[pnews-news] Islam's Imperial Dreams

     -----
    / o o \
====OO=====OO===
 http://pnews.org/
Progressive News & Views (since 1982)
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||


--


Islam's Imperial Dreams
Muslim political ambitions aren't a reaction to Western encroachments.

BY EFRAIM KARSH
Tuesday, April 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

When satirical depictions of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper 
sparked a worldwide wave of Muslim violence early this year, observers 
naturally focused on the wanton destruction of Western embassies, 
businesses, and other institutions. Less attention was paid to the words 
that often accompanied the riots--words with ominous historical echoes. 
"Hurry up and apologize to our nation, because if you do not, you will 
regret it," declared Khaled Mash'al, the leader of Hamas, fresh from the 
Islamist group's sweeping victory in the Palestinian elections:

     This is because our nation is progressing and is victorious. . . . By 
Allah, you will be defeated. . . . Tomorrow, our nation will sit on the 
throne of the world. This is not a figment of the imagination but a fact. 
Tomorrow we will lead the world, Allah willing. Apologize today, before 
remorse will do you no good.

Among Islamic radicals, such gloating about the prowess and imminent 
triumph of their "nation" is as commonplace as recitals of the long and 
bitter catalog of grievances related to the loss of historical Muslim 
dominion. Osama bin Laden has repeatedly alluded to the collapse of 
Ottoman power at the end of World War I and, with it, the abolition of the 
Ottoman caliphate. "What America is tasting now," he declared in the 
immediate wake of 9/11, "is only a copy of what we have tasted. Our 
Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years, of 
humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its 
sanctities desecrated." Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's top deputy, has 
pointed still farther into the past, lamenting "the tragedy of 
al-Andalus"--that is, the end of Islamic rule in Spain in 1492.

These historical claims are in turn frequently dismissed by Westerners as 
delusional, a species of mere self-aggrandizement or propaganda. But the 
Islamists are perfectly serious, and know what they are doing. Their 
rhetoric has a millennial warrant, both in doctrine and in fact, and taps 
into a deep undercurrent that has characterized the political culture of 
Islam from the beginning. Though tempered and qualified in different 
places and at different times, the Islamic longing for unfettered 
suzerainty has never disappeared, and has resurfaced in our own day with a 
vengeance. It goes by the name of empire.

"I was ordered to fight all men until they say, 'There is no god but 
Allah.' " With these farewell words, the prophet Muhammad summed up the 
international vision of the faith he brought to the world. As a universal 
religion, Islam envisages a global political order in which all humankind 
will live under Muslim rule as either believers or subject communities. In 
order to achieve this goal, it is incumbent on all free, male, adult 
Muslims to carry out an uncompromising "struggle in the path of Allah," or 
jihad. As the 14th-century historian and philosopher Abdel Rahman ibn 
Khaldun wrote, "In the Muslim community, the jihad is a religious duty 
because of the universalism of the Islamic mission and the obligation [to 
convert] everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force."

As a historical matter, the birth of Islam was inextricably linked with 
empire. Unlike Christianity and the Christian kingdoms that once existed 
under or alongside it, Islam has never distinguished between temporal and 
religious powers, which were combined in the person of Muhammad. Having 
fled from his hometown of Mecca to Medina in 622 c.e. to become a 
political and military leader rather than a private preacher, Muhammad 
spent the last ten years of his life fighting to unify Arabia under his 
rule. Indeed, he devised the concept of jihad shortly after his migration 
to Medina as a means of enticing his local followers to raid Meccan 
caravans. Had it not been for his sudden death, he probably would have 
expanded his reign well beyond the peninsula.

The Qur'anic revelations during Muhammad's Medina years abound with verses 
extolling the virtues of jihad, as do the countless sayings and traditions 
(hadith) attributed to the prophet. Those who participate in this holy 
pursuit are to be generously rewarded, both in this life and in the 
afterworld, where they will reside in shaded and ever-green gardens, 
indulged by pure women. Accordingly, those killed while waging jihad 
should not be mourned: "Allah has bought from the believers their soul and 
their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the path of 
Allah; they kill and are killed. . . . So rejoice in the bargain you have 
made with Him; that is the mighty triumph."

But the doctrine's appeal was not just otherworldly. By forbidding 
fighting and raiding within the community of believers (the umma), 
Muhammad had deprived the Arabian tribes of a traditional source of 
livelihood. For a time, the prophet could rely on booty from non-Muslims 
as a substitute for the lost war spoils, which is why he never went out of 
his way to convert all of the tribes seeking a place in his Pax Islamica. 
Yet given his belief in the supremacy of Islam and his relentless 
commitment to its widest possible dissemination, he could hardly deny 
conversion to those wishing to undertake it. Once the whole of Arabia had 
become Muslim, a new source of wealth and an alternative outlet would have 
to be found for the aggressive energies of the Arabian tribes, and it was, 
in the Fertile Crescent and the Levant.

Within twelve years of Muhammad's death, a Middle Eastern empire, 
stretching from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to northern Syria, had come 
into being under the banner of Islam. By the early 8th century, the 
Muslims had hugely extended their grip to Central Asia and much of the 
Indian subcontinent, had laid siege to the Byzantine capital of 
Constantinople, and had overrun North Africa and Spain. Had they not been 
contained in 732 at the famous battle of Poitiers in west central France, 
they might well have swept deep into northern Europe.

Though sectarianism and civil war divided the Muslim world in the 
generations after Muhammad, the basic dynamic of Islam remained 
expansionist. The short-lived Umayyad dynasty (661-750) gave way to the 
ostensibly more pious Abbasid caliphs, whose readiness to accept non-Arabs 
solidified Islam's hold on its far-flung possessions. From their imperial 
capital of Baghdad, the Abbasids ruled, with waning authority, until the 
Mongol invasion of 1258. The most powerful of their successors would 
emerge in Anatolia, among the Ottoman Turks who invaded Europe in the 
mid-14th century and would conquer Constantinople in 1453, destroying the 
Byzantine empire and laying claim to virtually all of the Balkan peninsula 
and the eastern Mediterranean.

Like their Arab predecessors, the Ottomans were energetic empire-builders 
in the name of jihad. By the early 16th century, they had conquered Syria 
and Egypt from the Mamluks, the formidable slave soldiers who had 
contained the Mongols and destroyed the Crusader kingdoms. Under Sultan 
Suleiman the Magnificent, they soon turned northward. By the middle of the 
17th century they seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe, only to be 
turned back in fierce fighting at the gates of Vienna in 1683--on 
September 11, of all dates. Though already on the defensive by the early 
18th century, the Ottoman empire--the proverbial "sick man of 
Europe"--would endure another 200 years. Its demise at the hands of the 
victorious European powers of World War I, to say nothing of the work of 
Mustafa Kemal Atatrk, the father of modern Turkish nationalism, finally 
brought an end both to the Ottoman caliphate itself and to Islam's 
centuries-long imperial reach.

To Islamic historians, the chronicles of Muslim empire represent a model 
of shining religious zeal and selfless exertion in the cause of Allah. 
Many Western historians, for their part, have been inclined to marvel at 
the perceived sophistication and tolerance of Islamic rule, praising the 
caliphs' cultivation of the arts and sciences and their apparent 
willingness to accommodate ethnic and religious minorities. There is some 
truth in both views, but neither captures the deeper and often more 
callous impulses at work in the expanding umma set in motion by Muhammad. 
For successive generations of Islamic rulers, imperial dominion was 
dictated not by universalistic religious principles but by their prophet's 
vision of conquest and his summons to fight and subjugate unbelievers.

That the worldly aims of Islam might conflict with its moral and spiritual 
demands was evident from the start of the caliphate. Though the Umayyad 
monarchs portrayed their constant wars of expansion as "jihad in the path 
of Allah," this was largely a faade, concealing an increasingly secular 
and absolutist rule. Lax in their attitude toward Islamic practices and 
mores, they were said to have set aside special days for drinking 
alcohol--specifically forbidden by the prophet--and showed little 
inhibition about appearing nude before their boon companions and female 
singers.

The coup staged by the Abbasids in 747-49 was intended to restore Islam's 
true ways and undo the godless practices of their predecessors; but they 
too, like the Umayyads, were first and foremost imperial monarchs. For the 
Abbasids, Islam was a means to consolidating their jurisdiction and 
enjoying the fruits of conquest. They complied with the stipulations of 
the nascent religious law (shari'a) only to the extent that it served 
their needs, and indulged in the same vices--wine, singing girls, and 
sexual license--that had ruined the reputation of the Umayyads.

Of particular importance to the Abbasids was material splendor. On the 
occasion of his nephew's coronation as the first Abbasid caliph, Dawud ibn 
Ali had proclaimed, "We did not rebel in order to grow rich in silver and 
in gold." Yet it was precisely the ever-increasing pomp of the royal court 
that would underpin Abbasid prestige. The gem-studded dishes of the 
caliph's table, the gilded curtains of the palace, the golden tree and 
ruby-eyed golden elephant that adorned the royal courtyard were a few of 
the opulent possessions that bore witness to this extravagance.

The riches of the empire, moreover, were concentrated in the hands of the 
few at the expense of the many. While the caliph might bestow thousands of 
dirhams on a favorite poet for reciting a few lines, ordinary laborers in 
Baghdad carried home a dirham or two a month. As for the empire's more 
distant subjects, the caliphs showed little interest in their conversion 
to the faith, preferring instead to colonize their lands and expropriate 
their wealth and labor. Not until the third Islamic century did the bulk 
of these populations embrace the religion of their imperial masters, and 
this was a process emanating from below--an effort by non-Arabs to escape 
paying tribute and to remove social barriers to their advancement. To make 
matters worse, the metropolis plundered the resources of the provinces, a 
practice inaugurated at the time of Muhammad and reaching its apogee under 
the Abbasids. Combined with the government's weakening control of the 
periphery, this shameless exploitation triggered numerous rebellions 
throughout the empire.

Tension between the center and the periphery was, indeed, to become the 
hallmark of Islam's imperial experience. Even in its early days, under the 
Umayyads, the empire was hopelessly overextended, largely because of 
inadequate means of communication and control. Under the Abbasids, a 
growing number of provinces fell under the sway of local dynasties. With 
no effective metropolis, the empire was reduced to an agglomeration of 
entities united only by the overarching factors of language and religion. 
Though the Ottomans temporarily reversed the trend, their own imperial 
ambitions were likewise eventually thwarted by internal fragmentation.

In the long history of Islamic empire, the wide gap between delusions of 
grandeur and the centrifugal forces of localism would be bridged time and 
again by force of arms, making violence a key element of Islamic political 
culture. No sooner had Muhammad died than his successor, Abu Bakr, had to 
suppress a widespread revolt among the Arabian tribes. Twenty-three years 
later, the head of the umma, the caliph Uthman ibn Affan, was murdered by 
disgruntled rebels; his successor, Ali ibn Abi Talib, was confronted for 
most of his reign with armed insurrections, most notably by the governor 
of Syria, Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufian, who went on to establish the Umayyad 
dynasty after Ali's assassination. Mu'awiya's successors managed to hang 
on to power mainly by relying on physical force, and were consumed for 
most of their reign with preventing or quelling revolts in the diverse 
corners of their empire. The same was true for the Abbasids during the 
long centuries of their sovereignty.

Western academics often hold up the Ottoman empire as an exception to this 
earlier pattern. In fact the caliphate did deal relatively gently with its 
vast non-Muslim subject populations--provided that they acquiesced in 
their legal and institutional inferiority in the Islamic order of things. 
When these groups dared to question their subordinate status, however, let 
alone attempt to break free from the Ottoman yoke, they were viciously put 
down. In the century or so between Napoleon's conquests in the Middle East 
and World War I, the Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in 
response to the nationalist aspirations of their European subjects. The 
Greek war of independence of the 1820's, the Danubian uprisings of 1848 
and the attendant Crimean war, the Balkan explosion of the 1870's, the 
Greco-Ottoman war of 1897--all were painful reminders of the costs of 
resisting Islamic imperial rule.

Nor was such violence confined to Ottoman Europe. Turkey's Afro-Asiatic 
provinces, though far less infected with the nationalist virus, were also 
scenes of mayhem and destruction. The Ottoman army or its surrogates 
brought force to bear against Wahhabi uprisings in Mesopotamia and the 
Levant in the early 19th century, against civil strife in Lebanon in the 
1840's (culminating in the 1860 massacres in Mount Lebanon and Damascus), 
and against a string of Kurdish rebellions. In response to the national 
awakening of the Armenians in the 1890's, Constantinople killed tens of 
thousands--a taste of the horrors that lay ahead for the Armenians during 
World War I.

The legacy of this imperial experience is not difficult to discern in 
today's Islamic world. Physical force has remained the main if not the 
sole instrument of political discourse in the Middle East. Throughout the 
region, absolute leaders still supersede political institutions, and 
citizenship is largely synonymous with submission; power is often 
concentrated in the hands of small, oppressive minorities; religious, 
ethnic, and tribal conflicts abound; and the overriding preoccupation of 
sovereigns is with their own survival.

At the domestic level, these circumstances have resulted in the world's 
most illiberal polities. Political dissent is dealt with by repression, 
and ethnic and religious differences are settled by internecine strife and 
murder. One need only mention, among many instances, Syria's massacre of 
20,000 of its Muslim activists in the early 1980's, or the brutal 
treatment of Iraq's Shiite and Kurdish communities until the 2003 war, or 
the genocidal campaign now being conducted in Darfur by the government of 
Sudan and its allied militias. As for foreign policy in the Middle East, 
it too has been pursued by means of crude force, ranging from terrorism 
and subversion to outright aggression, with examples too numerous and 
familiar to cite.

Reinforcing these habits is the fact that, to this day, Islam has retained 
its imperial ambitions. The last great Muslim empire may have been 
destroyed and the caliphate left vacant, but the dream of regional and 
world domination has remained very much alive. Even the ostensibly secular 
doctrine of pan-Arabism has been effectively Islamic in its ethos, 
worldview, and imperialist vision. In the words of Nuri Said, longtime 
prime minister of Iraq and a prominent early champion of this doctrine: 
"Although Arabs are naturally attached to their native land, their 
nationalism is not confined by boundaries. It is an aspiration to restore 
the great tolerant civilization of the early caliphate."

That this "great tolerant civilization" reached well beyond today's Middle 
East is not lost on those who hope for its restoration. Like the leaders 
of al Qaeda, many Muslims and Arabs unabashedly pine for the reconquest of 
Spain and consider their 1492 expulsion from the country a grave 
historical injustice waiting to be undone. Indeed, as immigration and 
higher rates of childbirth have greatly increased the number of Muslims 
within Europe itself over the past several decades, countries that were 
never ruled by the caliphate have become targets of Muslim imperial 
ambition. Since the late 1980's, Islamists have looked upon the growing 
population of French Muslims as proof that France, too, has become a part 
of the House of Islam. In Britain, even the more moderate elements of the 
Muslim community are candid in setting out their aims. As the late Zaki 
Badawi, a doyen of interfaith dialogue in the UK, put it, "Islam is a 
universal religion. It aims to bring its message to all corners of the 
earth. It hopes that one day the whole of humanity will be one Muslim 
community."

Whether in its militant or its more benign version, this world-conquering 
agenda continues to meet with condescension and denial on the part of many 
educated Westerners. To intellectuals, foreign-policy experts, and 
politicians alike, "empire" and "imperialism" are categories that apply 
exclusively to the European powers and, more recently, to the United 
States. In this view of things, Muslims, whether in the Middle East or 
elsewhere, are merely objects--the long-suffering victims of the 
aggressive encroachments of others. Lacking an internal, autonomous 
dynamic of its own, their history is rather a function of their unhappy 
interaction with the West, whose obligation it is to make amends. This 
perspective dominated the widespread explanation of the 9/11 attacks as 
only a response to America's (allegedly) arrogant and self-serving foreign 
policy, particularly with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

As we have seen, however, Islamic history has been anything but reactive.