The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (11 page)

The main thrust of Sayyid Qutb’s writing and preaching was directed against the internal enemy—what he called the new age of ignorance, in Arabic
j
hiliyya,
a classical Islamic term for the period of paganism that prevailed in Arabia before the advent of the Prophet and of Islam. As Sayyid Qutb saw it, a new
j
hiliyya
had engulfed the Muslim peoples and the new pharaohs—rightly seen as an allusion to the existing regimes—who were ruling them. But the threat of the external enemy was great and growing.

It has been suggested that Sayyid Qutb’s anti-Americanism is the result simply of the fact that he happened to visit America, and that he would have reacted similarly had he been sent by his ministry to any European country. But by that time, America was what mattered, and its leadership, for good or evil, of the non-Islamic world was increasingly recognized and discussed. The sinfulness and also the degeneracy of America and its consequent threat to Islam and the Muslim peoples became articles of faith in Muslim fundamentalist circles.

By now there is an almost standardized litany of American offenses recited in the lands of Islam, in the media, in pamphlets, in sermons, and in public speeches. A notable example was in an address by an Egyptian professor at the joint meeting of the European Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference held in Istanbul in February 2002. The crime sheet goes back to the original settlement in North America, and what is described as the expropriation and extermination of the previous inhabitants and the sustained ill treatment of the survivors among them. It continues with the enslavement, importation, and exploitation of the blacks (an odd accusation coming from that particular source) and of immigrants in the United States. It includes war crimes against Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as in Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, and elsewhere. Noteworthy among these crimes of imperialist aggression are American actions in Lebanon, Khartoum, Libya, Iraq, and of course helping Israel against the Palestinians. More broadly, the charge sheet includes support for Middle Eastern and other tyrants, such as the shah of Iran and Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, as well as a variable list of Arab tyrants, adjusted to circumstances, against their own peoples.

Yet the most powerful accusation of all is the degeneracy and debauchery of the American way of life, and the threat that it offers to Islam. This threat, classically formulated by Sayyid Qutb, became a regular part of the vocabulary and ideology of Islamic fundamentalists, and most notably, in the language of the Iranian Revolution. This is what is meant by the term the Great Satan, applied to the United States by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Satan as depicted in the Qur’an is neither an imperialist nor an exploiter. He is a seducer, “an insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men” (Qur’an CXIV, 4, 5).

CHAPTER V

S
ATAN AND THE
S
OVIETS

America’s new role—and the Middle East’s perception of it—was vividly illustrated by an incident in Pakistan in 1979. On November 20, a band of a thousand Muslim religious radicals seized the Great Mosque in Mecca and held it for a time against the Saudi security forces. Their declared aim was to “purify Islam” and liberate the holy land of Arabia from the “royal clique of infidels” and the corrupt religious leaders who supported them. Their leader, in speeches played from loudspeakers, denounced Westerners as the destroyers of fundamental Islamic values and the Saudi government as their accomplices. He called for a return to the old Islamic traditions of “justice and equality.” After some hard fighting, the rebels were suppressed. Their leader was executed on January 9, 1980, along with sixty-two of his followers, among them Egyptians, Kuwaitis, Yemenis, and citizens of other Arab countries.

Meanwhile, a demonstration in support of the rebels took place in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. A rumor had circulated—endorsed by Ayatollah Khomeini, who was then in the process of establishing himself as the revolutionary leader in Iran—that American troops had been involved in the clashes in Mecca. The American Embassy was attacked by a crowd of Muslim demonstrators, and two Americans and two Pakistani employees were killed. Why had Khomeini stood by a report that was not only false but wildly improbable?

These events took place within the context of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. On November 4, the United States Embassy in Tehran was seized, and sixty-two Americans taken hostage. Ten of them, women and African Americans, were promptly released; the remaining hostages were then held for 444 days, until their release on January 20, 1981. The motives for this, baffling to many at the time, have become clearer since, thanks to subsequent statements and revelations from the hostage takers and others. It is now apparent that the hostage crisis occurred not because relations between Iran and the United States were deteriorating but because they were improving. In the fall of 1979, the relatively moderate Iranian prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, had arranged to meet with the American national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, under the aegis of the Algerian government. The two men met on November 1 and were reported to have been photographed shaking hands. There seemed to be a real possibility—in the eyes of the radicals, a real danger—that there might be some accommodation between the two countries. Protesters seized the embassy and took the American diplomats hostage in order to destroy any hope of further dialogue. In this they were, for the time being at least, completely successful.

For Khomeini, the United States was the main enemy against whom he had to wage his holy war for Islam. Then, as in the past, this world of unbelievers was seen as the only serious force rivaling and preventing the divinely ordained spread and triumph of Islam. In Khomeini’s earlier writing, and notably in his 1970 book
Islamic Government,
the United States is mentioned infrequently, and then principally in the context of imperialism—first as the helper, then as the successor of the more familiar British Empire. By the time of the revolution, and the direct confrontation to which it gave rise, the United States had become, for him, the principal adversary, and the central target for Muslim rage and contempt.

Khomeini’s special hostility to the United States seems to date from October 1964, when he made a speech in front of his residence in Qum, passionately denouncing the law submitted to the Iranian Assembly giving extraterritorial status to the American military mission, together with their families, staffs, advisers, and servants, and immunity from Iranian jurisdiction. He was apparently not aware that similar immunities had been requested and granted, as a matter of course, to the American forces stationed in Britain during World War II. But the question of the so-called capitulations, extraterritorial immunities accorded in the past to Western merchants and other travelers in Islamic lands, was a sensitive one, and Khomeini played on it skillfully. “They have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog. If someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he will be prosecuted. Even if the Shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he would be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the Shah, the head of state, no one will have the right to interfere with him.”
¹
Already in trouble with the authorities, as a result of this speech Khomeini was exiled from Iran on November 4. He returned to this theme in a number of later speeches and writings, taunting the Americans in particular with their alleged commitment to human rights and their disregard of these rights in Iran and in other places, including Latin America, “in their own hemisphere.” Other accusations include the looting of Iran’s wealth and support of Iran’s monarchy.

In speeches after his return to Iran, the list of grievances and the list of enemies both grew longer, but America now headed the list. And not only in Iran. In a speech delivered in September 1979 in Qum, he complained that the whole Islamic world was caught in America’s clutches and called on the Muslims of the world to unite against their enemy. It was about this time that he began to speak of America as “the Great Satan.” About this time too he denounced both Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Saddam Hussein of Iraq as servants and agents of America. Sadat served America by making peace with Israel; Saddam Hussein did America’s work by making war on Iran. The confrontation with America in the hostage crisis, in the Iraqi invasion, and on many diplomatic and economic battlefields confirmed Khomeini’s judgment of America’s central position in the struggle between Islam and the West. From now on America was “the Great Satan,” Israel, seen as America’s agent, was “the Little Satan,” and “death to America” the order of the day. This was the slogan brandished and shouted in the anti-American demonstrations of 1979. Later it was given a ceremonial, almost ritualized quality that drained it of most of its real meaning.

American observers, awakened by the rhetoric of the Iranian Revolution to their new status as the Great Satan, tried to find reasons for the anti-American sentiment that had been intensifying in the Islamic world for some time. One explanation, which was for a while widely accepted, particularly in American foreign policy circles, was that America’s image had been tarnished by its wartime and continuing alliance with the former colonial powers of Europe. In their country’s defense, some American commentators pointed out that, unlike the Western European imperialists, America had itself been a victim of colonialism; the United States was the first country to win freedom from British rule. But the hope that the Middle Eastern subjects of the former British and French Empires would accept the American Revolution as a model for their own anti-imperialist struggle rested on a basic fallacy that Arab writers were quick to point out. The American Revolution, as they frequently remark, was fought not by Native American nationalists but by British settlers, and far from being a victory against colonialism, it represented colonialism’s ultimate triumph; the English in North America succeeded in colonizing the land so thoroughly that they no longer needed the support of the mother country against the original inhabitants.

It is hardly surprising that former colonial subjects in the Middle East would see America as being tainted by the same kind of imperialism as Western Europe. But Middle Eastern resentment of imperial powers has not always been consistent. The Soviet Union, which retained and extended the imperial conquests of the czars of Russia, ruled with no light hand over tens of millions of Muslim subjects in Central Asia and in the Caucasus. And yet the Soviet Union suffered no similar backlash of anger and hatred from the Arab community.

Russia’s interest in the Middle East was not new. The czars had been expanding southward and eastward for centuries, and had incorporated vast Muslim territories in their empire, at the expense of Turkey and Persia and the formerly independent Muslim states of Central Asia. The defeat of the Axis in 1945 brought a new Soviet threat. The Soviets were now strongly entrenched in the Balkans and could threaten Turkey on both its eastern and its western frontiers. They were already inside Iran, in occupation of the Persian province of Azerbaijan. Their threat to Iran was of long standing. In the Russo-Iranian wars of 1804–1813 and 1826–1828, the Russians had acquired the northern part of Azerbaijan, which became a province of the czarist empire and later a republic of the Soviet Union. In World War II, together with the British, the Soviets occupied Iran, to secure its lines of communication for their mutual use. When the war ended the British withdrew; the Soviets stayed, apparently with the intention of adding what remained of Azerbaijan to the Soviet Union.

That time they were held back. Thanks largely to American support, the Turks were able to refuse the Soviet demand for bases in the Straits, while the Iranians dismantled the Communist puppet state which the Soviet occupiers had set up in Persian Azerbaijan and reasserted the sovereignty of the government of Iran over all its territories.

For a while, the Soviet attempt to realize the age-old dream of the czars was resisted, and both Turkey and Iran entered into Western alliances. But the Russian-Egyptian arms agreement of 1955 brought Russia back into the Middle Eastern game, this time with a leading role. The Turks and Iranians had long experience of Russian imperialism and were correspondingly wary. The Arab states’ experience of imperialism was exclusively Western, and they were disposed to look more favorably on the Soviets. By leapfrogging the northern barrier and dealing directly with the newly independent Arab states, the Russians were able, within a short time, to establish a very strong position.

At first they proceeded in much the same way as their Western European predecessors—military bases, supply of weapons, military “guidance,” economic and cultural penetration. But for Soviet-style relationships this was only a beginning, and the intention clearly was to carry it much further. There can be little doubt that, had it not been for American opposition, the Cold War, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, the Arab world would at best have shared the fate of Poland and Hungary, more probably that of Uzbekistan. And that is not all. While seeking to establish a protectorate over their Middle Eastern allies, the Soviets showed themselves to be very ineffectual protectors. In the Arab-Israel War of 1967 and again in 1973, they were unwilling or unable to save their protégés from defeat and humiliation. The best they could do was to join with the United States in calling a halt to the Israeli advance.

By the early 1970s the Soviet presence was becoming not only ineffectual but also irksome. Like their Western imperial predecessors, the Soviets had established military bases on Egyptian soil which no Egyptian could enter and proceeded to the classic next stage of unequal treaties.

There were some Middle Eastern leaders who learned the lesson and turned, with greater or lesser reluctance, toward the West. Notable among them was President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who had inherited the Soviet relationship from his predecessor, President Nasser. In May 1971 he was induced to sign a very unequal “Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation” with the USSR;
²
in July 1972 he ordered his Soviet military advisers to leave the country and took the first steps toward a rapprochement with the United States and a peace with Israel. President Sadat however seems to have been almost alone in his assessment and his policies, and in general these events seem to have brought no diminution in goodwill to the Soviets, and no corresponding increase in goodwill to the United States. The Soviets suffered no penalties or even reproof for their suppression of Islam in the Central Asian and Transcaucasian republics, where two hundred mosques were licensed to serve the religious needs of 50 million Muslims. Nor for that matter were the Chinese condemned for their battles against Muslims in Sinkiang. Nor did the Americans receive any credit for their efforts to save Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania. Obviously, other considerations were at work.

Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this disparity was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979 and the installation there of a puppet government. It would be difficult to find a clearer and more obvious case of imperialist aggression, conquest, and domination. And yet the response from the Arab and more generally the Islamic world was remarkably muted. By January 14, 1980, after long delays, the United Nations General Assembly was at last able to pass a resolution on this event, not as had been suggested, condemning Soviet aggression but “strongly deploring the recent armed intervention in Afghanistan.” The word
aggression
was not used, and the “intervener” was not named. The vote was carried by 104 to 18. Among the Arab countries, Syria and Algeria abstained; South Yemen voted against the resolution; Libya was absent. The nonvoting PLO observer made a speech strongly defending the Soviet action. The Organization of the Islamic Conference did not do much better. On January 27, after much maneuvering and negotiation, the OIC managed to hold a meeting in Islamabad and to discuss the Soviet-Afghan issue. Two member states, South Yemen and Syria, boycotted the meeting; Libya’s delegate delivered a violent attack on the USA, while the representative of the PLO, a full member of the OIC, abstained from voting on the anti-Soviet resolution and submitted his reservations in writing.

There was some response in the Muslim world to the Soviet invasion—some Saudi money, some Egyptian weapons, and many Arab volunteers. But it was left to the United States to organize, with some success, an Islamic counterattack to Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan. The OIC did little to help the Afghans, preferring to concentrate its attention on other matters—some small Muslim populations in areas not yet decolonized, and of course the Israel-Palestine conflict.