Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (57 page)

That move sent a shock through the industrialized world. In Oregon, where I lived at the time, gas was quasi-rationed: people could buy it only on alternate days, their turn determined by whether their license
plate ended with an odd or even number. I remember getting up long before dawn every other day that winter to secure my place in line at a local gas station for a chance at the scarce commodity. Sometimes, the gas had run out by the time I got to the pump. I thought I was seeing the end of civilization, and perhaps I was getting a foretaste of it; perhaps we all were. That OPEC embargo sent the price of oil skyrocketing from $3 a barrel to $12. As I write, oil is selling for about $130 a barrel.

Media backlash soon began constructing the now-familiar stereotype of Arabs as rich, oily, evil men with long noses, conspiring to rule the world. That stereotype closely, even eerily, matches the one constructed a hundred years early by European anti-Semites as a depiction of Jews, particularly an imagined secret Jewish cult called the “elders of Zion,” who were supposedly conspiring to, yes, rule the world.

The oil embargo did give the OPEC nations an intimation of their potential power. Although it lasted only a few months, it ended up increasing the oil-producing nations’ mastery of their own resource. Thereupon, the elites of these nations got even richer—which only exacerbated the division of Muslim societies into separate worlds, as described earlier.

Throughout this time, secular forces in Dar al-Islam went on struggling to “modernize” their countries while coping with international forces. But the submerged, even suppressed “other” currents of Muslim revival—the political Islamists, the Salafis, the Wahhabis, the Deobandis, the jihadists, et al—continued to thrive among the excluded people of the left-behind economies. There, they went on preaching that the world was divided into two distinct, mutually exclusive parts, a realm of peace and a realm of war, a realm of Muslim brotherhood and one of violent pagan greed.

The people they were preaching to could look about and see that, yes indeed, society
was
divided into whole separate worlds; it was palpable; you’d have to be blind not to notice. And when the jihadists went on to predict that an apocalyptic showdown was coming up between those who remained faithful to the letter of the revelations received by Mohammed in seventh century Arabia and those who had joined Satan in his quest to draw people away from God, people who lived in these blatantly divided societies knew what they meant: they woke up every day to the reality of their own growi
ng impoverishment, even as their television screens showed them people just across town but living in a whole other world, ric
h beyond all fantasies. They thrilled to the idea of an apocalypse coming that would give them Earth and Heaven while knocking the undeserving Godless elite off their high horses.

And yet, until the 1970s, few in the West paid much attention to this explosive underworld of growing rage. The dominant Western narrative of world history said these left-behind folks were vestigial elements of a bygone era that would gradually disappear as developing nations became developed nations, as despotisms realized the errors of their ways and became democracies, as that universal panacea called education eliminated superstition and replaced it with science, as parochial emotion gave way to dispassionate reason. According to prevailing doctrines, the problem plaguing the
left-behinds of the Muslim world (and of other regions) was not the social conditions in which they lived, but the wrong ideas they had. And then—the secular modernists of the Islamic world began to fall.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was the first to go. He was the urbane, Berkeley-educated prime minister of Pakistan, leader of the left-flavored, secular socialist People’s Party. In 1977, an Islamist general named Zia al-Haq overthrew him and imprisoned him. Soon, Pakistan’s Deobandis began howling for his head. A kangaroo court tried him for vague crimes, and sentenced him. Bhutto was hanged. Sayyid Qutb had suffered exactly the same fate in Egypt, thirteen years earlier.

The next to fall was the shah of Iran. In 1978, a coalition of secular leftists, Islamic socialists, and pro-Khomeini Shi’i revolutionaries drove him out of the country and for a moment it looked as if the Mujahideen-e-Khalq and their modernist allies would construct a progressive government in Iran based on their new ideology of Islamic socialism.

But Khomeini craftily out-maneuvered all other factions of the Iranian revolution. On November 4, 1979, a band of his student followers overran the American embassy and took sixty-six Americans hostage. Khomeini exploited the year-long confrontation with America to weaken his rivals and consolidate his grip.
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Then again, perhaps Khomeini’s success can’t be explained entirely by his spiderlike strategizing and political gamesmanship. Perhaps he won because he did indeed speak for the deepest impulse of the Iranian masses at that moment. Maybe that impulse wasn’t to correct the cour
se of secular modernism but to kill all movement in that direction and give the Islamic Way another try. In any case, by 1980,
Khomeini had transformed Iran into an “Islamic Republic” ruled by the most conservative clerics of Iran’s orthodox Shi’i ulama.

Next to go were the secular modernists of Afghanistan. Their demise began with a seeming triumph for an extreme version of the secularist impulse. A coup by a tiny group of Afghanistan communists smashed the dynasty Nadir Shah had founded in the 1920s. Every member of that clan who could not escape was killed. Then the Soviet Union invaded and took direct control of the country. But the leftward swing of the pendulum was momentary and meaningless; it only triggered an overwhelmingly more massive tribal and religious insurgency. The eight-year, anti-Soviet guerilla war that followed
totally empowered the country’s Islamist ideologues. Not only that but the rural Afghan resistance attracted Islamist zealots from around the Muslim world, including jihadists from the Arab world and Deobandis from Pakistan, all of them sponsored by Wahhabi money from the oil-rich Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Among the many who tasted first blood in these battlefields of Afghanistan was Osama bin Laden.

In fact, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, Islam’s secular modernists saw their power erode almost everywhere. In Algeria, the secular government came under siege by the Islamic Salvation Party. In Palestine, the secular PLO gave way to the religious ideologues of Hamas. Islamic Jihad, another militant group rooted in religious ideology, gained a toehold in this region as well. In Lebanon, a series of devastating Israeli invasions emptied the Palestinian refugee camps along the southern border, destroyed Beirut, and drove the PLO to new headquarters in Libya,
but this only spawned the radical Shi’i political party Hezbollah, which ended up as the de facto ruler of the country’s southern half and proved itself just as committed to destroying Israel as the ousted PLO.

In Syria and Iraq, the Muslim Brotherhood (and its offshoots) fought a grim war with the Ba’ath Party, a war that went largely unnoticed in the West. The Ba’ath governments could not eradicate these Islamist insurgents despite horrific measures such as Syrian president Hafez Assad’s 1982 massacre of nearly all the people of a good-sized town called Hama.

Saddam Hussein, the ruler of Iraq, was a Sunni secular modernist and a sworn enemy of radical religious Islamism. In 1980, directly after Khomeini took power, Hussein invaded Iran. Perhaps he considered the country ripe for the picking due to its internal turmoil; perhaps
he had his eye on Iran’s oil; perhaps he felt threatened by Khomeini—as he had good reason to be: Khomeini blatantly announced his intention to export his revolution, and secular Iraq, with its large Shi’i population, was the obvious first market for this export. Whatever Hussein’s aims, his war proved catastrophic for both countries. Both lost nearly an entire generation of their young men and boys. Not since World War I had such vast armies met head to head nor had so many lives been squandered so casually for such trivial gains. And throughout this war, the United States funneled arms and funds
to Iraq, bolstering its capacity to keep fighting to the last Iraqi, because the United States feared that the Soviets might gain ground in this strategic region, now that the United States had lost its foothold in Iran. Helping the Iraqis was a way to weaken Iran and possibly keep the Soviets at bay. Here again was a catastrophic intertwining of the Muslim and Western narratives, the one narrative still about secular modernism versus back-to-the-source Islamism, the other still about superpower rivalry and control of oil, though couched in rhetoric about democracy and totalitarianism.

The Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988 with no winners, unless you count Iran’s mere survival as a victory. Iraq certainly ended up in ruins, its treasury exhausted by the pointless bloodshed. Saddam Hussein licked his wounds for two years, and then, in 1990, he made a bid to recoup his losses. A double-or-nothing risk-taker if ever there was one, Saddam invaded and “annexed” neighboring Kuwait, hoping to add that country’s oil to his own. Apparently, U.S. ambassador April Gillespie had given him reason to believe the United States would back him in this venture too.

Instead, the United States led a coalition of thirty-four countries against its erstwhile ally in an assault code-named Desert Storm, a short war that destroyed much of Iraq’s infrastructure and culminated in the firebombing of Saddam’s pathetic draftees as they were dragging themselves back toward Basra on what came to be known as the Highway of Death. This time Iraq was absolutely, totally, and unambiguously defeated—and yet the war ended with Saddam Hussein somehow still in power, somehow still in control of his core military outfit, the elite Republican Guard, and still able to cr
ush—as he savagely did—the rebellions that erupted in the wake of his defeat by the West.

After the war, the United Nations imposed sanctions that virtually severed Iraq from the world and reduced Iraqi citizens from a European standard
of living in 1990 to one that approached the most impoverished on Earth. Incomes dropped about 95 percent. Disease spread, and there was no medicine to stem it. Over two hundred thousand children—and perhaps as many as half a million—died as a direct result of the sanctions. One U.N. official, Denis Halliday, resigned because of these sanctions, claiming that “Five thousand children are dying every month. . . . I don’t want to administer a program that results in figures like these.”
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Iraqis, who had suffered through so many years of deepening horror trapped in a war-mad police state, were now reduced to inconceivable squalor. The only sector of Iraqi society on whom the sanctions had little impact was the Ba’ath Party elite, Saddam Hussein and his cohorts, the very people the sanctions were intended to punish.

And in the east, the Soviets, who had invaded Afghanistan less than a year before Iraq invaded Iran, pulled out of Afghanistan less than a year after Iraq finally left Iran. The Afghan communists clung to power for another three years, but when they di
d at last go down, the entire Soviet Union was crumbling too, its empire unraveling in Eastern Europe, its constituent republics—even Russia—declaring independence until there was nothing left to declare independence
from.

In America, conservative historian Francis Fukuyama wrote that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked not just the end of the Cold War but the end of history: liberal capitalist democracy had won, no ideology could challenge it anymore, and nothing remained but a little cleanup work around the edges while all the world got on board the train headed for the only truth. In fact, he offered this thesis in a book titled
The End of History and the Last Man.

On the other side of the planet, however, jihadists and Wahhabis were drawing very different conclusions from all these thunderous events. In Iran, it seemed to them, Islam had brought down the Shah and driven out America. In Afghanistan, Muslims had not just beaten the Red Army but toppled the Soviet Union itself. Looking at all this, jihadists saw a pattern they thought they recognized. The First Community had defeated the two superpowers of its day, the Byzantine and Sassanid empires, simply by having God on its side. Modern Muslims also confronted two superpowers, and they had
now brought one of them down entirely. One down, one to go was how it looked to the jihadists and the Wahhabis. History coming to an end? Hardly! As these radicals saw it, history was just getting interesting.

For years, they had been describing a world bifurcated between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. For years they had been predicting an apocalyptic showdown between good and evil, God and Satan, a great global battle to resolve all the contradictions and melt all factions into a single world, Medina universalized.

For the West, the end of the Cold War meant Afghanistan could be abandoned. There was nothing left to do there. The United States and its western European allies had pumped billions of dollars worth of arms and money into the country, but now they disengaged entirely, rejecting proposals from several sources that they sponsor some sort of conference, broker some sort of peace, help cobble together some sort of political process to help the country find its way back to civil order. CIA station chief Milton Bearden explained the reason for this sudden disengagement succinctly: “
No one gives a shit about Afghanistan.” The tribal armies that had battled the Soviets fell to quarrelling over the country they had won with the arms they had scored. The Soviets had al
ready destroyed the Afghan countryside. Now, the civil war among the various guerilla armies destroyed the cities. Foreign jihadists who had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s swarmed back to make the rubble their base of operations for a war against the West.

Step one was erecting in Afghanistan a pure version of the community they envisioned, one in which every man, woman, and child lived exactly according to the letter of God’s law as they understood it or suffered the punishment. For this reason, jihadists, sponsored by Wahhabi money from Saudi sources, helped develop the Taliban, a party of primitive ideologues that emerged out of the refugee camps in that tribal belt that vaguely separates Afghanistan from Pakistan.