeching God for the return of his favours and complacently blaming the West for their ills couldn’t be greater. Not surprisingly Atatürk, criticized by neo-traditionalists like Muhammad Iqbal, had many fervent admirers among modernizers in the Muslim world: Nasser, the shah of Iran, Jinnah and Sukarno were among those who wanted to imitate him.

  He has had even more influential devotees among Western believers in a teleological or purpose-led model of history, who believe that the non-West has no choice but to move (or be push
ed) into convergence with the West, using the West’s own patented techniques like secularization and constitutional democracy. The historian Bernard Lewis, whose scholarship on modern Turkey made his reputation, became a welcome visitor in the Bush White House with his fantasy that Iraq could be strong-armed, just as Turkey was, into becoming a modern democracy.

  But this conventional Western view, in which Turkey quickly ascends to modernity after cutting the Gordian knot of Islam, suppresses a lot of inconvenient facts. Atatiirk and the rest of Turkey’s revolutionaries consisted of a tiny bourgeois elite, mostly nurtured abroad, and their military techniques of modernizing and secularizing Turkish society empowered another secular military and bourgeois elite. The great mass of Turkey’s population, mostly peasants concentrated in Anatolia, did not reject Islam (nor did the mass of people do so in Tunisia, Algeria or indeed Iran, despite aggressive state-backed secularization programmes). And in retrospect, even the modernizers seem to have not so much abandoned Islam as set it off on a new phase in its distinctive Turkish history.

  They discarded many of the old ingrown and cumbersome aspects of Islam, such as the ulema who had become a powerful barrier to even the Tanzimat modernizers. Religious feeling didn’t weaken. As though bowing to this fact, the Turkish government reintroduced religious education in the late 1940s, and Turks were again permitted to go on pilgrimage to Mecca and visit the shrines of sultans and saints. The military regimes that periodically ruled the country after 1961 made more concessions to the essentially Islamic nature of Turkey’s population, especially after the military coup of 1980. Greater democratization was always bound to empower the traditionalist masses of Anatolia and marginalize the old dictatorial, if secular, ruling class – and so it has happened since the mid-1990s with the rise of the Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP).

  This development is often feared and scorned in the West as the ‘re-Islamization’ of Turkey. A less alarmist way of putting it would be that the part of the Turkish population that had long played a passive role in their country’s transformation from above has now found its voice. It tends to be devout, inclined to embrace Islamic symbols banned by Atatürk (such as the headscarf), while remaining a participant in the global economy in which Turkey is a major figure.

  The Indian poet Iqbal, who believed that ‘the morning breeze is still in search of a garden / Ill lodged in Atatürk, the soul of the East is still in search of a body’,66 expressed some broad optimism for the Turkish experiment in the early 1930s when he wrote:

  She [Turkey] alone has claimed her right of intellectual freedom; she alone has passed from the ideal to the real – a transition which entails keen intellectual and moral struggle. To her the growing complexities of a mobile and broadening life are sure to bring new situations suggesting new points of view, and necessitating fresh interpretations of principles.67

  Some of these hopes have been realized. Turkey is the first Muslim country to have developed a model of indigenous modernity that not only does not depend on the original Western one but also seems to rival it. Furthermore, this Islamic modernism is rooted in lived experience rather than, as has been the case elsewhere, pure imagination. Western ideas remain important but they are now assessed on the basis of their effectiveness, rather than simply swallowed whole. And a certain abject attitude towards the West has been replaced by a renewed pride in Turkishness. As Necmettin Erbakan, Turkey’s first openly Muslim prime minister and an early mentor to the leaders of the AKP, wrote in 1970, mocking decades of the Turkish state’s imitation of the West:

  Thus the European, by making us copy him blindly and without any understanding, trapped us in this monkey’s cage and, as a result, forced us to abandon our personality and nobility. That is to say, he was successful in this because he used agents recruited from within, who felt inferior and disgusted with themselves, bringing to his knees the Turk who for centuries could not be defeated by the crusades and external blows.68

  For Muslims elsewhere, Turkey’s success confirms the validity of an ‘Islamic’ solution to the problem of adapting to Western modernity, and the geopolitical implications of this unique achievement are immense. By its own reckoning, Turkey has resoundingly answered the question that haunted the Tanzimatists: can a Muslim country modernize itself enough to be counted as a member of Western civilization? The isolationist nationalism of Atatürk reflected this determination to enlist Turkey into the only club that mattered. While secluding itself from its Muslim neighbourhood, Turkey went on to propose itself as a reliable partner to NATO. Joining other anti-communist Cold War alliances it also befriended Israel, the outcast state for Muslims around the world.

  But Turkey, like Meiji Japan before it, may have finally come up against an explicitly racially motivated disinclination in the West against granting it full membership to their club. As its efforts to join the European Union are rebuffed, and anti-Muslim-immigrant sentiment rises in Europe, Turks have begun to wonder whether, although a modernized Islam seems to have adjusted itself to the West, the West may still be reluctant to include Islam in its self-perceptions.

  This frustration of Turkey’s oldest geopolitical ambition has coincided with the country’s long-delayed reckoning with its geographical destiny, or its long history as the ruler of the Middle East. Growing economic ties bind it to the Arab Middle East and Iran. The rise of pro-Palestinian sentiment within the Turkish population has led to diplomatic confrontations with Israel. Despite being offered a lucrative deal, Turkey refused to allow its territory to be used by American troops during the war on Iraq in 2003. It also opposes the Western regime of sanctions against Iran. One result is that after Nasser, Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, the fierce anti-Western passions of the Arab street have been focused, more respectably, on the AKP leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. After nearly a century of Western-style modernization, Turkey, under an Islamic leader, finds itself holding the banner of pan-Islamism yet again; and this is not all.

  Elections across the Arab world, which have enfranchised millions of people for the first time, are bringing parties with an explicitly Islamic orientation to power. Even before the Arab Spring, many Muslim countries had made new ideological and political beginnings with leaders from non-secular and non-elite backgrounds. In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, Abdurrahman Wahid, the leader of one of the world’s biggest Islamic organizations, helped his country’s transition from a dictatorship to representative government. For Arabs seeking to rebuild their political systems battered by decades of despotic rule, there is no clearer precedent than nearby Turkey, where many previously underrepresented people have been politically empowered by the AKP.

  Nearly a century ago, Atatürk seemed to be the Muslim world’s greatest visionary as he hectically remade his country in the image of the West. His attempts at large-scale secularization – which essentially created a small authoritarian elite – were to be admired and imitated by many rulers of Muslim countries, most recently Pakistan’s deposed dictator Pervez Musharraf. But Turkey itself shows that Atatürk’s political and cultural experiment succeeded only partially and that some selective borrowings from Western modernity cannot relegate Islam to the private sphere – let alone ensure social and economic justice for the majority of the population. Rather, many Muslims, suffering from a secular and kleptocratic despotism, decided to experiment with a more Islamic polity. In the future there will be many more politicized Muslims desiring accountable governments that guarantee civil rights and a degree of egalitarianism – and they will express their aspirations less through secular Western ideologies than through the old ideal of a moral community of believers.

  ‘THE CHINESE PEOPLE HAVE STOOD UP’

  China’s own evolution into a strong, centralized nation-state has been much messier and bloodier, involving the premature deaths of tens of millions of people, and the persecution and displacement of many more. But its success lies at the heart of China’s assertiveness
today. The pressures on China in the early twentieth century were, if anything, greater than those suffered by the doddering Ottoman Empire. The collapse of the Qing dynasty, the Japanese invasion of the country, and protracted civil war between Sun Yat-sen’s Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party made it imperative, even from a perspective other than the Social Darwinian one, for China to form a strong nation-state or perish. In this, it succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its founders, and, as in Turkey, the selective repudiation of the past and the appropriation of Western ideologies like secular nationalism and communism were crucial.

  Successive humiliations by foreigners shaped Chinese nationalism. Chinese schoolchildren still learn about Western vandalism during the Opium War in great detail, and the indoctrination began well before the Communists seized power: ‘The Opium War’, one history textbook of the late 1920s declared, ‘branded the iron hoofprint of imperialism on the bodies of our people.’69 A book on the conflict published in 1931 openly confessed to inciting ‘bitter hatred of the common enemy’ among its Chinese readers. It was left to Mao to redefine the conflict as a ‘national war against imperialism’;70 he also used it to explain why neither revolution nor nation-building was a dinner party. ‘In the face of such enemies,’ he declared in 1951, ‘the Chinese revolution cannot be other than protracted and ruthless.’71

  In 1990, a year after the Chinese army killed unarmed protestors near Tiananmen Square, a commemorative symposium organized by Communist authorities focused on evil foreigners, describing the Opium War as a plot to ‘enslave our people, steal our wealth and turn a great nation that had been independent for thousands of years into a semi-feudal semi-colony’. Many Chinese looked forward to 1997 – the year the British lease on Hong Kong, exacted from the hapless emperor after the Opium War, was to expire – as a likely salve for a ‘century of humiliation’; and anyone appearing to stand in their way – Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister, or Chris Patten, the last British viceroy of Hong Kong – or seeming to display the old British attitude of condescension and superiority was attacked, often viciously. Nothing revealed British weakness in Chinese eyes (and gladdened Chinese hearts) more than a widely distributed picture of Mrs Thatcher emerging from a blunt talking-to by Deng Xiaoping and then stumbling on the steps of Beijing’s Great Hall of the People and ending up on her knees.