Events of the past few weeks have provided plenty of new evidence for those who believe in a headlong clash between the Muslim and western worlds-from academic analysts of confrontation in the west such as Samuel Huntington, to the Islamic fundamentalist advocates of such a confrontation in the east. Following the firing of US missiles against targets in Sudan and Afghanistan on 20th August, Bill Clinton was at pains to say that this was not the start of a war with the Islamic world; but Madeleine Albright talked in starker terms. "This is going to be a long-term battle against terrorists who have declared war on the US," she said. For many in the Muslim world, the target was the Muslim world-not alleged bomb-making sites about which there was dubious evidence.
Other conflicts are also coming to a head. The dispute between Iraq and the UN-or rather, between Iraq and two members of the Security Council, the US and Britain-shows no sign of abating as sympathy for Iraq grows in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Playing on Arab reluctance to support further strikes against Iraq, Saddam is hoping to face down the Security Council and break the embargo on oil exports. Washington and London have decided that a military confrontation will not work. The Arab-Israeli peace process, the most sensitive pan-Islamic issue of all, is stalled, possibly moribund: even an Israeli agreement to withdraw from a further 13 per cent of the occupied territories will do little to address-and may, by lessening pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even hinder-a final settlement.
Washington has repeatedly threatened to exert pressure on Netanyahu but has spectacularly failed to do so. The reason is obvious: Congressional backing for Israel. The irony is that although the US Senate recently approved (in the Iraq Liberation Act of 5th October) $120m to support the removal of Saddam Hussein, it is acting as his best ally by blocking an effective and just implementation of the Oslo accords. The best way to reduce support for Iraq in the Arab and Muslim worlds would be to support the establishment of a Palestinian state and thus deprive Saddam of his strongest argument against the west.
Things are not much better elsewhere. The western defence of a Muslim state, Bosnia, against its non-Muslim opponents, the Serbs and the Croats, now appears to be blocked: the election of a hardline president, Nikola Poplasen, in the Serbian sector of Bosnia has all but frozen implementation of the Dayton accords. In Kosovo, the west has dithered as Milosevic has murdered and purged his way to victory over his Muslim Albanian opponents: even an intervention now would not resolve the issue or restrain the Kosovars.
And conflicts in which the west is seen to be supporting regimes against their Muslim opponents smoulder on. In Algeria, the military regime appears determined to crush its Islamist opponents, with western indulgence. In Egypt and Turkey, secularist military regimes backed by the west continue to deny political rights to their opponents. In Pakistan, there is a growing economic crisis brought on by the decision to explode nuclear devices in response to India's bomb-but much of it is blamed on the US. In Indonesia, the replacement of General Suharto by BJ Habibie has done little to assuage popular anger at a regime riven by corruption and patronised for over three decades by the west.
You do not have to believe in common Islamic politics, or a shared international organisation of the kind which used to be associated with international communism, to identify a discursive community in which Muslims in different countries identify the west, in whole or in part, as their enemy. Within this community, and with local variations, there are at least eight recurring themes: past-and present-western domination and intervention (Iran, for example, was invaded twice in this century by Britain and Russia); partition of Muslim states (the safe haven in Iraq is a recent example, western concern for East Timor and southern Sudan being others); indifference to the sufferings of Muslims (in Palestine, Bosnia, Eritrea, Kashmir, Xinjiang); cultural corruption, for which many use the Koranic term fisad; support for Israel; support for dictatorial regimes; double standards in the application of human rights policies, sanctions and UN Security Council condemnations; diffusion of anti-Muslim stereotypes in the west.
It sounds like an impressive list of denunciations-and it is. Yet it is only part of the picture. Many of the issues on which Muslims denounce the west, expressed as they may be in Islamic terminology, are not specifically Muslim at all. The sense of anger at western colonial and post-colonial domination is widespread in China, India, Africa and Latin America. Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers may have talked of istikbar-i jahani ("world arrogance") but this is just another word for imperialism. The condemnation of western human rights policies as instrumental and hypocritical is heard as much in China as it is in the middle east. Nor is everything that presents itself as Muslim to be taken at face value: Saddam Hussein issues postage stamps with his own head next to that of Saladin, the defender of Muslim Jerusalem against the Crusaders; but despite the Islamic rhetoric, Hussein's regime is thoroughly secular and crushed the religious establishment. Whatever else the Revolutionary Command Council of the Ba'ath party may be entitled to do, it is not qualified to issue calls for jihad. For their part, the elites of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are well supplied with whisky.
uncoordinated Islam
The impression of a coordinated conflict between the Muslim world and the west misses the point that, despite the existence of common sentiments and political links, the Muslim world is made of a large number of very diverse states (the Islamic Conference Organisation has 54 members). They may share a common stance on Palestine or Bosnia, but that is about all. Interests of state, ethnic rivalries and confessional differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims all play an important part. Indeed, amid the clamour about an Islamic-western conflict, in the past few weeks we have seen the development of alarming confrontations between Muslim countries.
Iran and Afghanistan have come near to war after the Taliban government in Afghanistan killed nearly a dozen Iranian diplomats and journalists. There is also a long-running rivalry within Afghanistan between the militantly Sunni Taliban and the 15-20 per cent of the population who are Shiites, as well as a growing sense in Iran that the Taliban are instruments of a Pakistani expansion into Central Asia. Iran reacted as a nationalist state: marshalling troops along the frontier. Its spiritual leader spoke in terms redolent of the French revolution's grande nation, referring to the need to defend the interests of millat-i bozorg-i iran, "the great nation of Iran." The Afghans, towards whom most Iranians retain feelings of superiority, were, he said, juhul, a Koranic term which literally means "ignorant," but which carries the implication of being un-Islamic.
Since the revolution of 1979 Iran has talked of Islamic solidarity and has supported militant groups in other states. Yet in each country where it has done so-Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan-it has encountered opposition. Its own foreign policy shows a flexibility which defies any religious community: in the conflict between Shiite Muslim Azerbaijan and Orthodox Christian Armenia, Iran has provided financial and diplomatic assistance to the Armenians; in its long smouldering conflict with Pakistan, now brought to the fore over Afghanistan, Iran has always maintained cordial relations with India; its relationship with Beijing has always overridden support for any secessionist movements in Xinjiang.
In other respects, too, the appearance of a united Muslim world does not correspond to reality. Malaysia and Indonesia have been quarelling ever since Indonesian workers were expelled by Kuala Lumpur. Turkey may be perceived in western Europe as a Muslim state, but it has enjoyed little Muslim solidarity over the years. Many Turks feel that they were stabbed in the back by the Arabs in the first world war, and they have received no significant Arab backing over Cyprus. The deterioration of relations with Syria in recent weeks has demonstrated that here, too, it is interests of state, not religious solidarity, which shape policy. Throughout the Muslim world there is a growing conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims: this is an axis of the Iran-Afghan conflict; it has manifested itself in Turkey, but also in communal killings in Pakistan, in the growth of tribal politics inside Iraq and in social tensions in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
Even the fundamentalists in the Muslim world are divided. Like their counterparts in the Hindu, Judaic and Christian worlds, they denounce foreigners and alien corruption. But their prime target is their own people, the secular forces in their midst: the terrorist battle which Madeleine Albright alludes to is, at its core, internal to the Muslim world.
fundamentalism's civil wars
The main cause of the growth of fundamentalism is dissatisfaction with the post-independence, modernising, secular state. This is true of the revolt against the FLN in Algeria as well as the Islamic revolution in Iran. Issama bin Ladin's main target is not the US, but the ruling family in Saudi Arabia: he uses specious arguments, such as the claim that US troops are despoiling the Holy Places of Islam, to mobilise domestic support. Likewise, the aim of the Palestinian Hamas is to take control of a Palestinian state.
Herein, too, lies the logic of the Rushdie affair: Khomeini and his associates made an issue of The Satanic Verses to reassert control over their own people. The charge of blasphemy has long been used as a means of crushing political dissent (as Socrates, Christ, Galileo and Spinoza learnt to their cost). Nor is Rushdie alone: in recent weeks angry crowds in Dhaka have been calling for the hanging of Taslima Nasrin, the Bangladeshi author who recently returned home.
In this context, relations with the west are secondary. Bin Ladin and his associates in Afghanistan were happy to take the money voted to them each year by the US Congress in support of their war against the secular pro-Soviet regime in Kabul and their Red Army allies. The Bosnian Muslims applauded the intervention of Nato. The Islamists in Turkey have struck a nationalist note-they even deployed the greatness of the Ottoman empire in support of their cause; but they, in the main, avoid denunciations of the US in the hope that they will assuage western concerns. The "long war" between Islam and the west is a side-show to a much deeper conflict within Muslim societies, just as the BJP's nationalist rhetoric in India is above all an attack on the secular politicians and intellectuals who have dominated India since 1947.
The key question, with regard to the middle east and the Muslim world in general, is not whether there will continue to be rhetorical, military and intermittently terrorist attacks on the west, but whether new forms of political legitimacy and stability can be worked out between weakened secularist and militant Islamist forces. Western reactions will play a role; but other matters are equally or more important: short-term ones such as employment and growth and long-term shifts in demography and urban life. Perhaps the most important single factor in the equation is very short-term and secular: the price of oil, currently down 40 per cent on recent levels.
Calculation and accommodation are also evident in the responses of the fundamentalists' opponents. Some regimes pursue an intransigent secularism: Turkey has made Laiklik (secularism) one of the pillars of the Kemalist state. In Egypt, on the other hand, the regime has tacked to accommodate Islamist sentiment, even as it seeks to crush the opposition groups. Four years ago it allowed an Islamic court to condemn Nasser Abou Zied, the Muslim sociologist; more recently, universities have been banned from using the life of Mohammad by the French scholar Maxime Rodinson.
the khatami effect
In the aftermath of the US missile attacks, a powerful corrective to the Islam-versus-the-west rhetoric has emerged from an unexpected quarter: in the speech by Iranian President Mohammad Khatami to the UN General Assembly on 21st September. Speaking on behalf of both his country and of the Islamic Conference Organisation (of which Iran is currently chairman), Khatami certainly criticised the west, including its handling of the Palestine question. He declared that his country was not willing to normalise relations with the US. But he also broke with prevailing Islamic and third world critiques of the west by stressing the shared values of different civilisations and the need for dialogue between cultures. He has done everything he can to end the Iranian government's support for any campaign against Rushdie. And at home he has warned of the dangers of dogmatism and dictatorship in an Islamic state, reminding his followers of what happened to communism when faith prevailed over liberty.
The import of what Khatami said was that the shared values between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds were greater than we might think; and that the shared values of the Muslim world were less great than might appear to be the case (the speech also included a denunciation of Afghanistan). It was an important break with the platitudes of Islam versus the west. It is a pity that more people, west and east, do not heed what he has to say.
