Peace Be Upon You (47 page)

The issue of oil and the Middle East has been peripheral to most of the history in this book. Oil did not become central for Saudi Arabia and Iraq until the 1920s, and only during World War II did the region take on global significance as a source of petroleum. By the end of the twentieth century, however, it was widely understood, both in popular culture in Europe and the United States and “on the Arab street,” that American involvement in the Middle East has been motivated by three things: Israel, Christianity, and oil.

And yet, Aramco is an Arab oil company. Specifically, it is a Saudi company with close ties to the global petroleum industry. The Saudi state rests on two foundations: an alliance between the royal family and the puritanical Wahhabis, and a symbiotic relationship with the major economies of the world as the dominant producer of oil. The Saudi oil barons own land, businesses, and investments throughout Europe, Japan, and the United States. Many of them have been educated in American schools, and live a double life as tribal potentates and Western billionaires. Today, Aramco executives and workers inhabit the peculiar twilight zone of Dhahran, as they have for decades, with fathers often passing their positions to their sons, and in their walled and heavily guarded compounds, they live a life that is not quite Western and very definitely not Saudi.

Whether one views this relationship as symbiotic or parasitic, a testament to free-market capitalism or a sign of Western imperialism; whether there is a genuine partnership between the Saudi oilmen and
American executives and engineers or a cynical compact, the existence of Aramco is a product of cooperation between an austere Muslim state and an unabashedly Christian country, the United States.
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Then there is the saga of Turkey’s struggle to gain full membership in the European Union. After World War I, Atatürk remade his country as a secular state, and it has stayed on that path. Throughout the Cold War, Turkey was an ally of the United States and a member of NATO. In the 1980s and 1990s, Turkey’s government and its business class made a concerted effort to join the European Union, and after considerable debate, the EU decided to commence the official talks that could lead to Turkey’s membership after 2010.

In both Turkey and Europe, there is unease and ambivalence. After decades of staunch secularism, Turkey in 2003 elected a prime minster, Recep Erdogan, who supported a more prominent role for Islam. That alarmed not only the Turkish military and the loyal inheritors of the Atatürk’s legacy, but also the Europeans. The European Union says nothing per se about the religion of its members, but one of its official criteria is the vague category of “Europeanness.” Suffice it to say that Islam has never been embraced as an aspect of European identity. To the contrary, Europe thinks of itself as having been forged in opposition to Islam, and to organized religion.

Erdogan, however, has consistently resisted attempts of Turkish Islamists to force traditional religion into the public sphere. He has refused, for example, to reconsider the ban on head scarves for women in public classrooms. Atatürk used reforms of traditional dress, including bans on head scarves for women and the fez cap for men, as a symbol that Turkey would be part of, and not distinct from, the modern world. That world was, he realized, governed by Western values and rules, and he wanted Turkey to become part of it. Erdogan belongs to a generation who, on the whole, accept that basic principle and yet also wish to integrate elements of traditional Turkish culture, including Islam. He personally is devout, yet that is no more antithetical to the “modern world” than the devoutness of American presidents.

The European Union, however, has been apprehensive about Turkey. Some Austrian opponents have explicitly raised the specter of the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna. Germans have also been suspicious. Millions of Turks live and work in Germany, but Germans, who outside of Bavaria have become increasingly less religious, express discomfort
with the Muslim nature of the Turkish government—just as they have been uncomfortable with the evangelical Christian character of George W. Bush’s administration. They have also questioned Turkey’s economic development and its commitment to human rights, but the core arguments have all, in one way or another, circled around the issue of religion, identity, and politics.

The irony, of course, is that it is the avowedly secular Europeans who have been equivocal, whereas the Muslim party leading the governing coalition in Turkey expressed no reservations about relinquishing sovereignty to the European Union in return for closer economic ties. Turkey has also cultivated a cordial, though not exactly warm, relationship with Israel and maintained close relations with the United States, even through the highly charged atmosphere after September 11 and especially after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003.
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Turkey’s path challenges most generalizations about Islam and the West, but that is only because these generalizations are so incomplete. Few people imagine that it is possible for a state to be Muslim in cultural and religious identity and also be a full participant in the global economy. Even fewer believe that it can prize the rule of law, have a healthy interest in constructive ties with Europe and the United States, and simultaneously cherish Islam. That type of state does not fit the either-or template that says a society has to put religion into a confined box in order to be a full-fledged participant in the modern world, nor is it easily reconciled with the notion that the relationship between Muslims, Christians, and Jews is inherently unstable.

The status of Muslim immigrants in Europe often seems to support that notion. Riots in Parisian suburbs; the killing of the prominent, provocative Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a disaffected young Dutch Muslim; the increase of jihadi sympathy in the anonymous apartment blocks of English cities; and the bombings in Madrid in 2003 and London in 2005 have led to considerable anxiety in Europe about whether Islam and secular Christianity can coexist. Yet here as well, the daily lives of millions of immigrants who live and work in their adopted societies willingly and ardently is given scant attention. It is not just a problem of the “squeaky wheel” syndrome, where angry voices of protest get more notice. It is that other lives and other stories are actively ignored because they don’t fit.

The result is that the cultural and economic cooperation that occurs
so regularly and so effortlessly that it should be considered commonplace is unmentioned or lost in the fray. In Jordan, King Abdullah II, heir to his father, Hussein, in so many ways, has tried to honor the tradition of intellectual openness, tribal solidarity, independence, and progress that marked the most vibrant days of the caliphs and the Ottomans. Jordan today is a hybrid of bedouin, Palestinian Christians and Muslims, a Muslim Brotherhood that participates (albeit grudgingly) in the political process, and a Western-educated and Western-leaning elite. That doesn’t mean that all is well, simply that the country and its monarchs have tried to steer a course of moderation and international integration, working assiduously with governments and businesses abroad, from the United States to the European Union to Iraq, Iran, China, and Japan.

And then there is Morocco, which under both King Muhammad VI and his father, King Hassan, has tilted toward France. Cities like Mar-rakesh, Fez, and Tangier are cosmopolitan. Having once ruled Iberia, Moroccans never ceased to feel that they are as much a part of Europe as they are of North Africa and the Arab world. In the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Marrakesh for one has become increasingly entwined with Europe in general and France especially. The French expatriate community has blossomed, and yet the city has maintained its eccentric Muslim culture. The call to prayer still blankets the old city at dawn and dusk, even as people drink alcohol in the Djemaa al-Fna, the airy open space that fills with crowds, food, and acrobats each night and that guards the entrance to the labyrinthine markets and to an old city whose tendrils extend from the twenty-first century back to the fifteenth.

And there are the 200 million Muslims of India, who live and prosper amid a billion Hindus, with flashes of conflict and long periods of indifference and communion. There are the young of Iran, an oil-rich country that is ruled by a brittle mullocracy spending the dwindling political capital of the 1979 revolution but that now has a majority of population under the age of twenty-five who cannot remember the shah and who have little but scorn for the clerics. While the mullahs may yearn for nuclear weapons, the young dream vibrant dreams of the United States, and Hollywood, and of men and women being able to walk hand in hand without being confronted by thugs claiming the mantle of the Prophet. And there are the five million Muslims in the United States, a few of whom are African-American converts and many more who are immigrants
and the children of immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and elsewhere, who go to neighborhood mosques and are appalled at the violence of distant men and women claiming to be the only true Muslims. And there are other stories, of people consumed not by religious fervor but by the daily, universal concerns of money, work, and family.

In a world where technology will make it easier for the angry few to do great harm, the perpetuation of a model of conflict is dangerous. Remembering that each of the three traditions carries the seeds of peace will not by itself heal the world. A more complete picture will not convert today’s jihadis from war to love, and it will not alone force the Western world to reconsider Islam. But if these stories are integrated into our sense of the past and the present, it will be more difficult to treat religion as destiny. Religion is a force coursing through the past, but hardly the only force. Muslims, Christians, and Jews are entwined, but their history is as varied as the story of the human race. It points in no one direction, or in all directions. If conflict is what we want to see, there is conflict. But if peace is what we are looking for, then peace is there to be found.

W
E READ EVERY DAY news of death and violence in Iraq. The stories include Sunni Iraqis killing Shi’ite Iraqis, al-Qaeda assassinating rivals, Shi’ite factions in the southern part of the country skirmishing with one another, Iranian-funded groups fighting against Saudi-funded groups, and everyone fighting the Americans. Many people throughout the world no doubt long ago ceased to pay these reports much attention, but in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, it is nearly impossible to avoid the news. The daily litany creates an indelible impression that Islam and violence keep close company.

Iraq has been only one element of that toxic brew. The continued struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is another, albeit familiar, ingredient. The presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran has added a new dimension. The president has rarely lost an opportunity to inflame passions, which he seems to stoke with glee, calling one moment for the eradication of Israel and the next for a united Muslim front against the American-led West. Flush with an unexpected injection of petrodollars, thanks to China’s increased demand for oil, Iran’s government and its populist president have pursued a path of confrontation with the United States and with any who question Iran’s right to a nuclear power program that might or might not go hand in hand with the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon.

And with the eruption of armed hostilities between Israel and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006, it looked as if, once again, Muslims, Christians, and Jews were locked in a death dance, and that with the prospect of nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran and Israel, the conflict could one day have an Armageddon potential.

But five hundred miles south of Iran and Iraq, on the western shore of the Persian Gulf, lies the emirate of Dubai. Until 2006, few Americans— though a somewhat higher percentage of British and Europeans—knew where Dubai was, but that changed when Dubai Ports World, one of the largest companies of its kind, concluded a $6.8 billion agreement to purchase Britain’s Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, which operated a number of ports in the United States, including Newark, Miami, and New Orleans. The transfer of ownership seemed destined to be a quiet, uneventful event until Congress proceeded to bludgeon the Bush administration for gross negligence and dereliction of duty. The crime was allowing the sale of vital national security to an Arab state.

The criticism was not limited to Democratic opponents of the Bush administration. It was, in fact, a rare moment of bipartisan dudgeon, with heated rhetoric erupting throughout the country against the proposed deal. There were allegations that the government of Dubai was linked to terrorism, based on the fact that several of the participants in the 9/11 attacks had availed themselves of Dubai’s banking system. While similar logic could have been used to denounce the government of Germany for abetting the 9/11 attacks, the fact that Dubai is a family-ruled Arab principality and that Dubai Ports World is controlled by the government was translated into proof that American national security would be endangered if the deal were allowed to go through. Said one outraged Republican congressional representative, “In regards to selling American ports to Dubai, not just
no—
but
hell no
!”