The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (10 page)

The theme of American artificiality and lack of a genuine national identity like that of the Arabs occurs frequently in the writings of the Ba‘th Party and is oc-casionally invoked by Saddam Hussein, for example in a speech of January 2002. As the wars—the Second World War, then the Cold War—continued, and American leadership of the West became more obvious, the American share of the resulting hatred became more significant.

After the collapse of the Third Reich and the ending of German influence, another power and another philosophy, even more anti-American, took its place—the Soviet version of Marxism, with its denunciation of Western capitalism, and of America as its most advanced and dangerous form. The fact that the Russians ruled, with no light hand, over the vast Asian empire conquered by the czars and reconquered by the Soviets did not prevent them from posing, with considerable success, as the champions and sponsors of the anti-imperialist movements that swept through the world after World War II, notably but not exclusively in the Middle East. In 1945, so it seemed at the time, socialism was the wave of the future. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union had triumphed on the battlefield. In Western Europe, the British Labor Party defeated even the great Winston Churchill in the general election of 1945. Various forms of socialism were eagerly embraced by governments and movements all over the Arab world.

But though these foreign sponsors and imported philosophies provided material help and intellectual expression for anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism, they did not cause it, and certainly they do not explain the widespread anti-Westernism that made so many, in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Islamic world, receptive to such ideas. It must surely be clear that what won support for such totally diverse doctrines was not Nazi race theory, which can have had little appeal for Arabs, or Soviet atheist Communism, which has no appeal for Muslims, but rather their basic anti-Westernism. Nazism and Communism were the main forces opposed to the West, both as a way of life and as a power in the world, and as such they could count on the sympathy or even the collaboration of those who saw in the West their principal enemy.

But why? If we turn from the general to the specific, there is no lack of individual policies and actions, pursued and taken by individual Western governments, that have aroused the passionate anger of Middle Eastern and other Islamic peoples, expressed in their various struggles—to win independence from foreign rule or domination; to free resources, notably oil, from foreign exploitation; to oust rulers and regimes seen as agents or imitators of the West. Yet all too often, when these policies are abandoned and the problems resolved, there is at best only a local and temporary alleviation. The British left Egypt, the French left Algeria, both left their other Arab possessions, the monarchies were overthrown in Iraq and in Egypt, the westernizing shah left Iran, the Western oil companies relinquished control of the oil wells that they had discovered and developed, and contented themselves with the best arrangements they could make with the governments of these countries—yet the generalized resentment of the fundamentalists and other extremists against the West remains and grows and is not appeased.

Perhaps the most frequently cited example of Western interference and of its consequences is the overthrow of the Mosaddeq government in Iran in 1953. The crisis began when the popular nationalist leader Mosaddeq decided, with general support in the country, to nationalize the oil companies, and in particular the most important of them, the Anglo-Iranian Company. Certainly, the terms under which this and other concessionary oil companies operated were rightly seen as both unequal and unfavorable. For example, the Anglo-Iranian oil company paid more in taxes to the British government than in royalties to the government of Iran. The United States became involved first as an ally of Britain and then, increasingly, through fear of Soviet involvement on the side of Mosaddeq’s government. The American and British governments therefore decided, allegedly in agreement with the shah, to get rid of Mosaddeq by means of a coup d’état. At first, the coup did not go very well. Mosaddeq simply arrested the shah’s messenger and ordered the arrest of General Zahedi, the leader of the coup and the intended head of the shah’s new government. For a while Mosaddeq’s supporters and members of the Tudeh Communist Party held mass demonstrations in the streets, denouncing both the shah and his father and crying, “Yankees go home.” The shah himself fled with his wife to Iraq, where he met secretly with the U.S. ambassador, and then flew on to Rome.

Meanwhile the demonstrations in Tehran changed in character. Previously they had all been against the shah; now they began to favor him, and in particular the military appeared in the streets supporting the shah. After a series of demonstrations, Mosaddeq was overthrown and Zahedi replaced him as prime minister. On August 19, 1953, the news reached the shah in a telegram from AP: “Tehran: Mosaddeq overthrown. Imperial troops control Tehran. Zahedi Prime Minister.” Soon after, the shah returned to Tehran and resumed his throne.

The aftermath, by the standards of the region, was remarkably mild. The foreign minister of Mosaddeq’s government was executed and a number of his supporters sentenced to imprisonment. Mosaddeq himself was put on trial and sentenced to three years’ house arrest. After his release in August 1956 he lived under guard on his estate until 1967. Because of the active intervention of the American CIA and the British MI6 in the overthrow of the regime and the return of the shah, the shah was regarded by significant groups of his subjects as at first a British, then an American puppet.

If so, the puppeteers were neither reliable nor efficient. When the Iranian Revolution came in 1979, neither the British nor the Americans did anything to save the shah from overthrow. The U.S. administration at the time not only provided no help but made it clear that they had no intention of doing anything. Even more dramatically, they for a while refused the shah and his family asylum in the United States. The shah fled Tehran in mid-January 1979 and flew via Egypt to Morocco, where he stayed briefly as a guest of the king. But the king of Morocco had other concerns, notably a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which he was to host in Rabat in early April. King Hassan therefore asked the shah to leave not later than March 30. The shah informed the U.S. ambassador that he would now like to accept President Carter’s offer of asylum, only to discover that that offer had been withdrawn, apparently in the belief that establishing good relations with the new rulers of Iran took precedence over granting asylum to the shah and his family. The United States relented only when the shah was dying and in acute need of medical care. On October 22, 1979, the shah was informed that he could proceed to the United States. He arrived in New York early the next morning and went straight to the hospital. Becoming aware that his presence was causing problems to the United States, in spite of his serious illness he left the country and went to Panama, where he narrowly escaped extradition to Iran, and from Panama he returned to Egypt, where he died in 1980.

Different groups in the region drew two lessons from these events—one, that the Americans were willing to use both force and intrigue to install or restore their puppet rulers in Middle Eastern countries; the other, that they were not reliable patrons when these puppets were seriously attacked by their own people, and would simply abandon them. The one evoked hatred, the other contempt—a dangerous combination.

Clearly, something deeper is involved than these specific grievances, numerous and important as they may be, something deeper which turns every disagreement into a problem and makes every problem insoluble. What we confront now is not just a complaint about one or another American policy but rather a rejection and condemnation, at once angry and contemptuous, of all that America is seen to represent in the modern world.

A key figure in the development of these new attitudes was Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who became a leading ideologue of Muslim fundamentalism and an active member of the fundamentalist organization known as the Muslim Brothers. Born in a village in Upper Egypt in 1906, he studied in Cairo and for some years worked as a teacher and then as an official in the Egyptian Ministry of Education. In that capacity he was sent on a special study mission to the United States, where he stayed from November 1948 to August 1950. His fundamentalist activism and writing began very soon after his return from America to Egypt. After the military coup of July 1952, he at first maintained close relations with the so-called Free Officers, but he parted company with them as his Islamist teachings clashed with their secularist policies. After several brushes with the authorities, he was sentenced, in 1955, to fifteen years’ imprisonment. As a result of an intercession on his behalf by President Arif of Iraq, he was released in 1964, and he published one of his major works,
Ma‘
lim f
’l-Tar
q
(
Signposts on the Way
), later that year. On August 9, 1965, he was arrested again, this time on charges of treason and, specifically, of planning the assassination of President Nasser. After a summary trial he was sentenced to death on August 21, 1966. The sentence was carried out eight days later.

Sayyid Qutb’s stay in the United States seems to have been a crucial period in the development of his ideas concerning the relations between Islam and the outside world and, more particularly, within itself. The State of Israel had just been established and survived by fighting and winning the first of a series of Arab-Israel wars. This was a time when the world was becoming aware of the near total destruction of the Jews in Nazi-ruled Europe, and public opinion in America, as in much of the world, was overwhelmingly on the Israeli side. The wartime relationship between the Third Reich and prominent Arab leaders such as the Mufti of Jerusalem and Rashid ‘Ali of Iraq was also in the news, and popular sympathy went naturally to those seen as Hitler’s victims in their struggle to escape destruction by Hitler’s accomplices. Sayyid Qutb was shocked by the level of support in America for what he saw as a Jewish onslaught on Islam, with Christian complicity.

Even more revealing was his shocked response to the American way of life—principally its sinfulness and degeneracy and its addiction to what he saw as sexual promiscuity. Sayyid Qutb took as a given the contrast between Eastern spirituality and Western materialism, and described America as a particularly extreme form of the latter. Everything in America, he wrote, even religion, is measured in material terms. He observed that there were many churches but warned his readers that their number should not be misunderstood as an expression of real religious or spiritual feeling. Churches in America, he said, operate like businesses, competing for clients and for publicity, and using the same methods as stores and theaters to attract customers and audiences. For the minister of a church, as for the manager of a business or a theater, success is what matters, and success is measured by size—bigness, numbers. To attract clientele, churches advertise shamelessly and offer what Americans most seek—“a good time” or “fun” (he cited the English words in his Arabic text). The result is that church recreation halls, with the blessing of the priesthood, hold dances where people of both sexes meet, mix, and touch. The ministers even go so far as to dim the lights in order to facilitate the fury of the dance. “The dance is inflamed by the notes of the gramophone,” he noted with evident disgust; “the dance-hall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust.” He also quoted the Kinsey Reports on sexual behavior to document his description and condemnation of universal American debauchery.
⁴
This perception of the West and its ways may help explain why pious terrorists regard dance halls, nightclubs, and other places where young men and women meet as legitimate targets. So vehement were Sayyid Qutb’s denunciations of the American way of life that in 1952 he was obliged to leave his post in the Ministry of Education. It was apparently after this that he joined the Muslim Brothers.