Is There An Islamic Problem?

By M. Shahid Alam

It has become fashionable after September 11, 2001, to excoriate Islam – the religion and civilization – as the source of the problems facing the Muslims. The air is thick with theories that identify Islam as the single greatest obstacle to the modernization of Islamicate societies. Oddly, after its success in derailing modernization, that same Islam now fuels the rage over the absence of modernity in Islamic societies.

In a recent essay, Pervez Hoodbhoy, a leading activist in Pakistan, argues that a deadening obscurantism has paralyzed Islamicate civilization since the twelfth century. Muslims can end this sustained paralysis, he writes, only if they decide to replace Islam with secular humanism. Perhaps unknowingly, Hoodbhoy echoes a common Orientalist fallacy, which envisions an early decline in the vitality of Islamicate civilization. It is fitting that we take a closer look at this thesis and see if we can quickly lay it to rest.

There is a touching irony in Hoodbhoy’s thesis – not intended by him, I think. He concludes, a bit pompously, that secular humanism “alone offers the hope of providing everybody on this globe with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Hoodbhoy’s faith is touching. It is also a bit ironic, given that he opens his essay by acknowledging that the United States – as he puts it, the “Grand Exorcist” – is busy pursuing its own “happiness” by “exacting blood revenge” for September 11. In blatant disregard of its founding principles, the Grand Exorcist has for decades – two hundred years, in the Western hemisphere – worked feverishly to deny basic human rights to more than three-fourths of humanity.

No doubt, there are Americans who cringe at policies of their government that undermine freedoms and hope abroad. Sadly, they are too few to have made much difference.

The only imperialist war that an American public has opposed was the Vietnam War, but that was mostly because it was killing American boys. They shed few tears for the two million Vietnamese, including half a million children, killed in their own country by the US war machine.

During an ascendancy that now spans at least two hundred years, the West has contributed little to forging a single humanity that includes all the children of Adam and Eve. For the most part, Western thinkers have pursued their humanist ideals within the paradigms of race and tribe. With few exceptions, the Enlightenment thinkers refused to share their humanity with Africans, Amerindians or Asians. Racism was germane to the thinking of the leading Western humanists, not excluding the great Montesquieu, Hume, Kant and Jefferson. Even as they glorified ‘man,’ they saw little that was wrong in colonialism, slavery, or the massacres of ‘uncivilized tribes,’ ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages.’ Europe’s dream of reason did not lead to sweetness and light for Amerindians, Africans, Asians or the ‘outsiders’ in Europe itself.

A Matter of Timing

I will turn directly to Hoodbhoy’s Orientalist thesis on the decline of Islamicate societies: his rejection of Islam hinges on this theory.

First, he is quite wrong about the timing of this decline. He claims that Islam lost its creative élan in the twelfth century, a result of the twin blows dealt by the ’ulama – the jurisprudents and theologians of Islam – and the Mongols. This suggests that Hoodbhoy has been raised on a rather pure diet of Orientalism and its falsification of Islamicate history.

Hoodbhoy employs graphic imagery in presenting his ideas. Islam was “choked” in the twelfth century by the “vice-like grip of orthodoxy” created by the anti-rationalism of Ghazali, whom he describes, incorrectly, as a “cleric.” He also refers to the “trauma” of the thirteenth century. Presumably, he is referring to the Mongol destruction of Baghdad in 1258.

Bernard Lewis, the dean of the post-war generation of Zionist Orientalists – and, probably, an important source of Hoodbhoy’s inspiration – places the Islamicate decline even earlier. Although “signs of decadence are visible even earlier,” he declares that by the eleventh century “the world of Islam was in a state of manifest decay.” (1) He accomplishes this tour de force – establishing the early decline of the Islamicate world – by equating Islamicate civilization with Arab power.

It is odd that after its “manifest decay,” Islamicate power, barring the reversal in Spain, continued to expand for several more centuries. In the Levant, the Muslims contained the repeated onslaughts of the Crusaders over two centuries, finally expelling them in 1291. The Ottomans expanded into the Balkans, taking Constantinople in 1453, and twice laid siege to Vienna, the second time in 1683. In the West, the Berbers extended Islamicate power beyond the Sahara into subtropical Africa. Perhaps most importantly, once the Turks and Mongols entered Islam, Islamicate power extended deep into Central Asia, up the Volga River, beyond the Tarim Basin, and past the Hindu Kush into the plains of North India. In addition, Arab and Persian traders were seeding Islamicate communities in East Africa, southern India, and the islands of the Indonesian archipelago.

Marshall Hodgson has challenged this Orientalist canard about an early decline of Islamicate civilization in The Venture of Islam (1974), a deep, sweeping and multi-faceted account of the history and civilization of Islamicate societies. He has written that “in its own setting, the age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was one of the greatest in Islamdom’s history. The artistic, philosophic, and social power and creativeness of the age can be symbolized in the spaciousness, purity – and overwhelming magnificence of the Tâj Mahall at Agra. In some sense there was a great florescence.” (2) The Isphahan School of philosophy, founded by Mulla Sadra (d. 1640), is now recognized by Western authorities as a major philosophical movement.

Scientific activity in the Islamicate world did not face sudden death either. George Saliba, a leading historian of Islamicate science, extends the Islamicate golden age to the fifteenth century.(3) Soon after their conquest of much of the central Islamicate lands, the Mongols turned their energies to rebuilding the societies they had destroyed. In fact, several of them took up earnestly the patronage of the arts and sciences, and major observatories were being set up as late as the fifteenth century. The astronomical tables computed at these observatories, together with the work of Ibn-Shatir (d. 1375), a time-keeper in the central mosque of Damascus, were passed on to Europe, and are believed to have contributed to the Copernican Revolution. Western debt to Islamicate sciences – in the fields of mathematics, optics, astronomy and medicine – may turn out to be deeper yet, once historians take up the research into these connections more seriously.

If there was a falling off in the scientific output of Islamicate societies after the eleventh century, this was compensated by growing activity in a variety of other human endeavors, including historiography, poetry, architecture, painting, and, in Iran, philosophy. Given this, it is a bit silly to scapegoat Ghazali for “choking” Islam with his “vice-like grip” of orthodoxy. In fact, Ghazali was a major philosopher in his own right whose philosophical skepticism anticipated Descartes and Kant; but unlike them, he turned to spiritual empiricism to transcend his doubts. Ghazali attacked the heterodox Isma’ilis and the heretical tendencies among Muslims who delved in Greek metaphysics. He was not opposed to logic, mathematics or the sciences.

Rise of Western Europe

If it was not in the eleventh or twelfth centuries, when did the decline of Islamicate societies become manifest? We must look for the beginnings of this process, as well as its source, not so much in Islamicate societies as in Western Europe. It was Western Europe that gathered speed and moved ahead of all other societies, starting in the fifteenth century. In turn, the ascendancy of the West produced decline and decay in nearly all non-Western societies, not only those in the Islamicate world.

Western Europe’s ascendancy began with its lead in two critical areas, gunnery and shipping, starting in the fifteenth century. The West Europeans did not invent gunpowder and cannons; both are Chinese inventions, diffused to Europe and the Middle East by the invading Mongols in the thirteenth century. However, it was the constantly warring Europeans – a result of their more decentralized polity – who led the way in the improvement of gunpowder weaponry; this included lighter cannons and handguns. At the same time, the Western Europeans were building sturdier ships to negotiate the stormy Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. In the fifteenth century, when the Western Europeans mounted their light cannons on their sturdy ships, this combination proved deadly against the galleys of the Mediterranean and the flimsier ships of the generally calm Indian Ocean. Luck also favored Europe. In 1433, the Chinese not only withdrew their maritime presence from the Indian Ocean, they scrapped their fleet of superior ships. This was a fateful measure. If the Chinese had continued their maritime explorations, they would have challenged the European entry into the Indian Ocean. It is even likely that they would be “discovering” Europe, instead of the other way around.

This superiority in gunnery and shipping launched Atlantic Europe, through deepening cycles of cumulative causation, on the path of global ascendancy. Its first dividend was the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, perhaps the greatest resource windfall ever received by any society. This was quickly followed by the European passage into the Indian Ocean, which led to a growing monopoly over the trade of the Indian Ocean, easily the world’s richest trading area. In addition, America’s gold and silver gave an economically backward Europe the means for entering into the trade of the Indian Ocean. In the long run, Europe’s command of the high seas produced vast new sources of wealth through plunder, trade, shipping, banking and overseas investments; and, in turn, the growth of shipping and commerce stimulated manufactures. When some of this new wealth was used to support universities and academies, it produced a growing interest in philosophy, mathematics and the sciences. Directly and indirectly, these advances contributed to Europe’s military technology, which, in turn, expanded their overseas empires and brought still greater profits. By the beginning of the nineteenth century – in India even before that – these developments had come to a head. Europe was ready to start its project of dismantling Islamicate empires and states in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.

Why did the Islamicate – or other Asian and African – polities fail to resist this growing European thrust? The Eurocentric narratives insist that Europe’s ascendancy since the sixteenth century is not new. It was only the denouement, the final playing out on a global scale, of the advantages that Europe has always enjoyed over other civilizations. This superiority is written into Europe’s social genetic code; it shows itself in stronger rationality, individualism, vigor, enterprise, love of freedom and curiosity. In turn, these unalterable individual tendencies derive, since times immemorial, from a superior biological endowment, divine choice, a diverse and more generous topography, or a more invigorating climate. In blaming Ghazali – read Islam – for the decline of Islamicate societies, Hoodbhoy is buying into the Weberian version of this Eurocentric narrative, which identifies Western ascendancy with the greater rationality promoted by Protestantism.

A historical narrative – one that is rooted in cumulative processes, contingencies, conjunctures, contradictions, accidents and unintended consequences – tells a different story. The colonization of the Americas, the growing control over the trade of the Indian Ocean, the mercantilist rivalries and incessant wars among European states – produced by the anarchy of their decentralized political system – accelerated the dynamic of historical change in Europe, allowing it to outpace the more centralized, mostly land-based empires of the Middle East, India and China. In the long run, the Netherlands, Britain, France and the United States slowly built upon their successes in commerce, shipping, the arts of warfare, state-formation and manufactures to develop into centers of capitalist production, which drew their economic strength from an alliance between capital and the state.

Globally, the growth of these centers of capitalist production – the Core of the world economy – produced, simultaneously, their opposite and complement, an underdeveloped Periphery, dominated by capital from the Core and restructured to supply raw materials – in some cases, labor – to the Core countries. In most cases, the incorporation of a country into the Periphery was preceded or accompanied by loss of sovereignty. With the solitary exception of Japan, the leading Core countries converted the non-White countries into outright colonies or forced them to sign open-door treaties, which gave equal or preferential treatment to Core capital. However, most countries of European ethnicity in the Periphery – for reasons of geopolitics and heritage – retained much of their sovereignty. On the whole, these countries exercised various degrees of sovereign control over their economic policies to promote indigenous capital and technology. In the long run, some of them pulled out of the Periphery to join the Core.

Quite a few historians and sociologists attribute the ascendancy of Western Europe to its greater rationality, a legacy thought to derive from its cultivation of Greek philosophy. This is spurious history and false sociology – two unavoidable ingredients of all Eurocentric thought. The truth is quite the opposite of this. The verdict of Ernest Gellner, a philosopher and social anthropologist, deserves to be quoted in full: “By various obvious criteria – universalism, scripturalism, spiritual egalitarianism, the extension of full participation in the sacred community not to one, or some, but to all, and the rational systematization of social life – Islam is, of the three great Western monotheisms, the closest to modernity.”(4) The French sociologist, Maxine Rodinson, arrived at a similar conclusion when he examined the precepts of Islam in relation to the demands of a capitalist system.(5)

In addition, the standard claims about the rationality of modern Europe – even during the Enlightenment – are exaggerated. Several of the leading scientists of the seventeenth century – including Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Pierre Gassendi – admired for their contributions to the development of modern physics and astronomy, held astrology in high esteem. Even Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientist of modern times, devoted nearly two decades of his life to investigations in alchemy. A mere twelve percent of the books in Newton’s library were on physics, astronomy and mathematics. On the contrary, not only were the leading philosopher-scientists of Islamicate societies opposed to astrology, so was Islamic orthodoxy.

Failing to Recoup the Losses

This brings us to the failure of Islamicate societies – a problem not shared by India or China – to mount an adequate recovery from the losses of the colonial epoch.

The European empires established in the nineteenth century did not last very long – as empires go. Their racist, exploitative, and sometimes genocidal policies fuelled vigorous anti-imperialist movements across much of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. In time, the colonial powers got into two major brawls – better known as the two World Wars – accelerating their own demise. The First World War created an opening for the emergence of the world’s first anti-capitalist regime in Russia; the Second World War did the same in China. In addition, the Second World War crystallized a new power structure, dominated by United States and Soviet Union, each opposed for different reasons to the old colonial empires. As the leading capitalist economy, the United States was jealous of the privileged access the colonial powers had to their colonies. The Soviet Union contested the capitalist powers by supporting radical and nationalist movements in the colonies. In other words, conditions were ripe for the dismantling of colonial empires at the end of the Second World War.

The end of colonial era, however, did not herald a bright future for all subject populations. In particular, the Islamicate world that emerged from the colonial era was weak and fragmented. It lacked a core state; the colonial powers had splintered the Arab peoples into some thirty states, some of them little more than collections of oil wells; Britain and the United States had placed the oil-rich states under despotic monarchies; and the Zionists had established a Jewish state in nearly all of Palestine. In contrast, India and China were decidedly better off. The Indians entered the new era with great hopes. Only for the third time in their long history, the ancient Hindus were in charge of a united India, the second largest country in the world that appeared poised to rise to the ranks of a great power. India was in capable hands too; its leaders were committed to democracy and keenly aware of the unique moment in their history. In addition, after nearly two centuries of colonial rule, the Indian economy was mostly in the hands of indigenous capital. China too had emerged single and whole – but for the loss of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao – having fought off a succession of imperialist powers and indigenous centrifugal forces. In 1948, after nearly a century of civil wars and the depredation of Europeans, the Americans and Japanese, the long-suffering Chinese state reconstituted their ancient state under new forms. The imperial house and the mandarins gave way to a communist party forged through decades of struggle against Chinese warlords and foreign imperialists.

The Islamicate world commanded at least three major empires in 1600: the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal. At the time, and for several more decades, the Ottomans alone could stand up to the forces assembled by any combination of the leading European states. Yet none of the post-colonial Islamicate states could aspire to the power that belonged to these empires. Why had Islamicate societies failed to reconstitute their former power in the post-colonial period? It is important to answer this question, since this political failure lies at the root of the present troubles in the Islamicate world. The Orientalists who claim that the turbulence in the Islamicate world is born from a failure of modernity are inverting the order of causation.

As recently as 1750, Islamicate power stretched from Mauritania and the Balkans in the West to Indonesia and Mindanao in East Asia. However, this power lacked an enduring demographic base. In the Balkans and India, the Ottomans and the Mughals ruled over non-Muslim majorities. Once nationalist consciousness gained ground as the principal basis of statehood, the Ottoman Empire lost its legitimacy, challenged first by its Christian population in Europe and later by Arab fellow Muslims who resented domination by the Ottoman Turks. In India, Hindu resentment against their Muslim rulers accelerated the dissolution of the Mughal Empire, and, later, the defeat of Muslim successor states in the face of British competition. Importantly, once these Empires had been dismantled, the Muslims could not reconstitute them in the absence of a Muslim majority.

The Islamicate societies suffered from a second demographic handicap in their struggle against European imperialism. Once the Middle East had lost the momentum of an early start with the agricultural revolution, the population advantage moved to China, India and Europe. Indeed, after the first century of the Common Era, the region even failed to maintain its absolute population. As a result, the population of the region in 1800 was considerably smaller than it was in ancient times or the early Islamicate period. More ominously, the total population of North Africa, Egypt, the Fertile Crescent and Arabia in 1800 was only modestly ahead of the population of France. In other words, these central Islamicate regions lacked both demographic weight and geographic depth – since this population was strung out along the Mediterranean coast and two river valleys – in its vital contest with expansionist European powers. Given this demographic disproportion, some Europeans dreamed of eradicating the Islamic character of North Africa and the Levant with a little help from colonial settlers.

The Islamicate states bordering the Mediterranean faced another handicap: they were only a few days’ sail from Europe. This made them tempting targets for European capital and cupidity, mixed with some of the old Christian zeal for eradicating Islam. France, Britain, the Zionists and Italy took up this project successively. The French proceeded to colonize Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, and quickly introduced white settlers with the aim of annexing these regions into France. The European powers dismantled the Egyptian effort to industrialize – initiated by Muhammad Ali Pasha in 1810 – after they intervened to block his march on Istanbul in 1839. When the Egyptians mobilized again in the 1870s to assert their independence, the British occupied Egypt in 1882. Taking advantage of the First World War, Britain and France occupied the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire and fragmented it into smaller states, with one slice going to the Zionists, as promised in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Britain, France and Israel mounted another invasion of Egypt in 1956, roiled when Gamal Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Luckily, the United States was not too pleased over this European adventure, and the invasion was called off in a hurry.

This capsule history of the Middle East offers some sobering reflections for the Eurocentrists and their Muslim acolytes, who attribute the backwardness of Islamicate societies to their religion and culture: to Islam’s antipathy to science, rationality and modernity. Imagine just one counterfactual. Imagine if the Egyptian bid to industrialize had not been dismantled by imperialist Britain and France. It is then likely that an industrialized Egypt would have become a catalyst for industrial transformation in other Middle Eastern countries. This thought experiment explains why Muhammad Ali’s industrial drive had to be aborted. An industrialized Middle East would have renewed the old threat of Islam to Europe.

On the other hand, the European powers showed little interest in blocking Japan’s industrial drive initiated some sixty years after Egypt’s. Japan succeeded because it was an archipelago tethered off the eastern edge of Asia, half a world away from Western Europe and separated from United States by the vast Pacific Ocean. Of equal importance, Japan’s mix of Shinto and Confucian culture did not set off alarms in the European psyche. Could Japan have pulled off its industrial coup if it had been a Muslim island anchored in the Eastern Mediterranean, or even the Arabian Sea?

The impotence of Arabs in the post-colonial period goes back to three additional factors: Zionism, the old Christian vendetta against Islam, and oil. The Zionist movement was founded on a confluence of Jewish and Western interests in the Middle East. The Zionists proposed to rid Europe of Jews if Europe would help them to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. In succession, Zionist ambitions combined with European Islamophobia to produce the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, the vivisection of the former Ottoman territories in the Fertile Crescent, the creation of a Maronite-dominated mini-state in Lebanon, the British mandate over Palestine, and the creation of a Jewish colonial-settler state in Arab Palestine. Arab aspirations in the Fertile Crescent had been dealt a body blow from which it would be hard to recover. Had the Arabs of this region been free to realize their nationalist aspirations, most likely they would have created a single Arab state that might well have included – because of its religious significance – the Arabian Peninsula as well, or at least the Hejaz and the oil-rich Gulf coast.

In the meanwhile, the United States and Britain were making arrangements in the Persian Gulf to ensure Western control over the richest oil reserves in the world. They decided to place the region under archaic, absolutist monarchies whose survival, against the rising tide of nationalism, would depend on the United States. As part of this plan, when a democratic movement overthrew the Iranian monarchy in 1953, the United States and Britain orchestrated a coup to re-instate the monarchy. In 1967, Israel inflicted a humiliating defeat on Egypt and Syria – leading to the occupation of Sinai, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza – virtually removing the Arab nationalist challenge to Western control over Middle Eastern oil. The Middle East straightjacket was now securely in place.

While appreciating the global forces arrayed against them, it is disconcerting to watch the ease with which the Arabs, the peoples no less than their leaders, have slipped into the straitjacket prepared for them by the Western imperialists. In the final analysis, the historical verdict on the Arab national awakening is clear: it failed. While the leaders of the Arab nationalist movements created a discourse of Arab nationalism – a concept of nationhood founded on language and history – they failed to create a deep consciousness of Arab unity, one that would seek its goal in Arab political unity, in a single Arab statehood. Once the Arab nationalists had gained power over Egypt, Syria and Iraq towards the end of the 1950s, their failure to realize a political unity – apart from a short-lived union between Egypt and Syria – is testimony to the tenuous character of the Arab nationalist project. Not even the successive defeats inflicted by Israel on various combinations of Arab states – in 1948, 1956 and 1967 – could create the impetus for unity, the desire to restore Arab honor, or mobilize to face the massive threat that Israel posed to Arab security. Arab nationalism was mostly talk – rhetoric without substance.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 failed to loosen the Western stranglehold on the Middle East. On the contrary, by raising the specter of Islamist power in the region, this paved the way for an ‘Arab’ war against Iran – with funding from the Gulf Arabs, manpower from Egypt, and the blessings of Western powers – to contain the spread of the Islamist revolution to the Arab countries. In time, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the corrupt Arab regimes formed a grand alliance – under the aegis of the United States and Israel – to control and repress their Islamist movements. In 1993, the Palestine Liberation Organization recognized Israel and agreed to police the Palestinian Islamists in return for municipal control over parts of the West Bank and Gaza. Syria and Libya chose to repress their Islamists without joining this alliance; as a result, the United States placed them in the limbo of ‘rogue states.’ When foolhardy Iraq dared to challenge this alliance in 1990, without the nerve to carry it to completion, it was bombed back to the Stone Age and crippled with comprehensive economic sanctions.

A new imperialism had descended on the Islamicate world in the 1990s. Its rules were clear. The United States would support despots in the Muslim states so long as they came to terms with Israel and kept a tight lid on political Islam. If any country dared to depart from the terms of this contract, it faced economic sanctions – and, if these did not work, war. When Iraq challenged this contract in 1990, it faced both endless war and crippling sanctions that have devastated its economy and caused more than a million deaths. Similarly, Algeria illustrates the fate awaiting a Muslim country if the Islamists seek to capture power – even through the democratic process.

This new imperialist contract explains why the ‘democratization’ of the 1990s bypassed much of the Islamicate world. Professor Hoodbhoy thinks otherwise. Instead of offering a historical analysis, rooted in the dynamics of global capitalism and the legacy of past conflicts between Europe and the Islamicate world, he joins the Orientalists in blaming the difficulties of the Islamicate world on Islam, the religion and civilization. His method is familiar – damnation by accusation; damnation by defining the essence of Islamicate societies. If Islam is obscurantist, anti-rationalist, fanatical, and misogynist, then we can explain the aversion of the Islamicate world towards modernity and democracy. The Orientalist has spoken: the case is closed.

Those who maintain that Islam is anti-democratic might gain from a short lesson in the modern history of constitutional movements in Islamicate countries. Muhammad Ali of Egypt appointed his first advisory council in 1824, consisting mostly of elected members. In 1881, the Egyptian nationalist movement succeeded in convening an elected parliament, but this was aborted only a year later by the British occupation. Tunisia had promulgated a constitution in 1860, setting up a Supreme Council purporting to limit the powers of the monarchy. However, the French suppressed this Council in 1864 when they discovered that it interfered with their ambitions in Tunisia. Turkey elected its first parliament in 1877 though it was dissolved a year later by the Caliph; a second parliament was convened in 1908. Iran’s progress was more dramatic. It started with protests against a British tobacco monopoly in the 1890s, and quickly led to an elected parliament in 1906, with powers to confirm the cabinet. A year later, however, the British and Russians carved up Iran into their spheres of influence, and this led to the dissolution of the parliament in 1910. Nevertheless, the constitutional movement persisted until it was suppressed in 1931 by a new dynasty brought to power by the British.

Compare these developments with the history of constitutional movements elsewhere, not excluding Europe, during the nineteenth century – and the world of Islam does not suffer from the comparison. Incredible as this appears to minds blinded by Eurocentric prejudice, Tunisia, Egypt and Iran were taking the lead in making the transition to constitutional monarchies. The resistance to democracy in the Arab world even today does not come from their population. On the contrary, it comes from neo-colonial surrogates – brutal military dictatorships and absolutist monarchies – imposed by the United States, determined to control the Middle East’s oil and to establish Israeli hegemony over the region.

A US-Imposed Straightjacket

The US-imposed straightjacket has deepened the contradictions of global capitalism in the Islamicate world: a development that is pregnant with consequences that threaten to spin out of control.

During the Cold War, the dominant factions in many Third World countries competed with each other to win the US contract for repressing their radical and populist movements. As long as they did their job, these repressive regimes enjoyed a degree of autonomy in managing their economies. Taking advantage of this autonomy, many Third World countries implemented interventionist policies to develop indigenous capital and technology. A few of them in East Asia, those most favored by the United States, became showcases of capitalist success. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, the United States terminated this Cold War contract. It was replaced by the Washington Consensus, which called upon the countries in the Periphery to open up their economies to Core capital. The World Trade Organization was created to formalize the new arrangements, which were a great deal more comprehensive than the Open Door treaties imposed on nominally independent countries in the nineteenth century. The elites in the Periphery quickly got the message. Soon they were competing to open up their economies for takeover by multinational corporations.

The United States offered two versions of this new colonial contract. Countries in the non-Islamicate Periphery are generally encouraged to compete for the contract through the ballot box. In countries that have strong Islamist movements, this option is not available; their dictators and monarchs are employed to keep the lid on Islamist movements. The excuse for this two-track policy is flimsy. Western commentators argue that the Islamist parties will only use the ballot to abolish democracy once they gain an electoral majority. The real reason is Western nervousness over the Islamist’s twin goals: introducing an Islamic social order, and reversing the fragmentation and marginalization of Islam. Washington has decided that it will oppose and suppress the Islamists at all costs.

The US-Israeli siege of the Islamicate world is unlikely to produce peace on their terms. On the contrary, it has engendered contradictions that will only deepen over time. After the Israeli rout of the Arab armies in 1967, secular Arab nationalism stood discredited: not only had it failed to unite the Arabs to reclaim Palestine, it had lost more Arab lands to Israel. Having depleted their political capital and, therefore, the support of their people, the Arab regimes were now ready for deals with Washington and Tel Aviv. In 1973, with appropriate American inducements, Egypt made a separate peace with Israel. In abdicating its leadership of the Arab world, Egypt wrote the obituary of Arab nationalism. Only the Islamists could now assume the historic task of liberating and uniting the Arab world.

Although humiliated, the Arab regimes remained firmly ensconced in power. In large part, this was a gift of the new colonial contract. The United States encouraged the Arab regimes – with intelligence, technology and loans when needed – to compensate for their loss of legitimacy by tightening their repressive regimes. The turn around from a strident Arab nationalism to capitulation was quick, moving through abdication at Camp David, concessions at Oslo, normalization of ties with Israel, and the embrace of the Washington Consensus. On the domestic front, these regimes intensified the repression of their Islamist opposition. They banned the Islamist parties, removed the Islamists from leading positions in professional associations and trade unions, and eventually the leading Islamists were jailed, executed, or hounded out of the country.

This repression of Islamists has produced two results. Nearly everywhere, the Arab regimes blocked Islamists who wished to work through the institutions of civil society, including political parties, professional associations, the media, courts and charities. This shifted the focus to radical Islamists, those who were willing to engage in violent actions – guerilla war, assassinations, and terror – to gain their ends. However, even the radicals had little leeway under the repressive Arab regimes. Those who evaded capture or execution, went underground, or escaped to Afghanistan, Pakistan, or the Western countries. At some point, some radical Islamists decided to change their strategy. They would target their problems at their source – and inflict damage on the United States. They decided to sting the United States into lifting its siege of Islamicate countries. Alternatively, they hoped to spark wars – like the one in Afghanistan – on the chance that this would spark rebellions against Islamicate surrogates of the United States.

There are powerful economic forces that affect this dynamic. I will mention one: the brain drain that has accelerated with the growing mobility of skilled workers. The range of deleterious economic and social effects produced by brain drain has received little attention from social scientists. Perhaps, the most talented members of the work force now migrate to developed countries. This results not only in the loss of a country’s best doctors, engineers and scientists: that we are aware of. In addition, brain dross depletes a country of its leaders, activists, scholars, poets, and its conscience. Over the past two decades, this has greatly weakened the progressive forces in nearly all the countries of the Periphery.

Almost as damaging, the brain drain leaves a second layer of alienation in its wake. Those who succeed in leaving are only a fraction of those who want to leave and who, therefore, order their lives around the chance of leaving. As a result, the college graduates who stay at home – because they cannot yet leave – remain disconnected from their own societies. This has had a deadening effect on mechanisms for social change, deepening the vicious circle of poverty, social apathy, and corruption.

All of this has slowly produced a coarsening of the Islamist discourse in some Islamicate countries. The brain drain has contributed to a growing lumpenization of the Islamist opposition. As more people from the middle classes exercise the exit option, the intellectual and political leadership of the Islamist movements has passed into the hands of persons who have little chance of taking the exit option. Increasingly, the Islamist leaders originate from members of the marginalized classes – including traders, shopkeepers, clerks, and self-employed workers – who are barred from the exit option by their education in the vernaculars or religious schools. These Islamists are busy creating a militant Jihadi culture in Pakistan, Algeria, Indonesia, and Afghanistan.

Giving Up ‘False Notions’?

Pervez Hoodbhoy counsels Muslims to give up the ‘false notions’ of Islam. On the contrary, Muslims alienated from their roots need to renounce false Orientalist narratives – of an Islam that has been misrepresented as irrational, misogynist, fatalist and fanatical.

Rational thinking did not begin with the Enlightenment. In fact, several Enlightenment thinkers turned to Islam to advance their own struggle against medieval obscurantism, the intolerance of an organized clergy, and the anti-rationalism of their own mystery religion. According to Bernard Lewis, “The image of Mohammed as a wise, tolerant, unmystical and undogmatic ruler became widespread in the period of the Enlightenment.”(6) It is time for alienated Muslim intellectuals to tear the Orientalist veil that obscures their vision of Islam, re-enter the historical currents they have abandoned, create a deeper understanding of the dynamics of derailed Islamicate societies, and lead them into an Islamic vision of a world where all communities, ethnic and religious, race against each other “in doing good works.”(7) After more than eighty years of Kemalism, a military clique still calls the shots in secular Turkey, wages war against a fifth of its own population, trembles at the sight of women in scarves, and grovels to gain entry into the margins of European society. Do we want to litter the Islamicate landscape with yet more half-baked Turkeys?

The West too must give up its false notions of Islam as the irreconcilable ‘Other’, the fundamental peril that must forever be opposed, fought against, bottled up, and besieged. If the Islamicate world appears to be a greater threat to the West than India or China, that is because the actions of Britain, France and the United States, now and in the past, as well as the forces of history, geography and demography, have succeeded in fragmenting it and, so far, prevented it from reconstituting its center, its wholeness and history. Nearly a fourth of the world’s peoples seek their identity and dignity, their place in this world and the next, within a stream of history that flows from the Qur’an. They want to live by ethical ideals that have produced the austere nobility of the Prophet’s companions, an egalitarianism that elevated slaves to kingship, the juristic insights of Al Shafi’i and Abu Hanifa, the sacred insights of Ibn al-Arabi and Rumi, the rationalism of Ibn Rushd and Ibn Tufail, the mathematics of Al-Khawarizmi and Khayyam, the scientific achievements of Ibn Sina and Al-Haytham, the sociological studies of Ibn Khaldun and Al-Biruni, the majesty of Al-Hambra and the Taj, the observatories of Samarqand and Maragha, the tolerance of Salahuddin and Akbar, and the poetry of Rumi, Hafiz, Ghalib and Iqbal. The Islamicate world can do so again if only the West will lift the siege – and allow the light, freshness and sweetness of the Qur’an to find expression again, not in combat, but in a new Arabesque of creative minds and soulful hearts, intertwined with reason and mercy.

M. Shahid Alam is Professor of Economics at Northeastern University. © M. Shahid Alam