Historical Perspectives on 11 September
By Professor Francis Robinson, Vice Chancellor, Royal Holloway University of London
On the Islamic Background to the events
of 11 September
On the 12th September 1683 the Ottoman armies besieging Vienna were ordered to retreat. This was the last great invasion of the European heartland from the Muslim world. Two hundred and forty years later, once the peace treaties which followed World War One were signed, almost the whole of the Muslim world was either under European rule or under European influence. It is unlikely that there is any connection between timing of the order of the Ottoman retreat and the air assaults of 11 September 200l, although some British journalists have tried to make it. But the near coincidence of dates does draw our attention to an important, though by no means the only strand, amongst the causes which lies behind the events of 11 September. It is the vast change that has taken place in the power relationships between Muslim peoples and the West over the past two hundred years.
Let us consider this vast change. For a thousand years, for much of the
period from the eighth to the eighteenth century, the leading civilisation on
the planet in terms of spread and creativity was Islam.
It was formed in the seventh century when Arab tribesmen, bearing the
prophecy of Muhammad, or so the traditional story goes, burst out of the Arabian
peninsula. Within a decade they
defeated the armies of two rival empires to the north, those of Christian
Byzantium and Sasanian Iran. A
great new cultural and economic nexus came to be
developed which was able to draw on the knowledge and commodities of
lands from China and India in the East to Spain and Africa in the West, as well
as those of the West Asian lands in which it was based.
This new civilisation commanded a substantial slice of the world’s area
of cities and settled agriculture. In
this region there was shared language of religion and the law.
Men could travel and do business within a shared framework of
assumptions. In its high cultures
they could express themselves in symbols to which all could respond. Arguably it is the first world system, the one which preceded
that of Immanuel Wallerstein. The
first notable centres were found in the Arab worlds of Damascus, Baghdad,
Cordoba and Cairo from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, the second in the
Turco-Iranian worlds of Istanbul, Isfahan, Bukhara, Samarqand and Delhi from the
fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. There
were great achievements in scholarship and in science, in poetry and in prose,
and in the arts of the book, of building and of spiritual insight, which are
precious legacies to all humankind. For
about half of what is termed the Christian era Muslims could regard themselves
as marching at the forefront of human progress. Over the same period, the odd crusade or loss of Spain aside,
they could regard the community of believers created by God’s revelation to
man through the Prophet Muhammad as walking hand in hand with power.
Over the past two hundred years the Islamic world system has been
overwhelmed by forces from the West, forces driven by capitalism, powered by
Industrial Revolution and civilised, after a fashion, by the Enlightenment.
The symbolic moment, when the leader’s standard overtly passed to the
West, was Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.
From this moment Western armies and Western capital overran the lands of
the Muslims: the British took India, the British and Dutch SE Asia, the British,
French, Germans and Italians, North, East and West Africa, the Russians swamped
Central Asia, the British and French carved up West Asia between them.
By the 1920s Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Central Arabia and the Yemen were
the only Muslim countries free from Western control, and even some of these were
subject to influence. The caliphate, the symbolic leadership for the community
of believers, which reached back to the Prophet, had been abolished.
For a moment it was feared that the holy places of Islam, Mecca and
Medina, might fall into the hands of the infidel.
The community of believers, which for so many centuries had walked hand
in hand with power, had good reason to believe that history (if not God) had
deserted it.
For the remainder of the twentieth century matters did not seem a great
deal better. Certainly, from the
emergence of modern Turkey in the early 1920s to that of the Muslim republics of
the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, we could talk of a steady decolonisation
of the Muslim world - at least in the formal sense.
But for many this has seemed a pyrrhic victory.
More often that not they have found Western rule replaced by that of
Muslims with secular Western values, while Western capital and Western culture
have come to be even more corrosive of their customs and their standards than
before. This challenge has elicited from many Muslims the assertion of an
Islamic, and for some a totalitarian Islamic, future for their people.
Such views have not been not been shared by all Muslims but have come to
be shared by enough of them to represent a significant threat to the secular
leaders of their societies, and on occasion, as in the revolution in Iran, to
drive their upholders to power. These
Muslims, who are popularly known as fundamentalist in the West, are more
appropriately known as Islamists. I
shall talk more about these Islamists when I address the significance of the
Islamic revival. But for the moment
it is enough to note that they represent the major opposition to the leadership
of Muslim states, many of which have relations of greater or less strength with
the USA, among them Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey, Egypt,
Jordan, Kuwait, and also of course, the Palestinian Authority.
In this situation, lack of fairness or evenhandedness on the part of
non-Muslim states is an irritant which helps to radicalise Muslim populations
not just in the states concerned but also across the Muslim world.
I refer, of course, to the problems of Muslim minorities in the Balkans,
to the resistance of the people of Chechnya to Russian military might, to the
sense of threat experienced by Indian Muslims as they were first demonised by
Hindu revivalism and then, in 1992, saw the emperor Babur’s Mosque torn down
by Hindu revivalists, to the sense of oppression of the Muslim majority in
Kashmir as they are held down by India’s martial rule, to the sufferings of
the peoples of Iraq on account of the rogue regime under which they endure, but
most of all I refer to the injustices experienced by the Muslim and Christian
peoples of Palestine these past fifty years and more. These are all complicated
issues. But, from the point of view of many Muslims in the streets
and bazars of Muslim towns and cities across the world, they represent symbols
of injustice and oppression. They
represent a world order in which Muslims are victims. They represent a world order in which Muslims must organise
to resist.
There are three developments, which accompanied the transformation of the
Muslim position in the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that
command attention. They form strands in the longterm background to the events of
11 September. The first is a range
of feelings ranging from a tremendous sense of loss of something very special
through to a deep bitterness and rage at the powerlessness of Muslim people in
the face of the West. The sense of
loss was particularly strongly felt in the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, now the
home of over 350 million Muslims. It
was strongly felt in part because of the speed with which the Mughal empire lost
power in the eighteenth century, in part because of the new competition for
power this brought with rival peoples, and in large part because this was the
area of the Muslim world most heavily exposed to rule from the West.
This sense of loss was expressed in the most powerful artistic form of
the culture - poetry.
This sense of loss was expressed first in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century poetic genre of Shahr Ashob, the mourning of the passing of great
cities, of great centres of Muslim civilisation.
It reached its peak in one of the greatest works of the nineteenth
century, the Musaddas or Elegy of Altaf Husain Hali entitled `The Flow and Ebb
of Islam’. This was a great
set-piece poem on the rise and decline of Islam and its causes. It was highly popular and came to be used almost as a
national anthem for the Pakistan movement.
It would be recited as the opening of political meetings and have
enveryone in tears as they contemplated the fate of Islamic civilisation. Listen
to this excerpt and I think you will see what I mean:
When autumn has set in over the garden,
Why speak of the springtime of flowers?
When shadows of adversity hang over the present,
Why harp on the pomp and glory of the past?
Yes, these are things to forget; but how can you with
The dawn forget the scene of the night before?
The assembly has just dispersed;
The smoke is still rising from the burnt candle;
The footprints on the sands of India still say;
A graceful caravan has passed this way.
Of course there was admiration for the achievement of Europe, even if of
a despairing kind. Listen to the
secretary of the Moroccan envoy to France in 1846 after watching a review of
French troops: `so it went on until all had passed leaving our hearts consumed
with fire for what we had seen of their overwhelming power and mastery ... In
comparison with the weakness of Islam ... how confident they are, how impressive
their state of readiness, how competent they are in matters of state, how firm
their laws, how capable in war.’ But as Western power enveloped the Muslim
world more and more, and constrained it more and more, there was a growing sense
of protest against the West. Listen
to Sir Muhammad Iqbal, a man who intellectually owed much to the West, accepted
a knighthood from the British, and was the poet philosopher behind the concept
of Pakistan - a Muslim modernist, in no way radical. In his Persian
Psalms. Published in 1927 he declared:
Against Europe I protest,
And the attraction of the West.
Woe for Europe and her charm,
Swift to capture and disarm!
Europe’s hordes with flame and fire
Desolate the world entire:
Architect of Sanctuaries,
Earth awaits rebuilding, rise!
Out of leaden sleep,
Out of slumber deep
Arise!
Out of slumber deep
Arise!
This
theme of the rejection of Europe, or by now the West in general, both as a
destructive force and a false model of progress was a theme of many of the
leading ideologues who prepared the way for the Iranian revolution.
`Come friends’, said Ali Shariati in the 1960s, `let us abandon Europe;
let us cease this nauseating apish imitation of Europe.
Let us leave behind this Europe that always speaks of humanity, but
destroys human beings wherever it finds them.’
But, by this time, as the USA replaced Europe in the Islamic world, it
became the focus of bitterness and resentment, a bitterness and resentment that
was all the greater because it enveloped and constrained the lives of supposedly
free peoples. Ayatollah Khomeini’s howl of range, when in 1964 the Iranian
Parliament granted US citizens extraterritorial rights in Iran in exchange for a
$200m loan, spoke for all muslims who had felt powerless in the face of a
bullying West from the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 to the brutal treatment
of the Palestinians in the present: `they have reduced the Iranian people to a
level lower than that of an American dog’.
The feelings of the Afghan schoolteacher who spoke to a British
journalist at the beginning of October have deep roots:
America is a tyranny ... and it is a religious duty to fight it; though
killing
innocents is unIslamic and wrong, it is perfectly understandable that
people
angry at America’s interference in the world, and oppression of Muslims
everywhere, should commit attacks like those in New York and Washington,
and rejoice in them.
The second development is that of an increasingly active pan-Islamic
consciousness in the Muslim world since 1800. I would argue that Muslims tend to
care about the fate of fellow Muslims to a much greater extent than Christians
care about fellow Christians. Yes, the Americans care hugely about the fate of
Americans, the British about the British, but not much I reckon about the
Christian peoples of say Africa or Indonesia.
There are reasons for this pan-Islamic sentiment which derive from Islam
itself. Muslims believe that
their’s is a community, an ummah,
created by God by his revelation to man through Muhammad.
Moreover, that revelation tells them that they are the very best
community raised up for mankind. They
know that it is an especial blessing to belong to this community.
The brotherhood of all those who belong to the community is a strong
concept, which is celebrated at many points from the salam in communal prayer
through to the shared experience of the pilgrimage to Mecca in a state of total
equality before God. You should know that a concern to cherish and sustain the
community, against all forms of divisiveness, is the underlying spirit of the shari’a,
the holy law. The classical
traditions of biography moreover, were always designed to show the role of
individuals, first in sustaining and enriching the community in their time and
second in transmitting that precious knowledge to subsequent generations, to
subsequent manifestations of the community.
There is a special magic in the community.
To express this I turn again to Muhammad Iqbal, writing at a time when
the community was threatened by the growth of nationalism.
In his Secrets of Selflessness,
published in 1918 he declared:
Our essence is not bound to any place;
The vigour of our wine is not contained
In any bowl; Chinese and Indian
Alike the shard that constitutes our jar,
Turkish and Syrian alike the clay
Forming our body; neither is our heart
Of India, or Syria, or Rum,
Nor any fatherland do we profess
Except Islam.
But
twentieth-century realities were destroying this charismatic community;
Now brotherhood has been so cut to shreds
That in the stead of community
The country has been given pride of place
In men’s allegiance and constructive work;
The country is the darling of their hearts
And wide humanity is whittled down
Into dismembered tribes...
Iqbal, however, need not have been quite so concerned. The community was
being re-created in a very special way in the age of the modern nation state,
using basic religious building blocks. One pillar has been the great increase in
the numbers of those performing the pilgrimage to Mecca in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Growing wealth and the great improvements in transport by
land, sea and air have greatly increased the numbers of pilgrims performing this
community-affirming ritual - they rose, for instance, from under one million in
the 1920s to over ten million in the 1970s.
But most important has been the growth of global news and communications
systems, from the massification of the press in the mid-nineteenth century to
the development of global radio and television in the second half of the
twentieth. Just listen to what
happened in British India as West Asia, from the 1870s came under the European
cosh. When Russia and the Ottoman
Empire went to war in the late 1870s, the press boomed.
When the British invaded Egypt in 1882, it boomed again.
When the Ottoman empire entered its terminal stage from 1911 to 1924, the
press boomed as never before. Such
was the fervour and excitement that many Muslims came to live a significant part
of their imaginative lives in thoughts about the wider Islamic world.
Muslims adopted headware and other forms of dress to indicate their
identification with West Asia; for the same purpose they stopped naming their
children with names from regional languages in favour of classical Islamic ones.
Their writings betrayed an absorption with Muslims of other countries.
During the second half of the twentieth century this process has
intensified, with an especial focus on Iran, Iraq and Palestine. Some of the
crowds that have protested against allied action in Afghanistan will have been
organised, but large numbers will have protested willingly out of fellow feeling
for their Muslim brothers. Unfortunately,
in the bazars of Muslims towns and cities throughout the world pictures of Osama
bin Laden will now be placed beside, or even replace, those of Ayatollah
Khomeini.
What this strong sense of community, of Islamic brotherhood, means is
that, although there are many differences and distinctions amongst Muslims,
there is a level at which they will come together, and especially when
confronted by bullying, interference or invasion from outside.
Read the local press in the Muslim world, talk to people on buses and
trains, in bazars and villages, as I have done, and you discover the truth of
this. Of course, power players in
the Muslim world have from time to time tried to hijack this sentiment for their
own purposes, as the Ottoman Empire did with its pan-Islamic policies in the
late nineteenth century, as Saudi Arabia has tried to do through their Islamic
Conference Organisation and the World Muslim League from the 1960s, and as Osama
bin Laden has been doing in recent weeks, harnessing global communications
technology to his cause with no little skill.
The third development, and in many ways the most important, has been the
worldwide movement of Islamic revivalism, which from the eighteenth century has
been expressed in many different ways through differing social, economic,
cultural and political circumstances. It
is important to recognise that this movement has profound Islamic roots and
precedes the assertion of Western power in the Muslim world.
Of course, from the nineteenth century onwards the movement interacts
powerfully with the Western presence and is in varying ways shaped by it. All
the Islamic organisations you have been hearing about in recent weeks have their
roots in this revival and this reaction. This
said, the fundamental concern of this extraordinary movement of revival has been
the renewal of Islamic society from within and not assault on forces without,
and internal struggle or jihad, not an external one.
At the heart of this Muslim revival lay a return to first principles.
In the massive spread of Islam from West Africa to China and Southeast
Asia too many concessions had been made to local religious practice, which
compromised the profound monotheism of God’s message to humankind through
Muhammad. It was necessary to go back to first principles, to abandon much of
the medieval superstructure of learning and concentrate on the Quran and the
traditions of the Prophet, to try to recreate, as they often said, the
perfection of the Prophet’s community in the oasis of Medina.
Side by side with this was a massive attack on all ideas of intercession
at saints’ shrines for man with God. This
is of the first importance. From
the late eighteenth century, there steadily spread to many parts of the Muslim
world the idea that man alone was responsible for his salvation, indeed that he
must act on earth to achieve it. This,
as is the case with the Protestant Reformation in Christianity, has released
vast amounts of energy. It
represents a shift in emphasis in the forms of Muslim piety from an
other-worldly to a this-worldly Islam.
I will draw your attention to three manifestations of this worldwide
movement of revival which link directly to the present.
The first is the Wahhabi movement of Arabia. This was the creation of an eighteenth century scholar
Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who preached a return to the Quran and the
traditions and the removal of all religious practices suggesting intercession.
His preaching is the locus classicus of the Islamic revival and the name
Wahhabi is given to similar forms of Islamic purism down to the present.
The message of this scholar, however, would not have got very far had he
not teamed up in 1744 with a petty chieftain of Central Arabia, Muhammad ibn
Saud. His message and Saud’s
ambitions proved an explosive mixture. They
underlay the creation of the first Saudi empire which was brought down by the
armies of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt in 1818. They
underlay the creation of the second Saudi empire, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
which emerged in the 1920s. This
Saudi state grew to become the corporate venture of the Saudi family, dependent
on the legitimisation of Wahhabi ulama, that we know today. There has developed
a constant and increasingly abrasive tension between the family and state
interests of the Saudi family and the concerns of the Wahhabi ulama to promote
their Islamic understanding and to assert their authority.
This situation has been exacerbated both by the Western life-style and
corruption of many members of the royal family and by the state’s close
association with the USA. The
presence of large numbers of Westerners in Saudi Arabia since the Gulf War of
1990 has made matters much worse. All
this you must place in the context of a growing Saudi middle class who have no
representation, and a growing population without jobs - as the median age in
Saudi Arabia is 19.7, the situation will get worse - and an annual per capita
income which has fallen from $28,000 in the early 1980s to $7000 today.
It can be no surprise that the Saudi regime could not afford to permit
the US to use the Prince Sultan airbase in the current campaign. It should be no
surprise that the Saudis should have tried to chalk up Islamic brownie points by
supporting Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist organisation, or the Jama’at-i
Islami of Pakistan, the Islamic Salvation Front of Algeria or the Muslim
Brotherhood of Egypt. It should be
no surprise, too, that nearly half of the high-jackers of 11 September were of
Saudi origin, and that one of the stated objectives of Osama bin Laden, that
Saudi citzen banished from his country, should be the overthrow of the current
Saudi regime.
The second manifestation of the Islamic revival, linking directly to the
present, to which I would like to draw to your attention, is the emergence of
what has been termed reformist Islam in South Asia in the nineteenth century.
This is a movement whose ideas and organisation can be linked directly through
time to the Taleban. At the heart
of South Asia’s reformist Islam was the Deoband madrasa, founded in 1867, and
termed by some the most important traditional Muslim university in the world
after Egypt’s al-Azhar. Deobandis
were tackling the problem of how to sustain an Islamic society under British
rule, of how to sustain Islam in the relatively novel situation in which they
did not have, and would not wish to have, state support. One answer, as in Arabia, was a great attack on the idea of
intercession, while giving the horrors of the Day of Judgement new emphasis.
The individual human conscience in search of salvation was to be the
driving force sustaining a Muslim society.
These individual human consciences, moreover, had to be equipped with
knowledge of how to behave as a Muslim. There
was a great process of translation of the Quran and other key texts into Indian
languages. The printing press was
harnessed seriously for the first time in the Muslim world, and with enormous
vigour, to make these texts as widely available as possible.
Schools were set up on the Deoband model; by 1967 there were said to be
over 8,000 worldwide. All were
supported by private subscripiton. This
movement has come to be seen as a form of Islamic Protestantism in which
Muslims, without power, willed their Muslim community for themselves.
This was a self=sufficient form of Islam which could operate outside the
colonial state, indeed, outside any state at all.
The reformist muslims, the Deobandis, in large part opposed the creation
of Pakistan;they did not need a Muslim state to create their Islamic world.
Once it was created, they carried forward their message both in Pakistan,
and in Afghanistan, where they had long-established madrasas.
By the 1980s and 1990s hundreds of Deobandi madrasas had been established
in Pakistan. From at
least the 1970s they were assisted from the outside by funds, in particular from
the Persian Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, and also by funds remitted by
Pakistanis working in the Gulf. The process was assisted, too, by the Islamising
goverment of General Zia ul-Haq and by a Sunni Muslim urban elite concerned to
consolidate its hold over the many Pakistanis who were moving from the
countryside to the towns. Given
their long term connections with Afghanistan, it was natural after the Soviet
invasion of 1979 that the Deobandi madrasas should perform a major role in
assisting the large numbers of refugees who fled to Pakistan.
Thus began the militarisation of the madrasas as the Afghans, but also
Pakistanis and Arabs, fought their jihad against the Russians.
It was but a short step from this, once the Russians had been defeated,
for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency to use the students from
these madrasas, the Taliban, to create a favourable regime in Afghanistan, and
give Pakistan the strategic depth to the NorthWest that it had long sought.
The Taliban were armed and trained, and in 1994 they invaded Afghanistan;
by 1997 Pakistan recognised the Taliban as the rulers of Afghanistan.
The irony is that the Taliban, the heirs of a revivalist movement
designed specifically to exist without state power, should be the very first
group of Sunni Muslim ulama to achieve total and unfettered control of a state -
or a least the shattered remains of what was the Afghan state.
Today, Pakistan is forced to assist, in part at least, in the destruction
of the monster it helped to create. It is not a role which it will be easy for
the Jamiat ul-Ulama-i Islam (the Deobandi Party in Pakistan’s politics) and
their sympathisers to forgive. Given
Pakistan’s traditions, I would be surprised if this did not lead to the
assassination of General Musharraf, and perhaps the replacement of the regime by
one with a more powerful Islamic focus.
The third aspect of the great Islamic movement of revival and reform
which reaches into the present is the ideology and organisation of Islamism.
Islamists are very much a twentieth century phenomenon.
They find the solutions of the reformers to the challenges of the West
and modernity unsatisfactory because, by and large, they ignored modernity and
dodged the issue of power. The
responses of Muslim modernists, many of whom led nationalist movements, were no
less satisfactory. Certainly they understood the issue of power, but in engaging
with the West there were deemed to be willing to sacrifice too much that was
essential to Islam and Muslim culture. Islamists
saw the real danger as Western civilisation itself. Their real enemies were the secular or modernist elites in
Muslim societies who collaborated with Western political, economic and cultural
forces, and enabled Western influence to flourish in their societies. Their
prime aim was to take power themselves so that their societies could be sealed
off from these corrupting influences. They
would then be able to introduce their`Islamic system’ in which the Quran and
the shari’a were sufficient for all
human purposes. This was a
system to match capitalism or socialism; it envisaged the Islamisation of
economics, knowledge and so on ... it was an ideology.
The founders of the Islamist trajectory in Islamic revivalism were
Maulana Maududi of India and Pakistan (1903-1979), whose organisation was the
Jama’at-i Islami, and Hasan al-Banna of Egypt, assassinated in 1949, who
founded the Muslim Brotherhood. From
the 1970s Islamist organisations had spread widely in the Muslim world.
Among the more notable organisations were the Islamic Salvation Front of
Algeria and Hamas of Palestine, to which we have already referred, and the Rifa
Party of Turkey. Amongst their
notable successes were the dramatic assassination in 1981 of Anwar Sadat,
President of Egypt, the steady Islamisation of the Pakistani constitution and
law, and, of course, the Iranian Revolution.
It is important that you understand that Islamism is in its way a
profoundly `modern’ movement, concerned to chart out an Islamically-based path
of progress for Muslim societies. While
concerned to resist the West, its leaders have been influenced by Western
knowledge, Sayyid Qutb who took over the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood
from Hasan al-Banna was much influenced by the French fascist thinker, Alexis
Carrell, and a visit to the USA. Ali Shariati,
ideologue of the Iranian revolution, was much influenced by Sartre, Fanon and
Louis Massignon. Erbakan, the leading Turkish Islamist politician was an
engineer. Bazargan and Bani-Sadr,
early leaders of the Iranian revolution were an engineer and an economist.
The followers of Islamist movements are the displaced.
More often than not they are those who have moved from countyside to
city, and who look for medical, educational and psychological support, often in
areas where the state is failing. Anthropological
studies have shown that Islamism and its organisations often provide the means
by which both men and women can come to participate in the modern economy and
state.
Classically, the prime concern of Islamist groups has always been to
affect change in their own societies, to seize power if possible.
The one exception to this rule has been a concern from the beginning with
the fate of Palestine. However, we
are told that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network contains members of former
Islamist groups and is in contact with Islamist groups throughout the world.
This network, moreover, seems to have been that which from the early
1990s has consistently waged war on US targets in West Asia and the US itself.
We need to know why this change has taken place. Is there, for instance, a new
strand of Islamism which sees the struggle for power in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia
and Egypt as one which can only be won by assaults on the USA? Or are we dealing
with the personal vendetta of an evil genius brilliantly able to make the anger
and hunger for justice of the Islamic world serve his purpose.
Where does this leave us? I
end by offering you five reflections. First,
injustice and oppression are the classic legitimisers of Islamic struggle or
jihad. There is, of course, much
injustice and oppression in the Muslim world, some of it being the work of
outside forces, but some of it being the oppression of Muslim on Muslim.
Ask any Muslim, and he or she would
run of a list of areas of injustice not dissimilar to the those I pointed
to earlier: the Philippines, Chechnya, Kashmir, Iraq, Algeria, and of course
Palestine. Now, I fear, they would add Afghanistan.
It is not going to be enough to eliminate al-Qaeda and the other elements
of terrorist organisation. Attention
must be paid to the sources of terror, the arenas of injustice, which help to
breed terrorists and the justification for their actions. The West, in
confronting the rest of the world, whether it be in the fields of
politics,economics or the environment, needs to place justice, equity and fair
dealing much closer to the foreground of its policy.
Secondly, it is, I hope you will agree, an interesting thought that the
US in its relations to the Arab world is placed in a position very close to that
in which Britain had itself in the mid-twentieth century. Britain was allied
with Arab elites thoughout West Asia, but she was also regarded as bearing a
large share of the responsibility for the creation of Israel and the subsequent
injustices to the Palestinian Arabs. This
undermined Arab elites, and had its part to play in the rapid reduction of
British influence in the 1950s. Now
the US is seen as the prime supporter of Israel, and its Arab allies suffer
accordingly.
Thirdly a fascinating development of recent years has been the steady
emergence of Iran as a semi-democratic country and potential major source of
stability in West Asia. Indeed, I
shall stick my neck out and suggest that it will be seen in the not too distant
future as an increasingly important ally and beacon of commonsense in the
region. We might reflect on why
this development has taken place. The
Iranian Revolution, after which Iran charted its own destiny, has given Iran a
sense of self-confidence such as few Muslim states possess. `What has your revolution achieved, what has it given the
Iranian people who are suffering from the ravages of war?’ a journalist asked
an Iranian leader in 1989 as ten years of the revolution were celebrated. He
replied: `We have given the Iranian people a sense of self-respect and dignity.
Now Iranians in Tehran, not in Washington or London, make decisions about the
destiny of Iran.’
Fourthly, we need to be aware, as this address has striven to indicate,
that every day for which the war is prolonged, every day that the West is seen
by many Muslims to be bullying their coreligionists, increases the likelihood of
friendly regimes in the Muslim world being overthrown. It breeds more hatred of
the West amongst Muslims; it creates fertile ground on which more terrorist
organisations can develop and on which more terrorist action against Western
targets can be justified. You should know that Usama Bin Laden is a hero to many
young Muslims. To help counter this threat the new sensitivity of President Bush
and Prime Minister Blair to the issue of Palestine will have to be sincere.
Moreover, Prime Minister Blair’s rhetoric on the need to adopt a new foreign
policy of addressing the issues of injustice in the world will have to be
followed with effective action.
[Fourthly we need to be aware, as this address has striven to indicate,
that every day for which the war is prolonged, every day that bombs are dropped
and collateral damage is taken, increases the likelihood of friendly regimes in
the Muslim world being overthrown.Don’t imagine for one moment that Muslims
will be taken in by President Bush’ sudden new sensitivity to Palestinian
concerns, welcome though it is.]
Finally, I want to make one thing absolutely clear.
I have discussed, amongst other things, the hatred of the West which some
Muslims have displayed, the power of the Muslim sense of community, and the
relationship between the Muslim revival and some aspects and agents of the
current crisis. But this does not
mean that I in any way subscribe to Huntington’s thesis of the Clash of Civilisations. As
you will recall, he argues that in the post-Cold War era, the crucial
distinctions between people are not primarily ideological or economic, but
cultural. World politics is now being reconfigured along cultural lines.
As that process takes place, the Muslim world is emerging with deep fault
lines between it and the West. It
has `bloody borders’ and represents the greatest danger to world peace. But,
the protest against the West to which I have referred is not against the West
intrinsically, but against its power in Muslim societies, the changes it brings
about, and the damage it has done to Muslim self-esteem.
The emphasis on the idea of community of believers is not for the vast
majority of Muslims one which should be hermetically sealed against the West, it
is a dimension of Muslim religious thought which permits a host of other
relationships. While it is
enormously important to remember that the Islamic revival has almost entirely
been directed inwards at the reform of Muslim society; it is a movement of
renewal and of self purification.
Through history the Christian and Islamic civilisations have constantly
rubbed together, constantly played a part in shaping each other.
The roots of Islamic civilisation lie in the monotheistic and Hellenistic
traditions of the Eastern Roman Empire. Indeed, its universalism is directly
derived from the political and religious universalism of Constantine’s
Byzantine empire. Medieval Europe was hugely enriched by the Arab-Muslim
knowledge which was passed to it
through Italy and Spain. Down to the nineteenth century Europeans measured
themselves in various ways against the world of Islam. During the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, as we have seen, the Muslim world came to be shaped by
Europe. And now, of course, Muslims play their part in shaping the West both as
communities within, as well as from without. These two worlds, Christian and
Muslim, have shared much, and have much to share. It is crucial that during this
period when the West is in the ascendant that we show respect, and enable
Muslims to gain a self-esteem which has been lost. I quote again the reply of
that Iranian leader in 1989: `We have given the Iranian people a sense of
self-respect and dignity. Now Iranians in Tehran, not in Washington or London,
make decisions about the destiny of Iran.
Francis
Robinson (Royal Holloway, University of London, 5 December 2001)
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