Islam

...It is this misunderstanding of the deeper cultural upheavals in Arab society that pushes otherwise enlightened and tolerant Western observers to turn intolerant when confronted with its outward symbols within their own secular societies...

...Nor should they overlook the paradoxical fact that if one looks for European parallels for the Iranian revolution, the nearest example would be the Puritan revolution—a radical attempt at a literalist interpretation of a Holy Book, a reaction against the corrupting influence of luxury and rampant consumerism (in both cases epitomized by a frenchified court), sumptuary laws, restrictive dress codes (especially for women), extreme intolerance toward dissenters from the politically institutionalized divine truth, and so on, and so on...

...But wouldn't a Zionist recognize some—obviously not all—of these phenomena as a mirror image, albeit distorted, of some of the motives of the Zionist quest for self-identity...

...It is the detritus of Western civilization—which exists, of course, also in the West, but is accompanied there and at least partially compensated for by the sweet charms of bourgeois and post-bourgeois society—that drives so many people in the Arab world to mosques, to prayer classes, to the Quran, looking for "roots," "authenticity," "self-hood...

...Yes, they are building mosques—just as Russians are rebuilding cathedrals and churches...

...In a deracinated society, where Western ideas appear not in the form of excerpts from the Federalist Papers but are made flesh in the form of jeans, jazz, drugs, a confusing sexual revolution—Islam becomes the only substitute for the emancipatory ideas imported from the West that have so hopelessly failed...

...A French intellectual who objects to the wearing of headcovering Muslim dress by female students in French state schools may evoke the principles of laicite, which also prohibits the wearing of a cross in school...

...These failures have been compounded by the even more humiliating failure in the most important and overarching project of secular Arab nationalism— the confrontation with Israel and its destruction...

...Safeguarding French republican schools from symbols of an ultramontane Catholicism, which is the nominal religion of the majority of the population, is a different proposition from respecting the religious self-identity of a minority...

...When such intolerance toward the Muslim minority in France from lalque 412 • DISSENT Politics Abroad intellectuals is accompanied by statements to the effect that Muslim immigration to France challenges the outcome of the battle of Poitiers, one wonders who really is engaging in cultural warfare...

...The tragedy of the Arab world has been that over the last decades Arab societies have tried every variety of Western political ideology—monarchical constitutionalism, republicanism, varieties of Marxism and socialism, whiffs of fascism, "Third World" radicalism—and all have failed to heal Arab societies...

...All the world powers have entered unto a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: the pope and the president of Russia, Helmut Kohl and Françors Mitterand, French radicals and German police agents, and of course the CIA and right-wing Israeli politicians...

...Like many prodigal sons and daughters of his generation, he was shocked into re-adoption of Palestinian identity after 1967: Theodore Herzl would obviously understand his quest and sympathize with it...

...The rights and wrongs of the U.S...

...Whether the model was Paris or London, the Third Reich or the Kremlin, it was always a Western paradigm...

...Islam, as a culture that encompasses much more than religion, is a rich repository of norms, traditions, social and political institutions: most of them are unpalatable to a Western, secular mind, and the sentimental, "anti-orientalist" idealization of Islam, now sometimes fashionable in the West, is rubbish...

...q FALL • 1993 • 413...

...Another dialectical outcome of the U.S...

...This, of course, also explains the grudging admiration Saddam Hussein evoked even among so many Arab intellectuals who, for political and prudential reasons, opposed his occupation of FALL • 1993 • 411 Politics Abroad Kuwait...

...But the analogy is a misleading...

...And in Iraq the Jewish immigration to Israel in the 1950s decimated the Iraqi Communist party (one of the reasons why the right-wing government of Nun Said allowed the exodus in the first place...

...Beyond semantic quibbles ("fundamentalism" is a deeply Christian term, and has no meaning, or even equivalent, within the Islamic tradition), the phenomenon of Islamic revival is obviously gathering force...

...True, most of their citizens, in most of the republics, are nominally Muslims...

...instead of secular republics, the Syrian turmoil of the 1950s, culminating in the ascendancy of the Syrian Ba'ath and Assad...

...True, the Central Asian former Soviet republics are now trying, under stress and with great pain, to establish themselves after decades of Soviet oppression, and in the process they are also attempting to reconstruct their identity...

...It certainly does not sit well with a secular left-wing Israeli intellectual to express such empathy for the return to Islam...

...And the spectacle of Arab countries rich in history and tradition, like Egypt and Syria, having to queue up, hat in hand, to get the crumbs off the tables of disgustingly rich desert sheikhs only exacerbated the feeling of humiliation and frustration...

...Wasn't it the case that the Ottoman Empire, once the scourge of Christendom, had degenerated into "the sick man of Europe," losing by stages much of its territorial conquests to Russia, Austria, and resurgent European national movements— the Greeks, the Serbs, the Bulgarians, the Rumanians...

...Imagine the reaction of New York intellectuals if they found their universities, publishing houses, theaters, and banks physically controlled by rural conservatives from deepest Mississippi...

...Zionism is basically secular, though drawing on a religious tradition...

...true, after seventy-five years of Soviet rule, they are trying to regain their Islamic heritage—just as Russians and Ukrainians are doing with regard to their respective Christian traditions (and former Soviet Jews too...

...Zionism is not, in any way, coeval with what is now called Islamic fundamentalism...

...But just as Meir Kahane and Gush Emunim (and each of these is very different from the other) are not identical with Zionism or its "essence," though they are obviously part of the historical Zionist phenomenon, so the Islamic return is highly differentiated...

...The point I am trying to make here is that the principle of the return to Islam cannot be totally subsumed under some of its least appealing expressions—like the re-imposition of the veil or the terrorist proclivities of some Islamicist groups...

...The underlying assumption has always been that Islam—as a culture and not only a religious creed—was primitive, underdeveloped, retrograde, at best stuck in the memory hole of a medieval splendor out of which it could not disentangle itself without a radical transformation...

...the return to Islam is an exclusively religious phenomenon...

...Oil, mostly but not exclusively found under the sand of traditional, sparsely populated dynastic kingdoms and emirates, only marginally mitigated some of the hardships of modernity...

...But the Whig interpretation of history is a highly biased and one-sided Victorian construct and has little to do with "really existing" Calvinist Puritanism as it manifested itself in Calvin's own Geneva, Knox's Scotland, Cromwell's England, and witch-hunting New England...

...But what is indisputable is that American intervention, using the most extreme "fundamentalist" groups to destabilize the Soviet-supported regime, brought about the present internal instability in Afghanistan that threatens the whole region, especially along the sensitive Tadjik border...

...The copying of school systems and military academies, the introduction of newspapers, philosophical tracts, and political institutions, the whole project of "modernizing," "Westernizing" and "secularizing" the Levant: all these were aimed at (re-)creating the Orient in the image of the Occident...

...When PLO intellectuals maintain that their movement is "the Zionism of the Palestine people" they pay, unbeknownst to themselves, the ultimate compliment to this emulation of the West: isn't Zionism to them an alien, Western importation...

...The reasons for this return to Islams are not, of course, identical with the project itself, and many facets of this project are obviously obnoxious...

...If Tadjikistan, the only former Soviet republic in danger of going fundamentalist, is helped along that path by its ethnic cousins within feuding Afghanistan, liberally endowed with Western-supplied arms, somebody at Langley should get a medal...

...Edward Said, himself coming from a family that converted to Anglicanism in the late nineteenth century and who, like other members of the Arab Jerusalem elite, attended St...

...But Western intellectuals and statesmen should not mount a new crusade against Islam...

...Arab nationalism itself in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was premised upon the adoption of Western institutions, attitudes, fashions, and modes of thinking and behavior: liberal constitutionalism or Marxist socialism, the theory of the nation-state or semi-fascist Ba'athist ruminations...

...George's Cathedral School in Jerusalem, is a poignant and tragic example of this alienation...

...instead of Arab socialism, windbags and paper tigers like Nasser or bloody dictators like Saddam Hussein...

...This is obvious and unjust stereotyping, but the emirs of Kuwait live up to the stereotypes...

...In the 1940s, the Egyptian communist party was made up almost exclusively of either Copts or Jews, both usually graduates of English or French schools, to which their bourgeois parents sent them to imbibe Western culture—which, dialectically, they did by absorbing the Western critique of Western society...

...Paradoxically, some of the Islamic activists are frustrated communists or communisants—the phenomenon can be seen among the Palestinian intelligentsia as well as in non-Arab Iran (and not all of it is, in the Iranian case, pure accommodationism to the Islamic regime's repression: after all, in Teheran it was the shah, and not John Stuart Mill, who personified Western ideas...

...Didn't the Ottoman Empire, by introducing the reforming Tanzimat, acknowledge the superiority of Western values and technologies over its own decrepit structures...

...And should one look under every bed for Muslim fundamentalists the way some people (sometimes the same people) used to look for communists in the good old bad days of the evil empire...

...And that in many cases it was Christian Arabs, and in some cases also Jews, who were in the forefront of this adoption of Western models, only accentuates the internal problematics of these developments...

...This analysis has to be widened to include developments in postcommunist Central Asia, where the bogey of a resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism is raised by a new type of cold warrior...

...Terrorism inspired by Islamic fanatics should be fought tooth and nail—and this is what the security services of the Western and Middle Eastern countries are and should be doing, by means not always pleasant...

...That all but one of these nations are Turkic speaking (only Tadjikistan is Farsi) also helps the Turkish option—but then why should Western experts and pundits on "Islamic fundamentalism" (sometimes former experts on "Communist aggression") know such trifling details...

...In the course of this attempt to emulate Western ideas, Arab society became atomized, cut off from its own tradition and mores, confused and deracinated...

...Instead of enlightened monarchs, the Arab world got King Farouk...

...In Egypt, for example, it is these "Afghani" who are the hard core of the Islamic terrorism that poses a serious threat to President Hosni Mubarak's regime...

...But, per contra, it is simplistic, Western cultural imperialism—be it liberal or Marxist —to think that the West, with its own internal, modern and postmodern problems, can give adequate answers to Islamic societies...

...wearing the "right" dress is, for a Muslim woman, part of her self-identity as a "pure," "uncontaminated," "righteous" woman: without it she may feel, literally, naked...

...and this could only be based on Western, "rational," "progressive" values...

...support for the Mujaheddin at a time when America saw Iran as a major strategic danger in the Middle East must be left to a separate discussion (which will, of course, be complicated by the fact that the Afghan war did contribute toward the weakening of the Soviet Union...

...taxpayers' money somewhere along the PakistaniAfghan border...

...Didn't the semi-independent Egyptian Khedivate, from Muhammad Ali onward, continually seek Western support, culminating in the digging of the Suez Canal...

...Looking at this development in retrospect, it is obvious that the debacle it bequeathed to Arab society has left deep scars and feelings of alienation and frustration—especially, of course, among the Arab intelligentsia that has been its torchbearer...

...Even in the Palestinian movement, the most radical and Marxist elements are predominantly Christian Arabs, more specifically members of the Greek Orthodox Arab community which has for complex historical reasons played a unique role in this radicalization of Arab thinking...

...But is it a danger to world stability and Western civilization...

...To understand both the phenomenon and its possible ramifications for world politics, some historical perspective on the tribulations of Islam in the modern world is necessary...

...support for the Mujaheddin is that many of the volunteers recruited by the CIA in the Arab Middle East to fight in Afghanistan have now returned to their own countries and become the spearhead of the most violent Islamic groupings...

...One does not have to adopt such a view in order to understand it and feel obligated, on libertarian grounds, to respect it...

...but just as not every return to Russian Orthodoxy leads necessarily to Pamiat and rabid anti-Semitism (though the danger is there), so not every assertion of Muslim identity in Alma Ata, Ashkabad, or Bishkek means adopting Iran as a model...

...A cross in an adornment, merely accentuating a person's belief...

...Murderers like Radovan Karadzic may be trying to win friends and influence people by explaining that their genocide against Bosnian Muslims is nothing but the defense of European Christendom against the hordes of barbaric Islam...

...Much of this criticism of Islam, despite its obvious and simplistic Eurocentrism, was true: didn't the Muslim Arab world, once the apogee of 410 • DISSENT Politics Abroad civilization, truly lag behind the West and its achievements...

...Wrong enemy, wrong-headed thinking...

...but the idea of a Return, from the wasteland of a Western exile, is not totally alien to anyone who understands the deep roots of Zionism...

...Both their Islamic fanaticism and their familiarity with deadly explosive devices have been acquired with U.S...

...That Western scholars, missionaries, and archaeologists were accompanied, ever since Napoleon's time, by either the political or the military might of Western powers or the threat thereof gave the cultural encounter a subtext of domination and subordination...

...The demise of communism has given the final death blow to the currency of Western ideas in the Arab world: it appears now that Arab society has tried every Western remedy and has failed dismally...

...But why should a self-respecting intellectual, especially if imbued with Western ideas of justice, equality, and democracy, have any particular sympathy for the rich, profligate emirs of Kuwait...

...Two centuries of hubris ought to have disproved the proposition that all the Islamic East needs is an injection of Western Christian or post-Christian values and institutions...

...As a matter of fact, the Turkish example is seen as a much more relevant model by these new nations and their leaders—Muslim but secular and moderate— than the ayatollahs from Teheran...

...Ex Occiendente lux...

...No doubt, Puritanism in its later manifestation, after the defeat of its republican excesses, eventually contributed to the emergence of modern democracy...

...Western ideas and structures, coupled with industrialization, urbanization, the emergence of a "middle class" and—last but not least—the acquisition of Western military technology and training were the means by which the Arab Muslim world would "catch up" with the West: always a linear project, in which the Arabs had to look to the West as their model...

...French intellectuals should know better...

...Western observers, and especially people on the left, should not fall into the trap of an abstract and blanket demonization of Islam...

...Even if one does not follow the highly exaggerated and willful distortions of Edward Said's "orientalist" argument, there is no doubt that the encounter between the West and the mainly Muslim Arab world has had the far-reaching consequence of undermining the self-assurance of Arab Muslim culture...

...It is in the context of this dismal failure of all Western models, from liberalism to Marxism, that the return to Islam has to be understood...

...The paradox is that Central Asia has indeed experienced the emergence of a murderous Islamic fundamentalist state, where various Islamic sects are now slaughtering each other and threatening to spread their internecine killings into neighboring countries—but we have the perspicacity of American policies and the fine-tuning expertise of the CIA to thank for it: Afghanistan...