“The modern Middle East, in shape and name, has in large measure been formed much more recently and by external pressures: the very term was invented in the early twentieth century (1902) as a function of imperial strategy.”
—Fred Halliday, The Middle East in International Relations
“There are as many Islams as there are situations that sustain it.”
—Aziz Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities
1. “The incidence of war in modern times in the Middle East is a continuation from earlier times of violence and conquest, and of a culture that promotes violence.
An area of political value “where much generalisation and ahistorical claim is made is in regard to violence, and cultural and moral values surrounding this. No one can contest that the incidence of violence, but also the justification of it, has been prevalent in much of the modern history of the region. This is, be it noted, as much a matter of the use of violence by rulers, indigenous and foreign, against the ruled, as it is of the resort to violence by those who are ruled. The history of Islamist violence after 1980 is inextricably tied to western instigation. The ascription of responsibility for Islamic terrorism solely to Arab society, after 11 September 2001, is an act of grotesque western amnesia. Images of oppressive, tyrannical sultans and amirs, and of bloodthirsty external powers, collide with those of assassins, bombers and terrorists seeking to challenge states. Its undemocratic rulers, traditional and modern, have been as cruel and despotic as those elsewhere.
However, here too, an element of comparison and caution may be in order. It should never be forgotten that the bloodiest wars have been in modern Europe and North America. The first industrial war was the American civil war in which 600,000 [*] people died.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 126)
The incidence of war in the post-1945 period has nothing to do with the earlier incidence of wars, or with a ‘culture of conflict’ inherited from pre-modern times. States, warriors and propagandists make much of such continuity, be it the Israelis invoking the warrior-king David, Saddam Hussein the Battle of Qadissiyya or the Turks their conquering sultans; but this is symbolic usage, not historical explanation. As for there being a ‘culture of violence in the Middle East, this is a nebulous phrase that is almost without analytical purchase: certainly there are values and practices in these societies, such as parading small boys with guns and holding pompous military revues, that are usable for militaristic mobilisation and indoctrination, but so are there in other cultures—notably those of the former imperial powers of Europe, the US and Japan. The history of Europe in the twentieth century, and the brutality visited by some of its rulers on their own people, far outstrips anything seen in the modern Middle East.” (100 Myths, pp. 26-27)
“The seeds of the crisis of the atrocities and wars of the early twenty-first century, of 11 September 2001 and all that followed, lay in the Middle East of the 1970s and 1980s, and not in ‘Islam’, the ‘Arab psyche’ or any other such vapid hypostatisation. They lay in a concrete, political and socio-economic context that the outside world, in particular the west, had sought to exploit… The events of 11 September 2001 and the 2003 Iraq war were to be the culmination of tensions inherited from Cold War and post-Cold War alike, and of tensions as much within the societies of the region as in inter-state relations.
Proceeding from the nature of the Cold War itself, as both inter-state and social process, several broad global trends – strategic, regional, socio-economic – followed from its denouement: the end of east–west strategic nuclear and geopolitical rivalry, the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself and the reconfiguring of inter-state and regional relations, the end of the ideological division of the world into capitalist and anti-capitalist forces, and the spread, as a consequence, of a model of supposedly neoliberal political and economic organisation to new areas of the world. The end of strategic and ideological rivalry was accompanied by, and in some measure served itself to accelerate, a separate process associated with the erosion of barriers between states, termed ‘globalisation’. Globalisation and the end of the Cold War were not identical processes: the former reflected the lessening of barriers – economic, political, cultural – between states within the western world, the latter was primarily a strategic and ideological shift. However, together these two trends, reduction in strategic competition and globalisation, defined at the international level the period after 1991 and in so doing did much to shape events, and expectations, in the Middle East.
Yet here the distinctive characters of regional states and societies were decisive. Middle Eastern states reacted to the changes but as much against, as in accordance with, global trends: their policies were, in the main, designed to offset any impact global trends might have, particularly in the reduction of state control of the economy and the promotion of a genuine, as distinct from showcase, democratic process. This state resistance was compounded within regional societies: in much of the region popular responses to the disappearance of the USSR or to globalisation were dominated by suspicion. While keeping the general context in view, therefore, here it is important to avoid, as in earlier phases, excess generalisation: it is not possible to apply, without qualification, world-wide trends to an area that, while not immune to general historical trends, has its own resilient specificity. The reason was not culture or religion as such, or the insecure regional inter-state situation, but the response of states and social movements to these changes. What was striking was how many of the global trends of the 1990s did not affect the Middle East; this was as true of political processes, such as democratisation, as of the economic effects of globalisation. The Middle Eastern state, and those who benefited from controlling it, was not about to go out of business. In sum, states kept control of politics, society and economy, and where necessary took pre-emptive action. The same applied to those social movements which challenged states within the new international context.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 129-33. See also Peter Gowan’s essays)
“Proportion aside, however, the analytic, theoretically informed question of why war affected and may well still continue to affect the Middle East as it did needs to be addressed. Here three broad kinds of explanation present themselves. One attributes the incidence of war to the political systems in the countries concerned, above all their authoritarian character, and the reliance of these on belligerent nationalism. A second form of explanation is in terms of culture, in particular the shaping of perception and foreign policy by religion and of political ideas that may follow from this, be this with regard to the illegitimacy of separate states, or of frontiers, or the sacred character of struggle against unbelievers. A third explanation is in terms of the impact on the region of external factors, imperial or Cold War.
None of these explanations is necessarily exclusive of the other, yet each needs to be treated with some caution. As we have seen, the last of these, in terms of global structures of power and impact of very real global conflicts, world wars and Cold War, did have their impact on the region, if only in the most general sense that each bloc had its allies in the region, and these local allies knew they could rely on the great powers to protect them if they got into trouble. There are, however, two problems with this emphasis on the international as an explanation. One is that explanation in terms of structural factors all too easily degenerates into simplistic explanation, a reduction that dissolves all agency, or human choice, whether of states, classes or individuals, into a determinism if not into a conspiracy theory according to which all states, and opposition forces in the region, act at the behest of external powers.”
“‘Culture’ cannot explain the why and the how of specific wars. If religion can lead to great intolerance and violence, it can as easily justify fatalism, acceptance of the given. Non-Muslim communities lived for centuries under Ottoman rule without complaining – though they all, especially the Serbs, now deny it. Religion is also, for all its transnational appeals, organised within specific, delimited countries. As we have seen, the concept of jihad in Islamic thought can mean military struggle, but it can also mean mobilisation for social ends, or individual effort and prayer. The Jewish, and Christian, traditions contain sufficient elements that can be used for the bloodthirsty and the militant, but plenty of others legitimating the opposite; as dis- cussed in chapter, the choice of how to use text or tradition to justify actions depends not on the holy text but on the wishes of the modern interpreter.” (The Middle East in International Relations, pp. 190)
“Culture [***] or tradition is not something that exists outside of or independently of individual human beings living together in society. Cultural values do not descend from heaven to influence the course of history. To explain behaviour in terms of cultural values is to engage in circular reasoning. The assumption of inertia, that cultural and social continuity do not require explanation, obliterates the fact that both have to be recreated anew in each generation, often with great pain and suffering. To maintain and transmit a value system, human beings are punched, bullied, sent to jail, thrown into concentration camps, cajoled, bribed, made into heroes, encouraged to read newspapers, stood up against a wall and shot, and sometimes even taught sociology. To speak of cultural inertia is to overlook the concrete interests and privileges that are served by indoctrination, education, and the entire complicated process of transmitting culture from one generation to the next.”**
“Taken together with the emphasis of other historical sociologists such as Theda Skocpol, on the persistence of social conflict, and of state–society tension, then ‘culture’ becomes not a given, a constant source, but the object of change, struggle and multiple, instrumental definition.” (The Middle East in International Relations, pp. 195)
“Apparently constant values, implicit as well as explicit, are like the institutions of state themselves, not therefore timeless givens: they are the product of identifiable historical forces, and usually rather recent ones at that. Modern political context is, therefore, what gives ideas their meaning and force. Herein lies the fallacy of explanations in terms of ahistorical words like ‘Islam’, or the ‘Arab mind’, or in terms of some underlying civilisational clash or animosity. While all such ideologies, be they nationalism or forms of religious fundamentalism, claim to be returning to some earlier, and legitimating, past the reality is that these are modern creations, using, inventing or ransacking the past, for contemporary purposes.” (The Middle East in International Relations, pp. 198)
“It is suggested that, instead of studying cultures – ours and those of others – in terms of universal ethnographic, sociological and historical concepts, we are to yield to a notion of individuality so irreducible that the multiplicity of historical masses is conceived in terms of ‘incommensurability’… We are urged to look at cultures as trans-historical masses in which change is inessential and continuity constitutive, and we are enjoined to look at these cultures not as structured historical units subject to the changes and mutations that occur in all histories, but as absolute subjects that found history and constitute its massive and glacial presence in an enormous movement of self-reference, irreducibility, of essential otherness to all that is not in essence its own.” (Islams and Modernities, p. 34)
“We are left, therefore, with an explanation that goes beyond ‘structural’ and ‘cultural’, to one within historical sociology in terms of the political and social character of the countries involved, the nature of their Janus-like states, the priorities of their rulers, and the broader domestic context in which foreign, and military, policies are made…” To the analysis of the political character of the state “must be added the broader historical context, not so much of great power rivalries, but of the tensions associated with modernisation, which have been evident in other areas ravaged by war in modern times. The wars of twentieth-century Europe were not a result of violence endemic to modernity, or capitalism, but due to a particular, historically limited phase of Europe’s development.” (The Middle East in International Relations, pp. 191)
*Between 600,000 and more than 1,000,000 dead according to sources cited by wikipedia.
**Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 1967, p. 486)
*** “Although eugenics is very much out of fashion, molecular biology has engendered a renewed confidence in physicalist interpretations. Socio-biological notions of gene-culture, coevolutionary circuits and the sweeping links between gene pools and cultures envisioned by very widely read socio-biologists like Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson are reviving associations between human collectivities and the notion of stocks with predetermined characteristics – and indeed, qualities and deficiencies – and naturally correlative boundaries of natural sympathy. Thus cultures become natures, and the history of human masses becomes a natural history.” (Aziz Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, 2009 ed., p. 30)
There are no such ‘special rules’ shaping the Middle East or any other region. The forces determining Middle Eastern politics over the last two centuries have been those of an expanding, militarised and economically ever more powerful , developed Western world. Relations between Middle Eastern states are, beneath the carapace of fraternity and equality that is found elsewhere in the world as well, governed by calculations of states, factional interests within states, balances of internal and external state calculation and , to some degree, ideology. If there are ‘rules’, tendencies, iterations, they are part of a broader pattern of international and regional state behaviour.” (100 Myths, p. 52)
The starting point for a historical perception of the state is two central, enduring categories: modernity and force. The state as an institution of coercion, administration and extraction has existed for millennia. But the contemporary state is only in a superficial sense a continuation of these earlier institutions. Rather, in Europe and the Middle East, it is a creature of modernity, of the economic and social changes associated with the transformation of the world since around 1780 and of the new inter-state system created as part of the process. The origin of these states, and historically their primary activity, has, for all claims of religious or popular legitimacy, been violence. All states, whether endogenously generated, forged through inter-state competition, as in the case of western Europe, or created from outside, owe their origin and central reproduction to force. This is more overtly so in the Middle East, where it is not easily forgotten, but was also the case for Europe in the five centuries since 1500, some of that extreme violence being not so long ago.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 36)
“Recognition of the shared culture between the Middle Eastern states “is not a matter of ascribing Middle Eastern political behaviour to some timeless ‘Islamic’ or ‘Arab’ mind or to unseen but all-effective ‘rules of the game’, dreamed up in academic seminars, terrorism institutes in Washington or Tel Aviv, or the bar of St George’s Hotel in Beirut. It is rather a matter of how, under modern political and social conditions, states, elites, whole political systems come to operate in broadly similar ways, in other words, how they are moulded by modernity and regional context alike. A parallel process has taken place in, for example, Latin America and in western Europe: national particularities remain but the areas of convergence are in many ways greater, whether in the spread of democratisation or the size of personal namecards. Historical sociology, with its emphasis on the formation and reshaping of ideas, is well suited to analysing such processes, and recapturing political culture from purveyors of essentialism, and gossip.
There are certainly other candidates in terms of which the foreign policy of a particular country can be explained: the international military and economic systems for some, the workings of transnational forces, social, ideological, economic, for others. Some would see the state in the context of the workings of longer-term factors, geography or religion. In the Middle East as elsewhere (e.g. political culture in the UK) the longue durée can be long indeed. Above all, ‘history’ can be invoked as explanation. It is certainly important to look at history, and for two reasons above all: history is necessary to explain why countries act as they do, and, equally, to provide a basis for analysing how states, and their opponents, claim to use, select and falsify history to justify what they do. The historical formation of the Middle Eastern state is an essential part of any understanding of the international relations of the region…” (The Middle East in International Relations, pp. 39-40)
“The states of Egypt and Morocco were radically reconfigured by the impact with Europe and, later, colonialism. Elsewhere in the Arab world, externally imposed colonial rule on the one hand and access to various forms of rent (oil money, foreign aid, remittances) on the other produced a set of new institutions, states that ruled over their more recently delineated territories and peoples. Kleptocracy, i.e. rule through theft, as opposed to just autocracy, requires there to be a great deal more to steal. It is not cultural or dynastic legacies but this modern formation, and the links of this formation to external structures of military, economic and political power, that explain the character of contemporary Middle Eastern states. If the Caliph, the Mahdi or Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent returned to power today, he would still need to join the UN, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the World Bank, build international airports and hospitals, and present himself as a representative of some, albeit dimly discerned, ‘people’. He would also most certainly claim to be environmentally friendly, combat terrorism and welcome the growth of ‘civil society’.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 45)
Historical sociology … emphasises the fact that states, and their critics, can overstate their uniqueness. This is what I have termed ‘regional narcissism’. For all the talk of a special, unique region, the states of the Middle East bear comparison with others in similar positions within the international system, in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Like these states they share a historical formation as a result of centuries of external domination and colonial rule.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 49)
“Armed conflict, social upheaval and the impact of the world economy have constituted the three most important formative influences on the Middle East. In a famous summary of the events of the twentieth century in particular, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt said that it was a time of ‘wars and revolutions’. If this is true of Europe, it equally characterises other regions of the world, not least East Asia and the Middle East. Here, as with culture, state and nation, the appearance of ancient patterns of conflict, via wars, reveals the rupture introduced by [capitalist] modernity. What distinguishes modern history is the combination of war with socio-economic change and revolution, and the very different character of the first.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 167)
“In its pre-modern form, war has been a formative influence, on the map of states as on their internal composition, in many parts of the world: war shaped Europe, between 1870 and 1945, as it shaped Latin America in the early nineteenth century and East Asia in the period between 1894 and 1975. From the 1960s onwards much of Africa was also ravaged by wars, with outcomes yet to be ascertained: the final [!] death throes of South African racism, from 1945 to 1994, were brought on by regional wars.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 189)
“In their broadest sense structures determine both state and non-state behaviour and give them meaning and direction. In both historical and contemporary periods, the Middle East has, if anything, been influenced by these structures as much as by any particular states and transnational actors: the shifts in the world economy from the sixteenth century onwards, the rise of the European democratic and liberal movements, imperialism, the spread of nationalism and communism, industrialisation, the end of the Cold War, then globalisation, go a long way to explaining how the Middle East developed... It is a matter not of reducing what occurred in the Middle East to these external structures, but of showing how they shaped the changes, and outcomes, of the region as a whole. (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 259)
“Historians, even some IR [International Relations] specialists, like to talk in general terms of ‘the expansion of the west’, or the interaction of ‘Islam’ and the ‘west’. But these are more often than not vague if not misleading terms, concealing the concerns of military power and commercial profit that have driven the subjugation and reconstruction of the non-European world since 1600. The western impact on the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century was determined by the political economy of imperialism, western imperial strategy on the one side, and concern for trade, debt repayment and raw materials on the other.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 263)
Islam as a religion has not been something external to Europe: “Islam has been in Europe, in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Balkans, as well as in much of European Russia and Poland, throughout medieval and modern history. The Middle East has not, therefore, been a distant, or passive, participant in the history of Europe, but neither has it been a constant ‘enemy’ against which Europe has defined itself.
The dominant pattern of the modern period, that is since the seventeenth century, has been for non-Muslim Europe to prevail, over Muslim Europe on the one hand, and over the non-European Muslim world on the other; this has been true in the political and cultural fields as it has been in the economic and the strategic. The period of reversal in this relation lay therefore between 1492, the expulsion of the Jews and Christians from Spain, and 1683, when, after two or three centuries of advance, the Turks were turned back from the gates of Vienna.” (The Middle East in International Relations, pp. 78-79)
“Unless contextualised, there is little meaningful sense in which the term ‘West’ can be used to denote a political process taking place over centuries. Nor can the term ‘Islam’, beyond some common religious beliefs and a shared sense of injustice, have much political purchase either.* Once analysed on the basis of specific states and policing issues no coherent pattern emerges and, indeed, there have been many cases since 1600 of alliances between European/US policies on the one side and those of particular Middle Eastern states on the other. The aim of trans-epochal confrontation is a political convenience and myth on both sides, and nonetheless effective for being that.
The very categories in which this argument has been made are mistaken. There is no one ‘West’, nor has there ever been one Islam, while Islam, in the sense of Islamic states and political forces, has always been plural and has been much more so with the emergence of over fifty Muslim states after World War II. Three more specific points: the state for action and identity development of European states were not, despite many claims to this effect, shaped by the encounter with the Islamic ‘Other’ but through interaction with each other, as well as through internal, political and economic change; secondly, the European states interacted in a flexible, often competitive manner with the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century and up to World War I, without any set of hostility or exclusion; the more than fifty Islamic states of the world today have no uniform pattern of relations with the West: they range from the economic and/or strategic alliances to hostility and confrontation, the latter lasting not on religious orientation or piety but on clashes of state and national interest.” (100 Myths, p. 33)
It is a mistake to talk of Islam as if it were one homogeneous movement or ideology, or as if it could be treated as an autonomous social force. As a religious belief, Islam has some uniform characteristics, but as a political and social movement it is diverse, varying in each country in its social context and political significance. Political Islam in Iran is an urban movement, in Afghanistan it is rural. In Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and contemporary Iran, Islam is an ideology of state hegemony. In other societies it acts as the expression of opposition tendencies, in particular articulating the ideas of social groups dominated by the state: this has been true in Turkey, Egypt, Syria and, before 1979, Iran. Similarly, as Iran well shows, different people can derive wholly different interpretations from the same texts—the conservative quietism of a Burujerdi and a Sharriat-Madari, or the activism of a Khomeini. All religions permit of multiple political interpretations, and Islam is no exception. In political terms, there are as many ‘Islams’ as there are movements claiming to be Islamic. (Halliday, New Left Review, December 1987)
“‘Islam’ became a significant factor in the foreign relations of Middle Eastern states when Saudi Arabia sought to promote opposition to Egyptian nationalism in 1965 and set up Ribita al-Alim al-Islamiya [sic]** (World Islamic League). It is striking how, despite the disbursal of large amounts of money, this Islamic ‘petro-dollar’ policy had, when other more concrete political interests came to the fore, limited effects.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 65)
“It started in the 1950s and 1960s, as a local Arab purveyance of the Truman Doctrine, and was sustained initially by Egyptian and Syrian Islamists – both earnest ones, and socially conservative, pro-Saudi business and other elements opposed to Nasserism and Baathism. This was indeed the first great cultural and ideological enterprise of Petro-Islam, along with ideas of pan-Islamism as a force counterbalancing Arab nationalism, and Islamic authenticity combating ‘alien’ ideologies.”(Islams and Modernities, pp. 91-92)
The most dramatic instance of promotion of Islamist groups, “very much as part of the Cold War, was the US arming of the Afghan guerrillas fighting the Red Army in Afghanistan after 1978. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, many other countries, not only Saudi Arabia but also Turkey, Egypt and indeed Israel, sought to use Islamist groups to diminish the influence of their opponents [i.e. leftist and nationalists movements], only to find that such groups had outlived their initial patronage and become independent, violent actors. In September 2001 this was to reach its culmination in the attacks on the USA. The power of these Islamist movements was, therefore, not a product of the end of the Cold War, but a pervasive, influential legacy of the Cold War itself, and the ends to which western states and their regional allies, in a policy of world-historical criminality and folly that was to cast its shadow over the onset of the twenty-first century, incited these fanatics and killers.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 123)
“As a rule, the most secular regimes in the Middle East have been those most independent of the United States. The more closely a government is allied with Washington, the more Islamic its politics. Egypt under Nasser, republican Iraq, the Palestine national movement, post-independence Algeria, the Republic of South Yemen, Ba’thist Syria — all charted courses independent of the United States. None of them declared themselves an Islamic state, and many of them repressed local Islamic movements. In contrast, those governments dependent on the United States typically claimed an Islamic authority, whether ruled by a monarch who claimed descent from the Prophet, as in Jordan, North Yemen, and Morocco, or asserting a special role as protector of the faith, as in the case of Saudi Arabia. When other governments moved closer to the United States — Egypt under Anwar Sadat in the 1970s, Pakistan under Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s — their political rhetoric and modes of legitimation became avowedly more Islamic.” (Carbon Democracy, pp. 201-02)
“The ‘Islam’ that we see in the enthralling articulation of ‘Islam and the West’ is the invention of that very ‘West’ itself. Eurocentric modernity has systematically sought to cross-authenticate itself (in order to naturalize and immortalize the power of capital it thus fetishizes) by inventing outdated and inferior civilizations: Islamic, Indian, Chinese, African, and so on. They are all there to nourish and centralize the insatiable appetite of ‘the West’ morally, imaginatively, materially.” (The End of Two Illusions, p. 56)
* “The definition of ‘one’ Islam, of a ‘True Path’ beyond a few bare articles of common faith, is equally spurious. National and religious values are, on closer inspection, immensely flexible and allow of different interpretations. Here one transhistorical claim is valid. The search for the one ‘true’ variant, of religion, nationalism or whatever, is a universally recurrent form of claiming power, if not on political then on gender or racial lines, but is just as universally misleading.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 199)
**Rābitat al-Ālim al-Islāmii. رابطة العالم الإسلامي. The League was actually established in 1962.
4. “We live in an age when international relations are dominated by a ‘clash of civilisations’.
This is a thesis popularised by the American writer Samuel P. Huntington in a book published in 1996. Its theme has been enthusiastically taken up by fundamentalists and nationalists, not only in the Muslim world but in India, Russia and Japan as well. No one can deny that issues of culture, identity and, more broadly, ‘civilisation’, play a role in relations between peoples and states. This has, however, been the case for centuries and indeed millennia, as the wars of religion and the role of culture in the development of modern popular identity and worldview, i.e. what has been known since around 1780 as ‘nationalism’, demonstrate. There are certainly issues of culture in contemporary political debates, as questions of immigration, inter-ethnic conflict and linguistic campaigning illustrate. But culture was never historically the dominant factor, as the wars between Christian states and Islamic states themselves show, nor is it today. The bloodiest Middle Eastern war by far was that between Iran and Iraq (1980-8) in which over a million people are believed to have died.” (100 Myths, p. 34)
“The disappearance of the Cold War led to numerous attempts by politicians all over the world to promulgate a new logic of global politics: a carnival of new-Hegelian meta-analysis swept the world, with many curious ideas, of a ‘New World Order’, ‘The End of History’, ‘The Triumph of the West’ and, not least, a belief in ‘Cultural Confrontation’ or ‘Clash of Civilisations’.1 This last was an idea espoused in the Middle East as well as in the west which, for many, became, by the same means, the dominant feature of the whole period. Up to two decades before, in a debate that seemed incisive and informative by contrast, the issues underlying international inequality had been framed in terms of the material – social, economic, military – inequalities that separated north from post-colonial south. This new theory, however, involved the belief that relations between the Middle East and the west had become those of civilisational confrontation, based on a western hostility to ‘Islam’. Such diverse developments as western refusal to support a Palestinian state, the opposition to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, anti-Muslim prejudice in the west and the US response to terrorism after the events of 11 September 2001 were subsumed into this new global pattern. Suitable reference, of blithely ahistorical kind, was made to the ‘Crusades’ and other antecedents. This was a historical myth sustained after 1991 by some in the west, for whom ‘Islam’ had become the enemy, and by some in the Middle East, for whom cultural confrontation, or, if one prefers, opposition to ‘cultural aggression’, with the west was a convenient and popular cause, even as they bought its weapons and medicine and invested in its financial markets.
As with all fideistic assertions, the ‘clash’ theory sailed on over all criticisms only to take 11 September as further indication of its historical perspicacity.
By its very diffusion, the idea of a civilisational clash certainly acquired some reality: it was part of the post-Cold War political atmosphere, in east and west, a form of east–west shared transnational paranoia. Yet there were several reasons for doubting its validity, as a description of the post-1989 period or of relations between the Middle East and the west more generally. First of all, throughout this period the twenty or more Middle Eastern states, and the 50-plus Islamic ones, as distinct from transnational groups, continued to conduct their relations with the west on the basis of broad considerations of national interest – military, political, economic – and as normal bilateral interactions. The Islamic states co-operated with the west where this benefited their interests and opposed western policies where this did not suit them. For all Saddam’s posturing about jihad, Iraq’s hostility to the west derived not from religion at all, but from calculations of state interest, and disputes over territory and power. He was always happy to sell oil. The same centrality of states applied in considerable measure to transnational groups: al-Qa’ida itself had an Arab agenda and needed a state, Afghanistan, within which to operate.
Many of the claims made on both sides about the ‘clash’ were false: ‘Islam’, meaning a coalition of Muslim states, did not threaten the security of the west, in military or economic terms – al-Qa’ida could alarm, but not pose a strategic threat; on the other side, the bombastic argument advanced by Islamists that they were now in a position to rival the west was also palpably false. So too was the claim, in varying registers, that all the problems of the Middle East could be blamed on the ‘west’, a stock-in-trade, with small variations, of all third world regimes. Finally, it was argued that the west had after 1991 promoted ‘Islam’ as an enemy to substitute for the loss of an external enemy in communism. Although a widely held idea, this argument was, on closer examination, facile. As discussed elsewhere, it was during the Cold War itself that the west had encouraged conservative Islam. On top of all this, the west as such did not need an ‘enemy’ – it has wanted since 1500 to create a world market, not a world war – and communism was not invented, as it was a real political threat of a kind Islam never was in modern times.
If there was an economic challenge to the west in the 1990s, it came not from the, economically weak, states of the Middle East, but from the Asian industrialising states.” [And if there is an economic challenge to the West today it comes from China, not ‘Islam’ or ‘terrorism’ or drugs, or even Russia.]
In sum, the illusion of ‘Islam’ challenging the ‘west’ was part of the pathology of the post-Cold War epoch, not of the explanation.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 155-57).
“Culture’, ‘civilisation’, ‘Islam’ did not identify the causes of the events of 11 September 2001. The attacks on the USA were political in origin, both regionally and internationally. Regionally they reflected the growing strength of armed Islamist groups, committed to extreme violence and enjoying widespread popular support, in sum the maturing of an integrated ‘Greater West Asian Crisis’. At the same time there was widespread anger at the USA pioneered by anti-secularist fanatics, themselves having been promoted by the west during the Cold War, like al-Qa’ida or Hamas, who paradoxically drew on forms of guerrilla organisation and popular ‘anti-imperialist’ ideology, initially pioneered by the secular left. The international context was one shaped by successive phases of colonialism, Cold War and globalisation, as three superimposed periods of asymmetric relation between the region and the west, going back to 1798 at least. The central dynamic of this challenge lay not in tales of history or ‘values’, but in the contemporary state–society relationship itself, marked by an effective militarisation of opposition in some states where central authority was weak or compliant (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia) and a growing Sunni popular resentment in the major Arab states (Saudi Arabia and Egypt in particular).”
(The Middle East in International Relations, p. 161)
“This presumed opposition between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ corresponds to a particular period of globalized capital when its innate and debilitating contradictions are in need of a fictive center and a global periphery cast as culturally inferior to ‘the West’—ready for abuse, plunder, and domination. Islam, as the inferior of these two ends, was systematically cast as a deranged culture destined to be ruled by white Christians… A false consciousness, rooted in the nineteenth-century concept of Europe as the epicenter of civilization, continues to rely on its authenticity, especially after 9/11, which is given outsized importance at the expense of far more immediate, mundane, and political reasons.
Precisely at a time when the whole world testifies to a rise in Islamic militancy, I propose the end of Islamism as one of the most potent political ideologies of the last two hundred years. And exactly at a moment when there is a militant crescendo in defense of ‘Western civilization’, I suggest the final collapse of that colonial fabrication.
The US campaign against Iraq and the military operation in Afghanistan that immediately preceded and then accompanied it, as well as the illusory battle against terrorism, are not wars targeted against Muslims as Muslims. They are ideological wars against an abstraction code-named ‘Islam’ launched from the premise of an even more vacuous abstraction called ‘the West’… It is true that the populations of these Muslim countries overwhelmingly oppose such aggressions against their fellow Muslims, yet their unelected officials are completely incorporated into the US imperial project.” (The End of Two Illusions, pp. 14-15)
“One of the anchors of the postcolonialist critique, latent in the very term ‘Eurocentrism’, has been the fetish of ‘Europe’ or ‘the West’ . . . The concept of ‘the West’ as it is used in postcolonial theory, I want to argue, has no coherent or credible referent. It is an ideological category masquerading as a geographic one, just as—in the context of modern Orientalist discourse—‘Islam’ is an ideological category masquerading as a religious one.”2
“The transmutation of Islam into a metaphor is the by-product of the fetishized commodity that calls itself ‘the West’. The fetishization of ‘the West’ did not begin with Said or his followers. It began with ‘the West’ itself—with the ideologues of its own capitalist modernity… Said was not a Marxist and had no such claims either. He was a literary critic through and through, with ingrained liberal proclivities dominant on North American campuses, of which he was an illustrious product. His problem was to take the self-fetishization of ‘the West’ on face value and set upon himself the task of mapping out the contours of its catalytic effect, and he did that task marvelously, but never turning to the material foregrounding of this ‘Western’ self-fetishization as its most potent ideological commodity… The factual relation of power and production had implicated a fictitious center-periphery binary that Said never cared to dismantle.
The ideological commodification of ‘Islam’, when placed right next to this commodified ‘West’, was not the work of Orientalists alone. Muslim ideologues themselves, from Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, through Muhammad Abduh, down to Ali Shari’ati, were integral to this project … Neither Said nor any of his followers were even slightly interested in this contrapuntal (Said’s own term) commodification of ‘Islamic Ideology’—fixated as they have been, and rightly so, with the ‘Western’ side of the dangerous delusion.”
As a fetishized totem, ‘the West’ fetishizes everything else it touches, guts it out of its historical complexities and by the power of its hegemony turns it into an illusion too.
With the commencement of the spiral crescendo of migratory labor and refugees mutating into globalized capital, that binary opposition that once categorically separated the colonial from the capital is no longer valid or operative—nor is any illusory cultural or civilizational divide that was presumed to accompany it.” (The End of Two Illusions, pp. 18-22)
“This particular illusion they call ‘the West’ is a false ideological camouflage seeking to center the world in a fictive field termed ‘Europe’, thereby morally, imaginatively, and materially subjugating the world at large to its self-raising, other-lowering hegemonies. ‘The illusion itself,’ as Freud says, ‘sets no store by verification,’ for it does not exist except as an ideology of conquest and control. Anything else this ‘West’ touches—Islam, Asia, Africa, Latin America—it turns into illusory constructs as well, bereft and robbed of their historical realities.” (The End of Two Illusions, pp. 33)
“We must begin to build on what has already been done to disengage ‘the West and the Rest’… What dismantles ‘the West and the Rest’ and brings it down upon itself is the intersectional space where race, gender, and class have crossed paths on a transnational public sphere … To disentangle what I believe is a false fixation on ‘Islam and the West’, to re-historicize this false binary, and to map out alternative trajectories of far more fluid historical cultures, an understanding of which is necessary in order to confront urgent global issues of environmental catastrophes and perilous human migrations without being bogged down by nervous preoccupation with invented divisions…
The outdated false rivalry presumed between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ has been the end result of a flawed narrative of European colonial conquest of the globe and the rise of militant ideologies of resistance ranging from Islamic to Christian liberation theologies. In both Muslim and Latin American colonial contexts such liberation theologies have now performed their historic tasks and have been dissolved into larger political cultures, most evident in the rise of Arab revolutions and massive anti-austerity and anticorruption rallies across Europe and Latin America.
What cuts through the fake civilizational divides of ‘Islam and the West’ is the fact of a world system in which the global circulation of labor, capital, raw materials, and markets generates and sustains cross-border similarities that are defiant of fake frontiers. In this transregional circulation of accumulated capital, abused labor, and raw material, where the beneficiaries and those disenfranchised by it remain the same, civilizational divides expose themselves to be utterly ludicrous… Race, gender, and class therefore animate the transnational public sphere into which any such fake civilizational divide fades and dissolves.”3 (The End of Two Illusions, pp. 48-51)
1. On his part, Aziz Al-Azmeh summed up the context/conjunctural conditions of the ideas of ‘the end of history’ and ‘the clash of civilisation’ in the following way: “Ultimately, all these posterior conditions celebrated in postmodernism, post-Enlightenment, post-coloniality and so forth appear, in the perspective of history, to be no more than gullible, hasty and rather thoughtless redactions of post-communism, or rather the collapse of the Socialist bloc after the end of the Cold War. This made possible the economics of deregulation, and the acceptance of largescale unemployment and the economic values of the Victorian era, all premised on the collapse of the Keynesian consensus that regulated socio-economic life in the wake of the Second World War and in light of events that preceded it. It also resulted in misery and social involution in lands of the North (and of the South). Yet Western triumphalism marking the end of the Cold War was given the sense of conveying the end of an era. It is to mark a particular major conjunctural event that the thesis of the End of History is propounded, and herein are the variations spun on the theme of posterity. But the amplitude of the event is not such as to merit an epochal or even an eschatological regard, as is presumed for it by the End of History thesis “and its progeny, most particularly if we regard the end of the Cold War as a reconfirmation – not the dissolution – of the vigour of one side of this great conflict, and as the defeat of the main contestant. The war against Iraq does not mark a new era, but a continuation of one that has been with us for two centuries, one which, anthropologically speaking, could be regarded in its major forms of representation as the performance of a ritual sacrifice marking the reconfirmation I have spoken of.” (Islams and Modernities, p. 33)
2. See Neil Lazarus, “The Fetish of ‘the West’ in Postcolonial Theory,” in Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (eds.), Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 44.
3. One might argue though that this is a unilinear look at historical processes and an underestimation of nationalism in its different forms in hampering the ‘dissolution of the civilisational divide’.
“Middle Eastern states have a long history of despotism and apparent socioeconomic stagnation, but this is not directly relevant to the region as transformed, since 1800 or thereabouts, by international modernity. The authoritarian character of the modern state is a result of recent institutional formation, the domestic and international forces acting on it and the ability of the ruling elites to use coercive, economic and ideological resources to remain in power—helped, in ways large and small, visible and not so visible, by their international friends.” (100 Myths, p. 39)
“Invocation of an ancient, timeless state structure or despotic political culture derivative of it is, questionable. ‘Oriental despotism’, for all its recurrent fascination, can be historical sociology at its worst – neither historical, in that it denies change, nor sociological, in that it abstracts the state from social context, and contemporary international connection.
The states and economies of the region are … modern creations [1]. Whatever the merits of the first argument, that from lack of growth in resources in the pre-oil period, this cannot be a sufficient expla- nation for what has happened since the l960s. Indeed it is precisely in this period, when the Middle Eastern economies, in the main, continued to stagnate, that those of other countries such as the industrialising states of East Asia, ones without comparable supplies of capital, experienced sustained growth. As for the general thesis of oriental despotism, one not specific to the Middle East (it could be applied to China, Sri Lanka and pre-Colombian America), it is in several respects flawed: above all, it assumes a degree of paralysis that does not accord with the actual history of these societies, and a state that can resist pressures, from within society and from the international context, to change.
Islam did not, in pre-modern times, inhibit considerable economic achievement, being comparable at that time with Europe, in its history and doctrine … being more favourable to trade and profit than any other major religion; nor has it constituted a block to sustained growth in other, non-Middle Eastern, states, such as Malaysia. Most importantly, as the great French writer Maxime Rodinson has shown in his definitive, if widely ignored, Islam and Capitalism, it is not possible to see how a value system such as the Muslim religion can, in terms of autonomous ideological or textual impact, explain the history of economic behaviour; … Islam, like all religions, has no definitive economic, financial or fiscal implications, and is compatible with a ranges of values and social practices. It cannot therefore explain why one economic system or another is adopted. Islam can sanction collective ownership, from that by nomadic tribes to that by modern workers’ collectives, but it is equally compatible with private property, accumulation of wealth and trade. Far from necessarily entailing hostility to economic growth, it can, indeed, be interpreted to entail precisely capitalist values, those attitudes to saving and limited consumption that were associated with Protestantism and the rise of capitalism in Europe.
Like any body of religious thought, Islam can be interpreted to validate a range of different economic and social practices; that particular interpretation which it yields depends, therefore, not on the religion itself but on other, secular factors in the society and political system.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 288-9)
“Until very recently the question of religion had no great importance. The penchant for religion of some social categories, the Islamization of politics and the politicization of Islam, had little effect on public life. Religious culture, the religious referent in the public domain, Koranic or other religious quotations, religious sectarianism: all of these things generally existed on the fringes of daily life. It was thought that these phenomena were an expression of underdevelopment; they were considered reactionary, inimical to progress, civilization and freedom. And until the 1980s they remained restricted to a narrow range of adherents. They did not succeed in establishing themselves in private or public life: religious culture – and I insist on the word ‘culture’ to denominate something distinct from popular, everyday religious observance – remained the property of men of religion and frequenters of mosques. Its diffusion was the exclusive preserve of certain political groups, notably the Muslim Brothers, who during the 1950s had rallied around the pole constituted by Saudi Arabia with a view to fighting Arab nationalism, the Socialist project that had been grafted onto it and the resulting Soviet-Arab friendship.”[2] (Islams and Modernities, p. 63)
“It is … to question the very premises on which the argument about the ‘failure’ of Middle Eastern social science rests, namely, first, that is the job of social science to predict, and secondly, that the region, or any other part of the world, can be comprehended through taking an entity called ‘culture’, or some version of religious belief, or some linguistic ‘essence’, as a general explanatory factor, an independent variable. …
The Middle East was far from being the only region of study where this malaise of methodology and over-specialism was to hit, but there were certainly reasons, even avoiding what I term ‘regional narcissism’ (the belief that the whole world spends all its time plotting and worrying about the Middle East, and that everything that happens in the region is somehow dissimilar to that which takes place elsewhere, and is singularly evil or angelic as a result), to feel that the history of the late twentieth century had in some way set upon the Middle East with particular vengeance.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 4 and p. 10)
1. Roger Adelson, London and the Invention of the Middle East, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, p. 22.
2. See an elaboration by Al-Azmeh in this excerpt from Islams and Modernities, Verso’s 2009 edition.
6. “The problem with the Middle East in the age of globalisation is that it is somewhat removed from the world economy, and needs further integration with it.
This is nonsense. In the first place, the world relies on the region for over a third of its current energy supplies, and is likely to do so for up to two-thirds of its needs by 2020, unless one or another of two most unlikely things happen — that major new supplies of oil are found elsewhere in the world or that a realistic and speedily introduced alternative developed to the internal combustion engine.
Secondly, the revenues earned by Middle Eastern oil producers, and the funds acquired from these producers by other regional states in the forms of loans, grants and remittances are, to a considerable but unquantifiable degree, reinvested in the West, and contribute much to the stability of property and financial markets there. Estimates of Arab Gulf financial holdings in the West go as high as US$5 trillion. ( By way of comparison, the US annual GDP in US$10 trillion [sic].) [ US GDP in 2005 was $13 trillion. As of 2021 the Gulf sovereign wealth funds hold around £2 trillion in assets.]
Thirdly, in other, more human aspects, Europe itself is interlocked with the region: specifically, as a result of the failure of Middle Eastern—particularly North African–states to develop their economies, more and more Middle Eastern migrant workers are crossing the Mediterranean to work in Europe. The West, which owes its religions, some of its historical continuity with Ancient Greece and Rome and a fair share of its eating habits and interior design aesthetics to the region, is, as it has been for more than two millennia, inextricably tied to the Middle East.” (100 Myths, p. 49)
If, therefore, there was one pervasive and ultimately constitutional ‘Middle East crisis’, it lay here, in inter- and intra-state political economy, not in Palestine or Iraq. The roots of the Middle Eastern economic impasses lay in the pattern of incorporation into the world market in regard both to the economies themselves, in my phrase ‘differential integration’, and also in the very pattern of formation of these modern states.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 267)
This became the Western favourite explanation for the conditions of the Arab world in the 1990s and 2000s, and was the perspective that underlay the 2002 report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on the Arab world and the later US Greater Middle East Initiative, a short-lived public relations episode of 2004. Many of the phenomenon referred to in the UNDP report, for example, were accurate but they omitted the historical and international context which these societies have been shaped, one or two centuries of subjugation to the West, the creation of authoritarian states and rentier economies and the moulding of these societies into unstable but subordinate formations.” (100 Myths, p. 50)
“The Middle East is a region that has for much of the past century been afflicted by war and upheaval, and which shows little sign of overcoming this pattern. External intervention, inter-state war, money, oil, religion, economic paralysis and a surfeit of passion seem to beset it. It is for these reasons a region that challenges any observer, be they seeking to understand and predict it from outside, or inhabitants of the area themselves. Yet analytic reflection may serve not only the better to understand the region but also to recognise the impact on it of global context. It is in the very history of subordination to external influences and ongoing inequality of power vis-a-vis the developed countries that the modern Middle East has to be understood; this history has also defined the ways in which it is similar to the rest of the third world.
“Western writers have purveyed one set of confusions about the region, not least the down-playing of regional factors and concerns. Yet these writers are often well matched by those from within the Middle East who assure you that, as discussed above, all can be explained in terms of some simplification – be it some claim about the timeless character of particular ethnic or religious groups, the role of ‘Islam’, or the machinations of imperialism, and other, flexible and recycled, conspiracy theories. The idea that the Middle East is somehow different from the rest of the world is as prevalent within the region as without.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 14)
“Indeed, in the context of simplistic claims about the Muslim world, cultural explanations seemed to take the Middle East as being the exemplar of this approach. Those in the region who presented their relations with the outside world as a conflict between ‘Islam’ and the ‘west’, of whom there were more and more, also did so. With the fall of realism, Marxism, rationalism and, it seemed, all else, ‘culture’, never defined very clearly, and, in any case one of the most difficult social concepts to define, became the fetish of the age, an apparently all-explanatory source from which all else could be deduced.”
(The Middle East in International Relations, p. 31)
“In the maelstrom of the Cold War and after, the USA was the object of intense, often divided sentiment; it was the external country to which most inhabitants of the Middle East looked, as an aspiration for life-style, wealth, and possibly residence, and simultaneously as object of denunciation and alleged source of all ills in the region. Apparently either way the USA could not win. Either way in fact it did. It simultaneously ostracised and dominated, the first in life-style and imagination, the second in terms of raw power.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 139)
“The collapse of the Soviet system was accompanied by much speculation about the global triumph, actual or inevitable, of the western conception of democracy and the free market. At the ideological level there was much truth in the claim, articulated by Francis Fukuyama: there was no global ideological challenge, no internationally accepted alternative, to this model, even if Fukuyama, like many in the west, over-estimated how many states had attained democracy and how securely they had done so. Of course, a region where established elites had for centuries faked piety to the divine was quite able to ape the formal trappings of democracy, focusing narrowly on voting, that the USA required. But as a description of reality, or of the plausible future, the Fukuyama model was mistaken, and simplistic. First, the economic history of few, if any, societies in the world had even approximated to the free market model of liberal theory – the development of Japan, Singapore, Korea, and before that of Germany and Britain relied centrally on state intervention. The state was, with the partial exceptions of Israel and Turkey, dominant in the region’s economies. Secondly, democratisation was not a sudden, all or nothing event like building a dam or buying a car, but a gradual process, over decades and centuries: it took Britain and the USA three hundred years and three internal wars between them to move from tyranny to the kind of qualified democracy they now have. Thirdly, liberal politics is not a single act, bestowing finality on a political system. No one can be certain that a democracy is even reasonably stable unless it has been installed for at least a generation – many have appeared only to disappear (Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Liberia in the 1960s to name but three). Moreover, democracy beyond official proclamations about elections, ‘civil society’ and ‘NGOs’ can only function if certain real embedded and parallel preconditions prevail: a reasonably functioning economy, reasonably transparent public finances, a degree of tolerance in politics and religion, the prevalence of secular law, and, most importantly, a guarantee for different sectors in society that their interests will not be overridden. Where a state denies these conditions, then formal elections mean little, or nothing, and no democracy or attendant free domain of ‘civil society’ can flourish.
The history of the modern Middle East illustrates this. It had in the early decades of the twentieth century some experience of partially liberalised media, political parties and elected parliaments. However, this ‘liberal’ period, marked at the time by partial democratisation, if that, in much of pre-1939 Europe and Latin America, was to be swept away in the tide of coups, revolts and statist populism after World War II. In the Middle East context the second, post-1991 democratisation process advanced in some respects, but it too faced many obstacles: state and popular intolerance within societies, on ethnic, tribal, religious and class grounds; profound economic difficulties; virulent anti-democratic ideologies, masquerading as nationalism or religion; entrenched elites who, by taking control of economic resources, manipulated political and social processes including a charade of ‘globalisation’; tensions between regional states that strengthened the repressive and military apparatuses in societies, and prevented democratic evolution. Ideology and nativist relativism also played their part.
The use made of regionalist and religious particularism by regional elites to deny the possibility of democratisation was one means of justifying a continued monopoly of power. The revolutionary rhetoric of some other states – including Iran – served similar purposes: all real opponents were playing an ‘American’ game. Only the Saudis actually went as far as to claim these Islamic values prevented them from even considering democracy. In the past Cold War regional dictatorships had been invested with a spurious political legitimacy by external powers – be it in myths of a particular ‘Arab’ democracy propagated in the west, or those of ‘socialist democracy’, the ‘non-capitalist road’, propounded in Brezhnevite Russia. After 1991, another range of myths was generated in the region, either to describe as ‘democratic’ or ‘transitional’ or ‘emerging’ processes that were still in their early stages, or quite paralytically in transition to nothing at all (Egypt, Tunisia, Iran), or to erect from within bogus objections to liberalisation on the grounds that such a liberalising process was part of the wider ‘imperialist’ intervention. On the showing of the 1990s, there was nothing inevitable about democratisation in the Middle East or anywhere else[*]; at best, it would be a slow, sometimes contested, process and would take decades before it can be consolidated on a region-wide basis. (The Middle East in International Relations, pp. 159-60)
International Relations theory’s explanations “in themselves rival, actor-based explanations may have to take account of an analysis which stresses the overarching structural context, and inequality. This has defined the relationship between the Middle East and the external world for the past three centuries, as that between an industrialised and militarily powerful west, and an increasingly weak, dependent and fragmented Middle East. It is the multifarious impact of that structural inequality, from the trade and finance of the eighteenth century, the cannon and armies of the early nineteenth-century colonial powers through to the cruise missiles, interventionist armies, Internet, investment houses and modern life-style of the contemporary west, not to mention good governance and ‘NGOs’, that has most shaped the Middle East. States, ethnic groups, business interests, not to mention individuals, from Muhammad Ali, Sultan Abdul Hamid, Naser-ad Din Shah and Theodor Herzl to Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon, Husni Mubarak and Osama bin Laden, have all been subordinated to that continuing, and intensifying, but ever re-defined, international and inexorable, that is structural, differential imegration [sic**].” (The Middle East in International Relations, pp. 163)
“If the study of ideologies is essential in any discussion of international relations, it needs … to be sociological, in the sense of looking at the relation of ideas to political and social interest. It needs to be historical, in seeing how, whatever their claims to being frozen by history, contemporary values are shaped by contemporary context. It needs also to be contingent, in the sense both that the particular set of cultures and states we have today is only one, accidental, outcome of past possibilities, and that it is aware of the many varieties of interpretation of national or religious resources that are possible for states and other political actors.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 199)
*For further interesting arguments, see Michael Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
**Typo: ‘differential integration’. Halliday here abandons uneven – and combined – development and imperialism as concepts and reality, which had characterised his earlier work such as Arabia Without Sultans.
Marxists have worked for many years to provide an analysis of Middle Eastern society, it’s states and ideologies, including religion, which sets these phenomena in a historical and socioeconomic setting. Some of these analyses of a simplified kind, as with many of the radical Arab and Iranian Marxist analyses of the 1960s and 1970s, but the more astute and theoretically able works within the Marxist tradition must count among the best writing on the region. Among these can be sited the works of Hanna Batatu, Ervand Abrahamian, Maxime Rodinson, Faleh A. J’aberre and, in his early work, Bernard Lewis. ‘Class analysis’ must have acquired a bad name for oversimplification, such as trying to reduce the Iranian clergy to being a faction or other of the ‘petty bourgeoisie’, or searching for ‘kulaks’ and ‘middle peasants’ in Arab or Iranian society; but anyone with the slightest academic, let alone first-hand, knowledge of these societies will recognise that those with access to wealth and control of rent and production form a class as eager as any in the world to hold onto its privileges and keep those without such access at bay. As for the overarching context of Marxist analysis, the capitalist ‘mode of production’, this has been the dominant global and regional socioeconomic context for the Middle East for more than a century.* The current dominant phase, globalisation, is the latest, if distinct, chapter in this process.” (100 Myths, p. 55)
*This is arguable, if not inaccurate. Was the capitalist mode of production dominant in the Middle East of 1900 or 1945? See Isam Al-Khafaji, for example].
9. “Islam does not allow for a separation of religion and politics, and hence of what in modern European thought is termed ‘secularism’. This is evident from Islamic history, and is expressed in the Muslim saying al-Islam dinun wa dawlatun (‘Islam is a religious and political system’).
This is a retrospective, contemporary rationalisation of a much more complex story. The unity of religious and political power lasted in Islam less than a century [1], from the establishment of the Muslim state [sic] in Mecca in 632 AD to the death of the fourth caliph Ali in 661 AD. Thereafter, while all rulers used religious symbolism to legitimate their rule and in some cases claimed to be sayyids [2], or descendants of the Prophet, there existed a clear distinction between the political ruler, the sultan or king or other title, and the religious authorities, the ulema [3]. Thus, in the last of the three major Islamic empires, the Ottoman, there was a sultan and a seyh-ul-islam (the highest religious authority), while in Saudi Arabia the ruling family of Al Saud has held temporal power, with (subordinate) religious power being in the hands of the Al Shaikh [sic] the descendants of the founder of their religious movement, al-Wahhab. As for the saying ‘al-Islam dinun was dawlatun’, this is not a classical Islamic formulation at all, neither a verse of the Qur’an nor a quote or hadith but a nineteenth-century political slogan popularised by the Salafi movement that emerged in opposition to Western influence in Egypt.” (100 Myths, p. 56)
Scholar Ira M. Lapidus has written an interesting essay on the subject:
The Separation of State and Religion in the Development of Early Islamic Society.
“Secularisation, a term not often well defined (Arabic almaniya [4], Turkish laiklik, Persian sekularizm), reflected a commitment to the values of the modern world, as exemplified in Europe; but in the modernisation of Middle Eastern states, secularism was not part, as it had been in areas of Europe, of a process of building tolerance between communities or of creating a civic and legal space independent of the state. Secularisation was, above all, a policy intended to strengthen states: it was a reflection of the desire of these states to reduce, or break, the power of an alternative centre of power, the ulema [sic] in the Arab world, the mullahs in Iran, the hocas in Turkey, who had hitherto exercised such influence on education, land and law, and to forge a new ideology of control over society. The most dramatic instance of this secularisation was the abolition by Atatürk in1924, of the institution of the Caliphate, up to then the formal source of Islamic authority and direct descendant of the Prophet’s authority, as well as of the Ministry of shari’ah and the shari’ah (Turkish Çeriet) court.
Three processes – state formation, nationalism, secularisation – were changes brought about from above and in response to external pressures; of equal import was the fourth process, what was happening below. The final years of the Ottoman empire and, even more so, the years following the imposition of the post-1918 settlement saw the emergence, in a range of countries, of popular movements, combining social with economic demands…
“Inevitably … the process of secularisation, promoted by states and social change alike, was to produce a counter-reaction, one that was, decades later, to emerge in the form of an Islamist, or fundamentalist, politics that throughout the region challenged the power of secular states. The most powerful of these groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, was founded in Egypt in 1928, in reaction to the secularising trends in the Arab world and Turkey. In Turkey and Iran the bases of later Islamist movements were also formed at this time: the electoral victory of the Democratic Party in Turkey in 1950, the June 1963 uprising in Iran and all that followed were part of the rejection of a secularisation driven by states. The later emergence of religious movements across the region invoking Islam therefore grew out of the state’s extension of control in this formative period: the ideological roots of 11 September 2001 lay, as its exponents like
al-Qa’ida themselves proclaimed, in the 1920s.” (The Middle East in International Relations, pp. 88-89)
1. It would be more accurate to say “less than fifty years.”
2. This is a common mistranslation among scholars. The plural of ‘sayyid’ is not ‘sayyids’. The word is ‘sāda’ or ‘ashrāf’ or ‘assāda al-alashrāf’. The title refers to the descendants of the Prophet, but they are not exclusive to them.
3. ‘ulāma, not ulema.
4. ‘ilmāniyya
10. “The persistence of authoritarian regimes in the Arab world can be explained by the continued interference of Western powers [and the Soviet Union, and later Russia].
Since the constitution of the Middle Eastern state system after 1918, Western powers have intervened on many occasions to sustain their existing allies and client states, sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly. The monarchs of Jordan, Oman and Morocco were, on occasion, rescued by overt external military assistance. Covert action has been seen in Iran, Syria, Oman and Yemen. Yet the importance of this should not overstated [sic]: equally numerous have been those cases where the West could not save it [sic] allies (Egypt [1952], Iraq [1958], Libya [1969], Iran [1979]) or hold into its colonial position (Palestine [1948], Algeria [1962], South Yemen [1967]).” (100 Myths, p. 61)
“This history of external intervention, and continued external attempts to influence the states of the region, not least during World War II, entailed that the mere fact of formal independence did not remove, or substantially diminish, the sense of external control pervasive in the region. For many Arabs, the persistence through the 1950s, 1970s and beyond of western support for Israel, and for conservative and profligate oil-producing Arabian monarchies, was an index of continued and malevolent external domination. In regard to the latter, the process known neutrally in western literature as ‘recycling’ (of petrodollar income and funds) was just another form of theft, reappropriating with one hand, as investment in western markets, what had just been given, in higher oil revenues.
All of this sense of domination, at both popular and elite levels, was, of course, overlain by a reality, that of economic imbalance, great and growing, between the region and the west; far from diminishing, this continued to increase throughout the twentieth century, as it had through the eighteenth and nineteenth. In overall terms, the fundamental international relation, one that underlay and gave meaning to the military or political systems, was the gap in economic, scientific and military power between the Middle Eastern states and peoples and those of Europe and other developed countries. In sum, nationalism and a sense of powerlessness were not autonomous ideational constructs, part of some free-floating, immovable and to the west impenetrable political culture. It was very tangible external hegemony, whether direct or indirect, that from the recomposition of state power after 1918 to the rollercoaster of globalisation underlay the pervasive political culture of domination.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 92-3)
“It is … one of the paradoxes of the region that the belief that the leadership alone decides coexists, in uneasy tension, with the idea, equally widespread, that external powers control these societies, and their foreign policy. Both simplifications, myths of modern political times, serve to disable, in effect paralyse, the rest of the population.
The examples of the autonomy of the state in the making of foreign policy are many. “Under the three main presidents who ruled Egypt after the 1952 revolution, Nasser (1954–70), Sadat (1970–81) and Mubarak (1981–), Egyptian foreign policy was marked by a number of major decisions – in regard to relations with other Arab states, in regard to Israel, in regard to shifting allegiances as between the west and the USSR. No analysis of how these policies, and related decisions, were made can avoid the conclusion that it was the Egyptian president, and his close advisers, who took and implemented the decisions. In some cases, such as the decision to launch the war of October 1973, these decisions were taken in conditions of the highest secrecy. In Iraq a similar process of concentration of power has been evident, before and after the revolution of 1958: the Iraqi challenges to Kuwait, in 1961 and in 1990, and the decision to go to war with Iran, in 1980, were the product of secret decision-making at the top, preceded, and followed to be sure, by moulding of public opinion through the media and popular mobilisation. In post-revolutionary countries, such as Egypt (after 1952) or Iraq (after 1958), a formal participation of the people has been part of the ‘mobilisation’ process; but such processes are controlled, when not manipulated, by the state.“ (The Middle East in International Relations, pp. 51-52)
“Realism and sceptical analysis may suggest a different conclusion, but to assert, as it is certainly the case, that within the Middle East itself it is almost universally believed that this external, regional and international, context determines foreign, indeed all, policy is important, in so far as an ‘understanding’ of the region is concerned. Israel blames enduring confrontation with the Arab states for the militarisation of its society, as does Turkey, confronting the Arabs, Russia and Greece; in both cases the claim is reinforced by stating that these external powers not only involve the state in an arms race and the threat of military confrontation, but support rebellious communities – Palestinians and Kurds respectively – within their own borders. The Arab world for its part justifies much of its foreign policy, and many of its internal difficulties, as a response to the threat posed by Israel and the generalised insecurity it maintains.
Such arguments may be overstated in so far as they are apologetic; they can by so doing justify the continuation of intolerant or authoritarian rule that is motivated by internal concerns. There is, however, an important element of truth in such claims: foreign policy, any foreign policy, is a process of interaction. This is the very meaning of the term ‘system’ as in ‘international system’, that is, of interaction whether it is in arms procurement, trade policy, the establishment and development of international organisations as with the UN or the Arab League. No state, whatever its internal character or wishes, can ignore what its neighbours and global interlocutors are doing. This is so especially if these neighbours make claims on territory, and appeal to citizens of the other state to revolt, let alone question the legitimacy of the other state’s existence on the grounds that it is an imperialist or colonialist creation. The two most obvious forms of such regional system interaction in the Middle East are the arms races provoked by both the long-running Arab–Israeli and Gulf conflicts, and the coalition, rivalrous but concerted, of oil-producing states in regard to oil prices and production arrangements with international energy companies. These classic forms of systemic determination of foreign policy through competitive interaction have, more recently, been compounded by concern at another form of regional context that no state can ignore, that relating to the environment and shared issues pertaining to water. Here there is a great deal of (nationalist and self-serving) alarm and fake compliance with international norms and laws, but in reality less is done.
This interaction of states is the most obvious, and long-established, form in which regional context determines foreign policy. Yet in one important sense such arguments about system do not go far enough, for they miss what is another, equally important form of regional, and global, determination: as historical sociology has argued and as has been described above, external influences shape not only the foreign policies of states, but, to a considerable degree, their internal character as well...” (The Middle East in International Relations, pp. 67-68)
“That this external influence should be seen as so powerful is, however, hardly surprising. This is for a historical reason, the fact that the most influential force affecting the Middle East over the past two centuries has indeed been that of a more developed, prosperous and aggressive external world ... Such influence can be seen as acting at several levels: direct pressure or intervention by an external power, sanctions and embargoes, long-run influences of dependence and policy co-ordination, the very calculation by regional states and rulers as to how best to win the support of their great power allies. But the overall reality of this influence, and at times control and conspiracy, is not a myth: it is the dominant fact of the Middle East over two centuries, and more.” (The Middle East in International Relations, pp. 69-70)
“Yet external, imperial policy can only explain so much, just as it is limited in accounting for the coups and wars of the post-1945 period. The challenge for the writer is to establish an account in which all three layers of international relations – the policies of external powers, the development of relations between regional states, and the evolution of transnational and internal forces – are accorded proportionate recognition. As elsewhere, narrative is never a given. Middle Eastern facts there most certainly are, but there is and can be no single Middle Eastern history.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 82)
As of the states relations with the Soviet Union, “of the eighteen Arab states only one, South Yemen or the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), was a full supporter of the Soviet Union, embracing the theory of ‘scientific socialism’ and modelling itself on the Soviet pattern of political and economic development.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 126)
“The USSR never offered significant amounts of investment or aid, let alone a viable economic model, whilst the monies coming from the west were largely channelled to elites through the provision of oil revenues from consumers and then recycled back to London and New York.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 129)
“What is perhaps most striking about the whole history of Russian involvement in the Middle East during and after the Cold War is not how much, but how little, Moscow was able to shape the course of events. In economic terms the Soviet Union made almost no impact, beyond acting as a general model for state-run development. If the USSR’s period of strongest influence lasted for about two decades, from 1955 onwards, it is, in this respect, comparable to that of the two main colonial powers during the 1960s; yet in many ways Britain and France, while geographically more removed, were able to sustain a deeper, and more comprehensive, relationship with the region than Russia. The post-colonial linkages between these states and the Middle East, backed by interests in oil, trade and investment, were far greater than those of Russia, as were the links of education, tourism and elite interaction. Arab princes and merchants and the fashionable elite of the Islamic Republic shopped in Harrods and lodged in Knightsbridge, not in the centre of Moscow.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 138)
“Between, on the one hand, the myth of pervasive external control, common in conspiracy theory and nationalist and fundamentalist rhetoric, and in ‘anti-imperialist’ literature the world over, and, on the other, the illusion of complete independence, at which no state arrives, there lies a more varied world of conflicting, and accommodating, interest, and of choices, be they informed, reckless or fatalistic. Analysis of that relationship involves more, however, than the narrative exposition of forces, regional and global: it requires analysis of some at least of the distinct elements that constitute Middle Eastern states and societies and around which the international context shapes the behaviour of states and non-state actors alike.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 164)
11. “The states of the Middle East can be divided into those that are historically deep-rooted and, by implication, therefore legitimate, and those which are ‘artificial’ colonial creations and, by implication, illegitimate.
All states in the world, in the sense of political, coercive and administrative entities that rule delimited territories and peoples, are modern creations. Some can claim anterior cultural, geographical or nomenclature derivation, ranging from those with three millennia of continuous existence as identifiable entities (such as China, Persia, Egypt or Yemen) to those which are the product of modern and accidental territorial delimitation and state coagulation – often, but not always, by colonialism. This includes all of East Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australasia and most of the Middle East. Legitimacy, the ‘right’ of a state and its people to exist as a separate entity, has no relation to historical existence or claims, which are usually inflated.” (100 Myths, p. 66)
“When Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1990 it claimed that the latter was an artificial creation; but so too was Iraq, and all other regional states except Yemen, Egypt, Iran and Turkey. This historical formation applies equally to the character of state institutions themselves: in all these states without exception, the institutional structure is a product of the engagement with the west, the impact of military and economic power alike, not timeless or geographical generalities. The bureaucracies, the military structures, the system of appropriating and distributing income are all expressions of this interaction.
The Middle Eastern state is therefore in large measure a product of the colonial period, hence its ‘post-colonial’ character, in the formative, if not generic, sense of having state institutions, armed forces and a culture shaped by the colonial period. This predominance of external factors is true even of those states, such as Israel or Iraq, which have, since independence, sought to reject the colonial past: the legal system of the former, the military structure, indeed the very military uniforms of the latter, bear a British stamp. Even where colonialism never prevailed, in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and not least Afghanistan, the influence of external factors, in terms of the consequences of competition with other states, education, models of government and administration, has been persistent over time.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 49)
12. “The underlying reason for the emergence of chaos and Islamic violence in Afghanistan in the 1990s was that the West had, after forcing the Russians to leave in 1989, abandoned interest in or activities related to that country.
Nothing could be further from the truth: far from ‘forgetting’ or ‘abandoning’ Afghanistan, the West, in violation of the April 1988 UN agreement on a Soviet withdrawal, continued to arm and finance the rebels and in the end brought down the reforming communist regime. In April 1988, the ‘West’, i.e. the US, Britain and its allies, Egypt and Pakistan, signed an agreement to stop supplying the Islamist guerrillas in Afghanistan in return for a withdrawal of Soviet forces. The Soviets left by February 1989, but aid to the guerrillas continued with the intention of forcing the collapse of the communist regime in Kabul. The US at the same time pressed hard for a cutoff in Soviet support for the Afghan regime after their troop [sic] withdrawal, but this was not successful until the change of government in Moscow following the failed coup of August 1991; then, in a deal brokered by US secretary of State James Baker, Moscow cut off all aid to its former ally in Kabul. The regime of President Najibullah, who had held power since 1987, fell the following April.” (100 Myths, p. 74)
13. “The military represents, or at least in the 1950s and 1960s represented, a ‘modernising elite’ – alternatively, the ‘new men’ – in the Middle East.
The seizure of power by armies in the Middle East, as throughout Europe and in Japan in the interwar period (1918-1939), reflected not some advance for modernity or ‘national’ forces but the control of the state by a rival elite. These elites, to be sure, used some modernising language and methods, but did so the better to control the population and fend off external pressures, and to legitimate their own corporate and collective appropriation of economic assets through states positions and salaries, and through direct administration of now-nationalised assets for their own purposes. The economic trading organisations characteristic of many Middle Eastern regimes exemplifies this (Egypt, pre-2003 Iraq, Syria, Yemen).” (100 Myths, p. 84)
14. “The Middle East never exhibited a strong affinity for communism, because of the atheistic nature of Marxist ideology.
From the 1920s onwards, and even more so under the impact of World War II in the 1940s, the Middle East had a strong communist presence in several countries. The first Communist Party to be founded in the whole of Asia was that of Iran in June 1920, and in the late 1940s and early 1950s the Tudeh (‘Masses’) Party had the support of around 25 per cent of the population. It was, indeed, the only real party in modern Iranian history since then. In a number of Arab countries (1) – Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon – the Communist Party was also a significant political factor. In Palestine, the only organisation to sustain the campaign for Palestinian rights in the 1960s and 1970s in Israel proper was the Communist Party. In two Middle Eastern states, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, what were in effect communist parties – though they affected other names (The Yemeni Socialist Party, The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan) – were in power for substantial periods of time (1967-94 and 1978-92, respectively).
The claim that Arab and Islamic cultures or national aspirations and communism were incompatible was standard counter-revolutionary theme of monarchs, ulema and Western statesmen alike in the Cold War period. The ultimate irony of the influence of communism was that those who opposed it so ferociously – first the Ba’th Party and then the Islamists – borrowed heavily from its ideological framework and organisational model. (For the influence of Marxism on the ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini, see Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism, London, I B. Tauris, 1993.) Khomeini, beyond his denunciation of ‘world-devouring’ jahankhor imperialism, also celebrated 1 May as the Festival of the Islamic Worker. He cited hadith (a saying of the Prophet) to the effect that the sweat of the worker meant more in the eyes of Allah than the prayers of the faithful [*].
In Sudan, the National Islamic Front, which came to power in 1989 with a programme of radical Sunni Islamism at home and abroad, had for more than three decades modelled itself on the ideas and organisational practices, as well as the utopian internationalism, of communism. (100 Myths, pp. 87-88)
In Iran “it was the political vacuum created by the suppression of the left-wing and nationalist movements, and the uprising of June 1963, which made Ayatollah Khomeini the leader of this movement.
In August 1953, British and US secret agents, with a range of Iranian collaborators, staged a coup in Tehran which ousted Mosadeq and installed the Shah as undisputed rule … The opposition bloc of nationalist and communist forces was destroyed, and power came increasingly to be held by the Shah.” (The Middle East in International Relations, pp. 102-104)
“Turkey had a significant communist tradition, but was not a country, as were Iran and some Arab states, in which an organised pro-Soviet mass movement had existed.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 108)
1. The Communist Movement in the Arab World
2. The Communist Movement in Syria and Lebanon
3. The Communist Movement in Egypt
4. The Sudanese Communist Party
5. The Rise and Fall of the Iraqi Communist Party
“Socialism’s decline, combined with a broader shift in social attitudes, led over time to a return, by state and social movements alike, to the espousal of a more traditional set of values, associated with religion. This was evident in a country like Egypt where interest in al-turath (heritage), and in Islam became stronger across a broad social spectrum. It was evident too in the influence of states, most notably Saudi Arabia, which sought to increase their own influence by promoting ‘Islamic’ values, and in the rise of opposition movements, sometimes associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 122)
*Some narrators and scholars consider the cited saying of the Prophet as a weak saying, i.e. it’s authenticity is questionable.
15. “Zionism, i.e. the project of creating a Jewish state in the Middle East, was a product of a broader Western campaign to divide and subjugate the Arab and Muslim worlds.
This frequently-made claim assumes a much closer relation between the Zionist movement, established in 1897 at a conference is Basel, Switzerland, and the major states of the time. The origins of Zionism lie in the political and intellectual discussion in Europe in the latter part of the nineteenth century amongst Jews concerned about the rise of anti-Semitism, especially in the Czarist Russian empire but also in Western Europe. As such Zionism a spontaneous, in contemporary terms ‘non-governmental’ movement which, as any such movement or NGO (non-governmental organisation) does, sought to win governments over to its side. None of the major powers either created, funded or consistently supported the goal of a Jewish state until World War II when, in the face of Nazi persecution of European Jews, the US, the USSR and later Britain came to accept this goal. The assimilation of Zionism as a non-state social and political movement with imperial strategy in the Middle East in the first part of the twentieth century is, therefore, a simplification. (100 Myths, p. 89)
“Zionism in its origins – a response to the rise of Jewish sentiment in Europe, itself promoted by the rise of anti-Jewish racism, or anti-semitism – was not the creation of states (except in so far as it was the discriminatory policies of the Russian state that promoted this, after 1881); Zionism was, in a manner similar to that of other nationalist movements, a result of activity, mobilising, writing and general political action carried out by first a small, and later a wider, circle of supporters. It became evident, however, to the organisers of the Zionist movement from early on that, in order to promote their goals, they had to form alliances with states that might be sympathetic to them; prior to 1914 this was above all the Ottoman empire, then it became Britain, and later still, in the midst of World War II, the USA and the USSR.
After its establishment, the new state of Israel sought to form alliances with whoever would support its goals – the USA, France and the USSR initially, then, while losing the USSR and later France, Britain and, from the l980s onwards, China. From the 1960s onwards the key alliance was with the USA, from which Israel received unique levels of political, financial and diplomatic support; yet here was a clear example of the two-sided, international and internal, balancing act of states. If the Israeli state remained keenly aware of the need to sustain US backing, it was also subject to the pressures of Israeli domestic opinion. Where external ‘support’ from America ended and control by Washington began is an open question; it was never, however, a matter of Zionism/Israel having complete autonomy or complete subservience. Distinct in its origins, and antagonistic in its relation to other Middle Eastern nationalist movements and states, Zionism nonetheless acted as other transnational movements do. It sought to maximise support from other states in pursuit of its own, autonomously defined goals.
One further point needs emphasis here: the goal of nationalism is not the ‘non-state’, but precisely to establish a state.” (The Middle East in International Relations, pp. 238-39)
Avi Shlaim: “The declaration [The Balfour Declaration] was a classic European colonial document cobbled together by a small group of men with a thoroughly colonial mind-set. It was formulated in total disregard for the political rights of the majority of the indigenous population.
British officials retorted that they had only promised a national home, which is not the same thing as a state. In the meantime, Britain incurred the ill-will not only of the Palestinians but of millions of Arabs and Muslims round the world.”
Eugene Rogan: “Britain wanted Palestine for its own empire, for simple geostrategic reasons born of World War I. Towards that end, the British government sought to exploit the Zionist movement - not to create a Jewish state, but to partner with Zionist settlers in managing Palestine over the predictable opposition of the Palestinian Arab majority.”
In 2017, responding to the petition “UK must apologise for the Balfour Declaration & lead peace efforts in Palestine”, the UK Government stated:
“The Balfour Declaration is an historic statement for which HMG does not intend to apologise. We are proud of our role in creating the state of Israel.
The declaration was written in a world of competing imperial powers, in the midst of the First World War and in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire. In that context, establishing a homeland for the Jewish people in the land to which they had such strong historical and religious ties was the right and moral thing to do, particularly against the background of centuries of persecution.
Much has happened since 1917. We recognise that the declaration should have called for the protection of political rights of the non-Jewish communities[*] in Palestine, particularly their right to self-determination. However, the important thing now is to look forward and establish security and justice for both Israelis and Palestinians through a lasting peace.”
*Note the persistence of the colonial mind-set that still refers to the Arabs as "the non-Jewish communities in Palestine".
16. “The Zionist movement, founded in 1897, did not originally intend to create a Jewish state in Palestine, just a ‘homeland’ or community.
This is a pervasive and no doubt necessary fiction that Zionist leaders maintained in the period before 1948 in order to lessen opposition to them. Thus Zionist policy was often publicly phrased in terms that seems to deny the goal of a Jewish state and to cast the decision to go for such a state as a result of British and/or Arab intolerance. In reality, the aim of Zionism was always that of a fully separate and independent state. It could not have been otherwise, given that this was the standard, modular, goal of all nationalist movements in the twentieth century. Theodore Herzl, speaking of the founding conference of 1897, was clear; in his Journals, he wrote: ‘At Basle, I created the Jewish state. If I said that publicly today, it would be met by general laughter. Perhaps in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will understand.’ He was nine months off.” (100 Myths, p. 96)
“Zion, literally one of the hills on which King David built Jerusalem, long a spiritual concept, was in accordance with the very normal procedures of nationalist ideology, here transformed into a modern territorial entity. Herzl’s claim was not that the Jews were different; rather it was precisely a modular nationalist one, partly a response to European anti-Semitism, but also a claim that the Jewish people were a people like any other. Hence they were entitled, on universal principles, to a territory and a sovereign, national state – all this without at this stage the paraphernalia of God’s will.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 203)
17. “The history of World War I and it’s aftermath in the Middle East demands understanding the importance of the British official T. E. Lawrence known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.
T. E. Lawrence was a minor, when not marginal, figure in the Modern history of the Middle East, whose importance has been subsequently blown out of all proportion. This is partly a result of a newspaper campaign romanticising him in the 1920s and partly a result of a British concern to conceal London’s betrayal of Arab nationalism by highlighting the activities of someone sympathetic to the ‘Arab’ cause (as if there were only one), but also in the Middle Eastern context, a means by which those who lost out in the battle for control of Arabia and the Hijaz in the 1920s (the Hashemites, with whom Lawrence worked) can magnify their own role in these events. The reality indicates a much more reduced role. Lawrence himself was not a military but just a political officer, attached to the irregular Arab forces provided by the then-Hashemite ruler of Hijaz, Sharif Hussein. Hussein’s forces comprised 3,000 untrained and irregular troops, compared to the 250,000 British and Indian regular soldiers who conducted the campaign against the Ottomans. Lawrence’s book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a fine piece of prose, but as a source for studying the history or society of the Arab world it is almost worthless. Lawrence’s qualifications for analysing 5 region must also be cast in question by the fact that, for all the mystique about his understanding of ‘the Arab’, his competence in the language was very limited.” (100 Myths, p. 98)
18. “Contemporary political and social developments can only be understood by reference to ancient, centuries-old – if not millennia-old – conflicts: the Medes and the Persians; the sons of Abraham; the desert (‘brown’) and the fertile (‘green’); the sons of Adnan and of Qahtan; Sunnis and Shi’is; the followers of Yezid or Mu’awiya versus those of Hussein and Ali … to name but a few.
All history before the living memory of those currently involved in politics must be tested as an explanatory framework to analyse the present. There causes are and factors that go back before the recent past, but the onus of proof is on those who assert such long-term causation, not on those often-beleaguered modernists who doubt this trans-epochal continuity. If identities and animosities of centuries or more are used to explain and/or justify current behaviour and events, this can only be explained by referring to the mechanisms of socialisation to which societies and authorities resort – often with various forms of violence – not as natural outcomes of some inherent but ethereal social continuity. The resort to explanation in terms of ancient heroes, wars, hatred is an escape from explanation rather than a contribution to it.” (100 Myths, p. 101)
19. “The peoples, and states, of the region have been more or less at war for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.
There have been many wars in the Middle East, in the distant and more recent past. There well be more. But in modern times the Middle East has been no more riven by war than other parts of the world such as Africa and East Asia, and, in the past century, much less than its neighbouring continent to the northeast, Europe. For all the wars between the Ottomans and Safavis (later Qajars), the two empires coexisted reasonably well for four centuries (1500-1914). In the period since 1945 there have been five Arab-Israeli wars but these, while catastrophic for the Palestinians, have been confined in time and space. Only the Iran-Iraq war 1980-8 escaped external and regional state control and involved, by modern standards, high levels of casualties.” (100 Myths, p. 102)
“Total casualties in the Arab–Israeli wars were round 50,000, far less than those in the wars of Algeria or Yemen, or the Iran–Iraq war, and small compared with those of the wars of East Asia and southern Africa. The region knew no Vietnam or Korea, no Angola or El Salvador; Afghanistan in the 1980s was on its margins, its impact all the more muted by the fact that the Iran–Iraq war was raging at the same time.” (The Middle East in International Relations, p. 126)
20. “Muslims of the Middle East have, for religious reasons, a particular resistance to rule by or substantive interaction with non-Muslims.
This is one of the most ridiculous generalisations of modern politics. The resistance by Muslims to rule by non-Muslims is not a function of religion at all, but of the rise of dominant Western secular ideology of modern times, nationalism, with its core ideological claim that peoples are entitled to sovereignty and independence on a given ‘national’ area of territory. Prior to the rise of nationalism, Muslims lived without major revolt under non-Muslim rulers – most evidently, in the British and Czarist Russian empires. Isolation from the outside world and a recurrent xenophobia have marked many Islamic states, as they have non-Muslim counterparts from medieval China to modern fascists and communist regimes, but the overall history of the Muslim world has been one of interaction through trade and cultural exchange with the non-Muslim world: east to India, south to Africa and west and northwards to Europe.” (100 Myths, p. 113)
21. “Islam is a religion of the desert.
Islam is an urban religion, which developed and sought to create a new society in opposition to the tribes of the desert. In the Qur’an the ‘Arabs’ [sic*], meaning here the nomads, are cast as unreliable, and in need of subjugation. The Prophet Muhammad himself was a merchant who, unlike his Christian counterpart Jesus, enjoined no cult of austerity or self-imposed deprivation, and believed in creating a strong state. One of the prime functions of the legal system he began, which later came to be known as shari’ah, was to base the legal codes of the new urban faith on the more fluid tribal legal system, or ‘urf.” (100 Myths, p. 114)
*The transliteration should be the ‘Arāb. Quran 9:97: “The bedouins are stronger in disbelief and hypocrisy and more likely not to know the limits of what [laws] Allah has revealed to His Messenger. And Allah is Knowing and Wise.” In other translations: ‘the Arabs of the desert’, ‘the desert dwelling Arabs’.
“The doctrine and practice of the Islamic world on alcohol (itself an Arabic word) are rather more varied than this. The early verses of the Qur’an (16:67) permit the drinking of khamr (wine), and the Muslim paradise is famously described in the Holy Book as containing ‘rivers of wine’. Throughout the history of the Islamic world wine, and the culture of drinking and festivity associated with it, have been recurrent themes, perhaps most notably in mediaeval Persian poetry where the pleasures of wine and love are praised and in the poetry of the ninth-century Arab [and Persian] poet Abu Nawas, who wrote: ‘Bring me wine, and, if it is truly wine, then say it is so.’ (See Poems of Wine and Revelry. The Khamriyyat of Abu Nuwas, translated by Jim Coalville, Kegan Paul Internatinal, 2005.) The mediaeval study by Muhammad ibn Zaharia [sic]* al-Razi (in 1012) contained a chapter on the benefits of wine, although recent editions have removed this. (On the role of wine in mediaeval Islam, see Peter Heine’s classic study Weinstudien, Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1982.) (100 Myths, p. 115)
Later the verse 90 in chapter Al-Ma’idah use the verb ‘to avoid’, which the explicators interpreted as was a explicit ruling that forbade the drinking of wine.
O believers! Intoxicants, gambling, idols, and drawing lots for decisions1 are all evil of Satan’s handiwork. So shun them so you may be successful.
Verse 43 in chaper I-nisāa:
O you who have believed, do not approach prayer while you are intoxicated until you know what you are saying or in a state of janabah, except those passing through [a place of prayer], until you have washed [your whole body]…
Early explicators also used the saying of the prophet to confirm the prohibition. Quranic verses and Hadith suggest that the prohibition against alcohol emerged in stages during the later life of the Prophet Muhammad. Yet the the prohibition and the history of drinking alcohol are two different things.
The Hanbali school, of which the Wahabis in contemporary Saudi Arabia are a subgroup, is very strict in its prohibition of alcohol. At the other extreme, Hanafi jurists interpret the word khamr to mean specific beverages. Only these specific beverages are forbidden, but not necessarily others, so they allow spirits, which of course did not exist at the time of Muhammad and so are not mentioned in the Quran. Hanbalis also allow nabidh-s (infusions) of raisins and dates, even if they ferment, so long as they are drunk "in amounts that one believes will not make him drunk" and without bad intentions (Alcohol and Islam: an overview by Lawrence Michalak and Karen Trocki, Contemporary Drug Problems, Nb. 33, 2006)
[One should add the reality on the ground: from pre-2003 Baghdad to Damascus to Amman to Tunis to Marrakesh bars and the sale of alcohol has been available. In addition, illegal suppliers are also abundant. In Tunis some supermarkets have a section for alcoholic drinks. In Amman and Damascus, some shops sell alcohol. Turkey, especially Istanbul, is another example.] Raki is the national alcoholic drink of Turkey and Arak is the traditional alcoholic beverage in Western Asia, especially in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Palestine.
“In the current context of widespread assertions of Islamic identity, many individuals and groups have marked their difference from the decadent other by insisting on abstention as an Islamic virtue. The long history, symbolism and poetry of wine and of drinking cultures in the past and present of Muslim societies are overlooked or derided as deviant.” (Beyond Islam, 2011, p. 23)
“Medical treatises, written by such dignified doctors and philosophers as al-Razi (d. 932), included chapters on wine’s benefits and its place in the humoral economy, without expressing any qualms about its religious status (it was only in recent, modern editions that such chapters were censored). The Hanafi school of jurisprudence recognized the products of certain types and durations of fermentation as legal, justifying this view by reference to the sunna of the Prophet.” (Beyond Islam, p. 57)
In nineteenth-century Istanbul “drinking cultures were high and low: the sumptuous wine tables of the rich and the taverns of the soldiery and awbash (rabble) The janissary corps, the military mainstay of the Ottomans, who as we saw were intertwined with the Bektashi order**, were well known drinkers, and many of their entertainments, as well as intrigues and conspiracies, were conducted in taverns. Dancing boys, dressed as girls and offering sexual favours, were a regular item of entertainment.”
“For the most part, however, the respectable classes drank in private, with their own circles of companions. In some Middle Eastern cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, public male drinking cultures became respectable and open – a sign of modernity and medeniyat. Alcohol thus became an issue in contests of identity and authenticity. François Georgeon has written a fascinating account of the symbolic significance of alcohol for notions of modernity and civilization in Turkey from the nineteenth century.
Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–39) was the first reforming ruler who made a serious impact. He modelled himself on other European rulers, and included alcohol as a feature of public occasions such as official dinners and receptions. Champagne, which was not new to the Ottoman court, then came out in public. Over the course of the century, and among the modern elites and the official classes, drink came to be associated with being modern and with civilization (medeniyat).” (Beyond Islam, pp. 144-45)
Turkey, December 2021: “The Turkish government's decision to impose ever-higher taxes on alcoholic beverages is leading to a rise in homemade liquor across the country, which has already resulted in a number of fatal poisonings.
Turks have begun distilling their own liquor from black market ethyl alcohol, while others put their lives in the hands of bootleggers. According to the state-run Anadolu Agency, 84 people died from methyl alcohol poisoning in December alone.” (middle east eye.com)
At the London’s King Fahd Academy: “We were all Muslim but weren’t a homogenous group. I remember at prayer time in the girls' school there’d be some that would always pray, and then there’d be the girls who’d skip prayers citing ‘women’s issues’ for the entire year, instead of once a month,” laughs Marwa el-Borhamy, who studied at the school in the 90s, returning to teach there herself years later. “But there was also never any judgment, that was the beauty of it.” The devout would organise spring breaks to go and perform Umrah when they were old enough to holiday together, while others in some year groups would host alcohol-free parties in rented basement halls of four-star Kensington hotels. It would be here that some of the boys and girls - studying by day in a segregated school - would end up meeting to dance to the latest mix of RnB tunes.
In December 2023 it was reported that the United Arab Emirates has opened its first brewery in Abu Dhabi following decades of restrictions on alcohol production. Alcohol has been restricted across the UAE since it was founded in 1971, though the different emirates have maintained varying levels of prohibition.
*Zakaria/Zakariyya
** An order distrusted by the establishment for its Alawi and Shi‘i sympathies and its heterodox practices, including ritual consumption of rakı (a Turkish alcoholic drink).
23. “For Muslim women, it is compulsory to wear a headscarf or veil.
This whole issue is surrounded with confusion, starting from the fact that not one but three variants of appropriate clothing are fused in the term ‘veil’: ‘modest’ dressing; the covering of hair with scarf; and veiling in the strict sense of covering the body and face. Until recent times the injunction to modest clothing referred to men as well as women, hence resistance to wearing Western suits, shorts, etc (hence also the preference of modern fundamentalist men for loose-fitting garb such as the Arabian jallabia or the Pakistani shalwar khamis).
There is not a verse in the Qur’an which enjoins the covering of women’s hair or head. Verse 33:58 advises the wives of the Prophet [not accurate*] to cover their hair and 24:31 speaks of covering women’s ‘adornment’ from the eyes of strangers, but the practice of compulsory covering of the head (hijab), let alone wearing the full veil covering the lower face up to the eyes (litham) has no canonical authority. Veiling of this kind was not associated with the time of the Prophet, but came in the ninth century with the Abassid Empire, and probably reflects a pre-Islamic Persian influence associated with that dynasty. Of the five major legal schools of Islam, none enjoins compulsory veiling. This is a social custom that has spread with modern fundamentalism and a misconceived and illiberal ‘identity politics’. Needless to say, the majority of women in the Muslim world across the ages, who worked in the fields, did not cover their faces and do not do so to this day. Full ceiling is an urban and largely modern institution.” (100 Myths, p. 116)
“The adoption of the veil by Muslim women occurred by a similar process of seamless assimilation of the mores of the conquered peoples. The veil was apparently in use in Sasanian society, and segregation of the sexes and use of the veil were heavily in evidence in the Christian Middle East and Mediterranean regions at the time of the rise of Islam. During Muhammad’s lifetime and only toward the end at that, his wives were the only Muslim women required to veil. After his death and following the Muslim conquest of the adjoining territories, where upper-class women, veiled, the veil became a commonplace item of clothing among Muslim upper-class women, by a process of assimilation that no one has yet ascertained in much detail.” (Ahmed, pp. 11-12)
“[Early] texts do not distinguish in their language between veiling and seclusion but use the term hijab interchangeably to mean “veil,” as in darabat al-hijab, “she took the veil”—which in turn meant “she became a wife of Muhammad’s,” Muhammad’s wives but not his concubines donning the veil —and to mean “curtain” (its literal meaning) in the sense of separation or partition. They also use the same term to refer generally to the seclusion or separation of Muhammad’s wives and to the decrees relating to their veiling or covering themselves.” (Ahmed, p. 57)
The veil “is nowhere explicitly prescribed in the Quran; the only verses dealing with women’s clothing, aside from those already quoted, instruct women to guard their private parts and throw a scarf over their bosoms (Sura 24:31–32).” (Ahmed, p. 59)
“It was the discourses of the West, and specifically the discourse of colonial domination, that in the first place determined the meaning of the veil in geopolitical discourses and thereby set the terms for its emergence as a symbol of resistance. In the discourses of geopolitics the reemergent veil is an emblem of many things, prominent among which is its meaning as the rejection of the West. But when one considers why the veil has this meaning in the late twentieth century, it becomes obvious that, ironically, it was the discourses of the West, and specifically the discourse of colonial domination, that in the first place determined the meaning of the veil in geopolitical discourses and thereby set the terms for its emergence as a symbol of resistance. In other words, the reemergent veil attests, by virtue of its very power as a symbol of resistance, to the uncontested hegemonic diffusion of the discourses of the West in our age. And it attests to the fact that, at least as regards the Islamic world, the discourses of resistance and rejection are inextricably informed by the languages and ideas developed and disseminated by the West to no less a degree than are the languages of those openly advocating emulation of the West…” (Ahmed, p. 240)
“In Iran, for instance, two tyrants, Reza Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini “focused on policing women’s bodies as the site of their respective ideologies of power and domination, with the bodies of women as the ideological battleground of their patriarchal practices. What we are witnessing in Iran in the imposition of mandatory veiling is, of course, the reverse of what we see in much of Europe and North America where Muslim women are systematically harassed if they choose to wear the Muslim hijab. For decades not a single day passes without a racist, misogynist, bigoted violent attack on Muslim women in Europe and the US.” (Hamid Dabashi, 2023)
“Elements from the past – manners of dress for instance – are made Islamic, and therefore ‘popular’, although they bear no relation to the manner in which people, Muslims included, dressed.” (Islams and Modernities, p. 86)
* O Prophet! Ask your wives, daughters, and believing women to draw their cloaks over their bodies. In this way it is more likely that they will be recognized ˹as virtuous˺ and not be harassed. And Allah is All-Forgiving, Most Merciful. There is a good reading of the verse – in Arabic – here.
24. “In the ‘true’, ‘authentic’, ‘correctly interpreted’ religions of the region, women are accorded equality with men, if not a superior position.
Since the late nineteenth century, there has been considerable debate within the Muslim world, South Asian as well as Middle Eastern, about the rights of women and the obstacles which existing social and patriarchal practice, but also holy texts and traditions, place in the path of these goals. One pioneer was the Egyptian Qasim Amin; more recently, Fatima [Fa’tema] Mernissi and Nawa’l El-Saada’wi have written on the subject, as has the NGO Women Living Under Muslim Laws. Similar debates have taken and are taking place within Judaism and Christianity. On this issue as in regard to war, there is no one single message but rather a variety of claims, the priority of which is decided not by text at all, let alone divine derivation, but by the wishes and power of the interpreter. Some writers have sought to base a case for women’s rights and equality in liberal or even socialist reading of text and tradition, holding (in a form of argument with deep roots in Islamic tradition) that where one verse or saying conflicts with another the preferred one is said, by a process of suppression or naskh, to prevail over the other. The criteria for naskh, and the power relations underlying a successful advocacy and implementation of such an interpretation are not specified. In other words, politics, in the broader sense, decides.” (100 Myths, p. 117)
25. “At the dawn of the new millennium, a ‘New Middle East’ is now in the offing.
Let us leave aside the fact that for most people in the Middle East, 2000 – a Western Christian date – is not the start of any particularly new anything [sic]. The call for a ‘new Middle East’ was a claim trumpeted by the US administration in 2003-4 when it carried out the invasion of Iraq and proclaimed a ‘Greater Middle East Initiative’ designed to bring progress and reform to Arab societies. The Middle East has been supposedly transformed by the crises, events and outcomes of many a previous year – the Turkish revolution of 1908; the colonial reordering of 1918-20; the founding of the Arab League in 1945; the defeat of the tripartite aggression over Suez in 1956; the Iraqi revolution of 1958, the June Arab-Israeli war of 1967, the Iranian Revolution of 1979; the Gulf war of 1991; the defeat of the Ba’thist regime in Iraq in 2003. Each of these dates has certainly marked significant changes in those who holed power in particular states, and each such change has had wider regional implications.
But continuity has, across the region, been stronger than discontinuity, with the exception of 1918-20. As for the history of reform, this began in the 1840s with the changes introduced by the Ottoman Empire, the tanzimat, and comparable changes in Iran, in response to external military and economic pressure. The region, has in common with other parts do the world, seen wave upon wave of reform – some cautious, some revolutionary – in the decades of the twentieth century, including during the Cold War, the rival projects of Arab socialism and the monarchical White Revolution in Iran. This historical record is not designed to deny the possibility of or need for reform today, or, but rather to suggest that any such project has to be generated from within the region itself and may take rather longer to bear fruit than the attention span of external ad administrations and their speechwriters.” (100 Myths, pp. 126-27)
[After less than 6 years of writing those lines, the Arab uprisings/revolutions of 2010/2011 broke out. The counter-revolution has so far generally prevailed. The oil-rich monarchies were not threatened and in fact played a significant role in the counter-revolution. On the whole, most Middle Eastern states proved to be resilient.]
26. “Is Islam a distinct culture and civilization that must be ‘understood’ by the West?” (Sami Zubaida, Beyond Islam, 2011, p. 9)
“The question is raised in the related context of ‘multiculturalism’. The term ‘multicultural’ is taken to imply a multiplicity of unit cultures: how are these units to be labelled and distinguished? By nationality, religion or ethnicity? As Indian, Muslim or Kurdish? Do these really form distinct units?
The Indian subcontinent is itself multicultural, but with illusive units, hard to categorize as distinct entities. When it comes to ‘Muslim culture’ the unit becomes even more indeterminate, not only because of the multiplicity of nationalities and ethnicities, but also the varieties of identification of the religion itself, and its adaptations to ideologies, generations and styles of life. In fact, modern forms of Islam, whether reformist or radical, tend to reject ethnic culture and its colouring of religion in favour of a ‘pure’ Islam derived from scriptures and Prophetic sources. Islam as a distinct culture, then, is illusory. As a religion it has certain constants, such as the holy book and the belief in the unity of God and the prophethood of Muhammad. But even these constants are constructed through a variety of discourses and practices enshrined in differing institutions. ‘Culture’ is best viewed as a process, in flux in relation to other socio-economic and political processes and situations, rather than a distinct unit with an essential identity.
Are these Muslim ‘cultures’, beliefs and institutions alien to Westerners, requiring special study and understanding? I would argue not. Islam shares with Christianity and Judaism a wide range of doctrines, practices and moral precepts. The issues of sexual morality and its codification in state law, for instance – so prominent in Islamic distinctiveness today – were until recently also part of Christian advocacy in Europe and North America, and remain so in the latter. Homosexuality was a criminal offence in Britain until the legal reforms of the 1950s and 1960s, and so was abortion… The assertion of the precedence of religious truths over scientific is a feature of Christianity and Judaism as much as it is of Islam, and the Muslim denunciation of Darwinian evolutionism has well-known precedents and parallels in the USA.
In relation to this history, the manifestations of militant Islam are not alien, but echo many of the features and episodes of assertions of religious authority in the history of the West.
Most surveys carried out in Europe (especially before September 2001 – after that there is a tendency towards retrenchment around the umma) found that a majority of nominal Muslims (between 60 and 70 per cent) are non-observant, and that, of those who are, many are ‘private’ believers, not involved in political or cultural advocacy.” (Beyond Islam, pp. 9-12)
“Three decades of the Islamic Republic in Iran have produced a thoroughly secularized society. All the indications are that the majority of a predominantly young population (70 per cent of the population are under 30) strongly resent Islamic government and its controls over their social and cultural lives. They use every opportunity to subvert these controls through their music, football, dress, courtship and sexuality.” (Beyond Islam, p. 172)
Furthermore, “religion influences and provides a language for, but does not determine, the international relations of the Middle East. There is no such thing as the ‘international relations of Islam’ any more than there is such a thing as ‘Islamic art’, a fabrication of curators and auctioneers. Uses, and abuses, of Islamic values and terminology in international relations are, and probably long will be, legion; there is no reason for social scientists to endorse the collective delusion.” (Halliday, The Middle East in International Relations, p. 220)
“For anyone wanting an introduction to the broader international dimensions, [John L.] Esposito's is an excellent account. He takes one into the mental world of the Islamist thinkers, and highlights some of the nonsens in the West, for reasons of strategic alarmism, or anti-migrant opportunism, in recent years. His book contains a rich critique of the monolithic view of Islam, and an effective challenge to stereotypes. Esposito is also good on the earlier history of prejudice against Muslims – in the speeches of Martin Luther and the early fathers of Croatian nationalism, amongst others.”*
Hamid Dabashi has put forward an idea “of Islam, a way of reading Islam as a dynamic proposition that accounts for its historical effervescence and worldly presence… an Islam of the lived experiences of Muslims… It is absolutely imperative for us to remember and recognize Islam not as the ‘other’ of ‘the West’ but as the constellation of doctrines and sentiments emanating from its own central charismatic moment” and demonstrate how with the rise of Eurocentric modernity “Islam was transformed into a singular and exclusive site of ideological resistance to colonialism, not simply by Orientalists but by Muslims themselves, and thus it lost the diversified texture of its multifaceted heritage. It was mutated by Muslim ideologues into the mirror image of the paramount power they faced, which they called ‘the West.’ This is the moment when Islam becomes Islamism.” (The End of Two Illusions, pp. 57-8)
*Fred Halliday, The Politics of Islam, British Journal of Political Science , Cambridge University Press, Jul., 1995. John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat, Myth or Reality?, Oxford University Press, 1992.
27. “It is assumed by many that the Shari‘a is a determinate body of law based on canonical sources, embodying Islamic virtues. It is also assumed that this form of ‘law’ prevailed in historical Muslim societies, and was disrupted by colonial or other dominant Western intrusions imposing alien legal systems on Muslims, and that Westernized elites and corrupt rulers acquiesced in this cultural domination.
One of the contentions of the advocates of the Shari‘a is that its rule consisted of a kind of constitution binding on the rulers, corresponding to the modern notion of ‘the rule of law’. This idea has been put forward forcibly by an influential American legal scholar, Noah Feldman, in recent articles and a book. Feldman’s was an effort at sympathetic understanding of modern Islamist demands for the Shari‘a: it indicates a desire to restore the rule of law, now disrupted under the arbitrary repressive regimes prevailing in much of the Muslim world.
This kind of sympathetic presentation of an essentialized Muslim history and civilization, while insisting on its total alterity to the West, is common among many historians and social scientists. It is well exemplified in the collection of essays edited by Miriam Hoexter, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Nehemia Lavtzion on The Public Sphere in Muslim Societies.”
The examples the authors provide depict “a remarkable picture of a utopian society, of harmony, consensus and balance, of social autonomies and checks of absolute power! And it continued from ‘very early in Islamic history’ into late Ottoman times, encompassed a vast geographical area, all as a continuing manifestation of an essential Islamic civilization. This is the picture that modern Islamic apologists would like to project of Islam as religion and civilization.
The contention that the Shari‘a constituted ‘rule of law’ also ignores the essential institutional underpinning of this notion in the modern context: evolved institutions, codes and procedures of legal enactments with checks and balances, fallible and imperfect as they might be.” (Beyond Islam, pp. 13-16)
28. “A dominant stereotype is that Islam oppresses women: veiling, Shari‘a rules on family, marriage (including plural marriage) and divorce are seen as aspects of this oppression.
Apart from the Turkish Republic, which banished the Shari‘a from its legislation, the main Arab states (though not Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, which retained traditional Shari‘a forms) drew on the Shari‘a for their personal-status legislation, but always selectively – placing limits on polygamy or limiting divorce prerogatives for the husband, among various other liberalizations. Those reformist legislative concessions have,with the Islamic currents of the later decades of the century, been the object of Islamic campaigns, conservative and radical, seeking the restoration of the full provisions of the historical Shari‘a. Such contestations have been particularly prominent in Egypt. The family law reforms in Iran under the Shah were reversed by the Islamic Republic, but subsequently modified in reformist directions under pressure from influential women’s campaigns and the contingencies of an economy that needed women’s employment outside the home.
What Europe and the Middle East had in common is the strict regulation of sexuality by religious and legal sanction, confining it to the sanctified marriage bond and punishing extramarital sex. They also shared a general oppression of women in social and familial status and relations, with more or less severe restrictions on roles and statuses of women outside the domestic setting. ‘Women’s liberation’ is a recent development in Western societies – the result of successive campaigns for legal and social rights that gained momentum in the course of the twentieth century, and are still ongoing. Western Christianity had forbidden divorce, while Muslim law allows the husband to divorce at will, though severely restricting that privilege for the wife.
Most of the discourse of difference, however, is reformist and apologetic: all these oppressive features, they argue, are distortions of the ‘true’ Islam, which grants equality of rights while recognising ‘natural’ differences between the sexes… An alleged Muslim ideal, largely unrealised, is favourably contrasted with a caricature of the West to seal the discourse of difference.” (Beyond Islam, pp. 17-20)
See also Women and Gender in Islam - Historical Roots of a Modern Debate by Leila Ahmed, Yale University Press, 1992.
29. “Homosexuality thus becomes a central plank in the discourse of difference and identity. We shall see presently that this proclaimed difference has a complicated history. Homoerotism was and is prevalent in Middle Eastern societies and elsewhere in recent history – but is ‘homoerotism’ the same as ‘homosexuality’?”
Prevalent homoerotism in the Middle East, as well as the European past, related to desires and acts rather than to enduring orientations.
It should be recalled, however, that such prohibition of homosexuality was shared by most Western societies and their laws until recent times. Homosexual acts constituted criminal offences in British law until the 1960s… The inscription of such prohibitions into the discourse of difference does not, therefore, designate some essential difference between Islam and the West, but an ideological contest of forms of sexuality and culture shared between dominant Islamism and conservative religious factions in the West.
In the context of the nineteenth-century Ottoman reforms, Sukru Hanioglu wrote:
Another important factor [in regard to changing sexual norms] . . . was the intrusion of European sexual mores into Ottoman society, and the consequent stigmatisation of homosexuality.
Progress, rationality and civilization thus required the suppression and punishment of those desires and acts.
The campaigns of persecution of homosexuals in Egypt and elsewhere are directed against ‘gays’: usually educated middle-class men attracted to the modes of expression and display of their Western counterparts. They represent the provocation of an ideologically driven self-assertion, seen by their detractors as carriers of Western cultural invasion and degeneracy. Invisible in this context are the village men – including religious functionaries – who sodomize boys. In the discourse of difference between essential Islamic virtue and Western vice, homosexuality is a potent element, representing a further denial of history and culture, as well as a blurring of the communalities of conservative thought between Muslim, Christian and Jewish advocacies.” (Beyond Islam, pp. 20-23)
30. Original sin and man’s fallen nature are the essential doctrinal props of Christian puritanism, and Islam is no different. Muslims exercise methodical restraint in matters of bodily pleasures: indulgences in sex, food, drink and other intoxicants; entertainments, etc.
Historically, for a Muslim man “many forms of sexuality are allowed, providing they are enacted within a legitimate relationship of marriage or slavery. The Quran is very positive about sexual activity… Celibacy, abstinence, even restraint, are not in the spirit of Orthodox Islam, and are confined mostly to the ascetic practices of some Sufis and sectarians.
While sodomy is strictly forbidden in Islam, the love of boys is a constant theme in the culture of the Middle East – and not just for Muslims – over the centuries. It is celebrated in poetry and song , and considered by the pious to be a regular temptation.”
Furthermore, “heavenly pleasure contrasts starkly with the Jewish and Christian versions, with sombre worship and sacred music, the greatest pleasure being the presence of the Lord.
It is not surprising … to find in the large corpus of Arabic erotic literature many notable contributions by distinguished jurists, exploring through explicit tales and reflections what is proper and licit in sexual conduct, the nature and (physical) types of women and how to treat them (the discourse being addressed to the male Muslim) and the techniques of pleasure… The two most renowned and widely diffused pornographic works in Arabic literature, The Perfumed Garden and How an Old Man Can Regain His Youth through Sexual Potency were both written, in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries respectively, by men with religious titles – the first by Shaykh Sidi Muhammad Nefzawi, the second by Mawla Ahmad Ibn Sulayman.
There are no grounds, however, for attributing puritanism (in Weber’s sense) to urban religious cultures in the Muslim world.” (Beyond Islam, pp. 55-56)
Today all forms of sexual conduct and practice exist. Whether such practices are explicit or hidden depends on the country, city, class, type of regimes and level of repression, availability of money, and so on. This has been facilitated by the abundance of sexual material on the Internet.
40. “The discourse of difference is reinforced by the practice of attaching the adjective ‘Islamic’ to a wide range of aspects of the histories and cultures of the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and India, each encompassing a wide diversity, as well as differing from the others.
The term implies that those regions have Islam as their essence, and confirms their otherness from the ‘Christian’ West. Yet this ‘West’ is hardly ever given the adjective ‘Christian’ with regard to its history, art, science and so on. So, the history of Europe and its offshoots is not ‘Christian history’, even though Christianity and its churches play prominent parts in it … Christianity is at least as prominent a factor in European history as Islam is in diverse regions – yet it is not ‘Christian’ history, but European, or English, or French, while the history of the church is a specific branch thereof.
Islamic’ art … has almost always avoided religious themes, the portrayal of sacred figures being taboo (exceptions occur in Shi‘ite popular iconography, seldom considered ‘art’). Mosaics and calligraphy decorate mosques. But despite the supposed ban on portraiture there are vibrant traditions of pictorial art in particular regions and periods. Persian and Indian miniatures, proceeding partly from Chinese influ- ences, are well known, and are the main example of ‘Islamic’ art. But what is ‘Islamic’ about them? They portray kings and heroes, battles and hunts, beauties and gardens, legends and myths, but hardly ever religious themes. So, we have European art, which is heavily imbued with religious themes and images but not called ‘Christian’, and so- called ‘Islamic’ art which avoids religious themes.
There are the iconic themes of domes and arches, mostly developments from Byzantine architecture, the Byzantine Aya Sophia in Istanbul being the inspiration for so much that followed. Beyond that, however, there is a great array of styles, specific to particular regions and historical periods. The Abbasid malwiya of Samurra in Iraq, following the Mesopotamian ziggurat, replicated in early examples in Egypt (the Ibn Tulun mosque in Cairo); the unique high-rises and decorative architecture of Yemen; the desert mud and stone constructions of Timbuktu, and other African styles. All these become ‘Islamic’, but there is no unity in their diversity, and no obvious connection to ‘Islam’ as such. By contrast, European architecture is Renaissance, Gothic, Bauhaus, modernist, postmodern, and so on – but never ‘Christian’.
So ‘Islamic’ is judged to be general and inclusive. But this attribution then feeds into the discourse of difference and the religious essentialism on which it is based. This is particularly pertinent to the concept of ‘Islamic’ science.” (Beyond Islam, pp 23-29)
41. U.S. President Barack Obama, for example, asserted in 2016 that “the only organizing principles [in the region] are sectarian” and that the conflicts that rage in the Middle East under America’s watch “date back millennia.”
Obama’s assertions, at least as recounted by journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, are both preposterous and self-serving—preposterous because they discount the rich, twentieth- century history of the Arab world that underscores the numerous social and political bonds in the region that are manifestly not sectarian, of which Obama is clearly ignorant; self-serving because they affirm an imperial self-righteousness that presumes that the problems of the Arab world, including those that affect the United States, are due to the persistence of allegedly immutable sectarian solidarities that defy a putative American benevolence. We have tried to help them, but they are hopeless appears to be the essence of Obama’s message.
However, the brute reality of Western interventionism and imperialism in the region not only exacerbates “internal” problems, but creates new conditions and contexts that define the very nature of what is internal. Thus, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared confidently in 2006, amidst Israel’s devastating U.S.-backed assault on Lebanon, that the world was observing the “birth pangs of a New Middle East.” The aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, moreover, witnessed not only the destruction of what remained of the secular Baathist Iraqi central state; it also created a new Iraqi Governing Council along explicitly sectarian lines. This fateful decision to divide Iraqi government along “Sunni,” “Shiite,” and “Kurd,” or to invent a “Sunni triangle,” was not predetermined objectively by the diversity of Iraqi society. It was principally a U.S. imperial interpretation of this diversity.
The “sectarian” Middle East does not simply exist; it is imagined to exist, and then it is produced. It does not emerge latently. Yet the strong association of the term “sectarianism” with the Middle East repeatedly suggests that the region is more negatively religious than the “secular” West. This is an ideological assumption woven into how the Arab and Muslim worlds are generally depicted as having fundamentally religious landscapes—even the term “Muslim world” highlights the allegedly religious nature of this region, as opposed to the geographic designation of the “West.” Not only does this assumption gloss over how religious the West is, but it also pretends that what is occurring in the Middle East reflects an unbroken arc of sectarian sentiment that connects the medieval to the modern. Modern politics, in short, is transformed into little more than a re-enactment of a medieval drama between Sunni and Shi’i, rather than being a geopolitical struggle in which Western states are deeply implicate.
The idea of a “sectarian” Middle East causes far more obfuscation than illumination. Sectarianism is often characterized as the violent and illiberal manifestation of competing, age-old antagonistic religious identities in the region. This characterization is rooted in a static, one-dimensional understanding of identity, so that being Sunni and Shi‘i, for example, are assumed to be constants etched into the fabric of the past.
The invocation of sectarianism as a category of analysis for understanding the Middle East misleads; it conflates a religious identification with a political one, and it ignores the kinship, class, and national and regional networks within which sectarian self-expression has invariably been enmeshed.
The concern with sectarianism in the modern Arab world thus does not simply indicate a political space that is contested by competing religious, ethnic, or other communities. It also presupposes a shared political space. In this sense, the rhetoric about “sectarianism” as insidious in the Middle East emerged as the alter ego of a putatively unifying nationalist discourse. Much like racism in the contemporary United States, sectarianism is a diagnosis that makes most sense when thought of in relation to its ideological antithesis.
It was only in the early twentieth century in Lebanon that the Arabic term for sectarianism—al-ta’ifiyya—was coined as a negative term in relation to national unity.
Sectarianism can also be thought of as a colonial strategy of governance insofar as Britain, France, Israel, and the United States have routinely manipulated the religious and ethnic diversity of the region to suit their own imperial ends. (Ussama Makdisi, The Mythology of the Sectarian Middle East, an essay published by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, 2017)
- 100 Myths About the Middle East by Fred Halliday, Saqi, London 2005 (ebook version 2013).
- The Middle East in International Relations by Fred Halliday, Cambridge University Press, 2005
- Beyond Islam - A New Understanding of the Middle East by Sami Zubaida, I. B. Tauris, 2011 (ebook version)
- The End of Two Illusions - Islam After the West by Hamid Dabashi, California University Press, 2022 (ebook version)
- Carbon Democracy – Political Power in the Age of Oil by Timothy Mitchell, Verso, 2011 (ebook version)
- Islams and Modernities by Aziz Al-Azmeh, Verso 1993 (2009 e-book edition is used here)
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