Chapter 4

THE TRUTH ABOUT ISLAM

RADICAL ISLAM ISN’T ANCIENT
(WHICH MAKES IT MORE DANGEROUS)

 

 

 

The Muslim nations of the Middle East took an irrevocable turn toward radical Islam not in the tenth century, not after the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in the thirteenth century, but in 1979. The key event was Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in Iran and his successful defiance of the United States. Two other events fueled the trend. Since 1973, the Saudi monarchy had been making such huge oil profits that it could afford to export radical versions of its own fundamentalist Wahhabi version of Islam throughout South and Southeast Asia. And also in 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan inspired successive U.S. administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, to fund Islamist mujahedin guerrillas in their defiance of the Red Army.

Guess what?

Radical Islamist terror as we know it is only thirty years old.

Jimmy Carter’s handling of the Iranian hostage crisis aided the rise of radical Islam.

The wisdom of Prince Turki

The new, radical, and un-Islamic nature of the modern wave of Islamist terror was explained in August 2005 by Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence.

Turki, who had served for almost four years the kingdom’s ambassador to Britain, told a workshop in London that the extreme Islamist terrorists were inspired by non-Islamic cult psychology. He argued that the real nature of terrorist organizations like al Qaeda was not Islamic, but rather a cult psychology that had borrowed Islamic language to propagate deranged messages and justify its actions.

“This terrorism is not based on Islam, but is a perverted cult ideology. Its followers have absented themselves from normal society and from the family, and placed themselves outside of reality to fulfill fantasies that have nothing to do with the real world,” Turki said. “It is a terrorist cult, rather than a classic terrorist organization like the IRA or ETA.”

His comments were not original ones. Many pundits and Islamic scholars have made similar points. They have noted that, far from being any kind of logical extension of traditional Islam, the kind of nihilistic violence and revolution advocated by Osama bin Laden and others is akin to the revolutionary utopianism of Bolshevism and the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Except this time, it is wrapped in the imagery of one of the world’s great, ancient, monotheistic religions, and among its goals are the overthrow of secular and moderate traditional Muslim governments and the establishment of an idealized super-powerful caliphate over the entire Muslim world.

The kind of people attracted by this message, as was the case with Marxism, are not the actual poor and suffering, who are overwhelmingly preoccupied with making ends meet and securing better lives for themselves and their families. They are the displaced, rootless intellectuals, the “superfluous men” described by the great nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky as being the driving force of the revolutionary movement.

British security service MI5 certainly shares Prince Turki’s assessment. Their psychological profiles have predicted that dangerous, alienated revolutionaries were more likely to be recruited from middle-class university backgrounds than from mean slums.

But as the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings in London showed, the British security services, unlike their French, Russian, and Israeli counterparts, badly underestimated the potential scale of the problem. After the discovery that British-born Muslims of Pakistani descent had set off the bombs that killed fifty-six people and wounded seven hundred more, the British security services multiplied their estimate of the number of people in Britain capable of carrying out such attacks by a factor of one hundred: from thirty to three thousand.

Prince Turki’s assessment revealed that the Saudi government correctly understood the complex and serious nature of the problem. They recognized that for the war against the Islamists to be won, they must first be isolated from the mainstream of the Islamic world.

The cycles of Arab history

Looking at the Middle East in the first decade of the twenty-first century, it’s easy to imagine that the great driving force radicalizing the region and turning it against the West is and always was the religion of Islam. It is certainly the case, as the mega-terrorist attacks of September 11 so awfully confirmed, that a fanatical anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Israeli dynamic seethed through the region, and that extreme Islam had become its driving force. But this was an exceptionally late development. What is extraordinary about Middle East history through the first three-quarters of the twentieth century is not the dynamic power of Islam but its almost total absence.

Islam was nonexistent as a motivating force for the Muslim peoples of the Middle East through both world wars. The sultan-caliphs in Constantinople called upon Muslims of the world to rise against the British Empire. None of them did. The British imagined that if they could get Sherif Hussein of Mecca, the guardian of the most sacred Islamic holy places, whose line of descent went back to the prophet Mohammad himself, on their side, they would be able to play the Muslim or jihad card against the Ottomans. That didn’t work either.

The only Arab leader who stood strong and independent through World War I was Abdulaziz ibn Saud. And while he championed a more austere and traditional form of desert Islam, he appealed only to his own tribesmen and to the population of the Hejaz coastal region of Arabia who had had their fill of old Sherif Hussein. Ibn Saud never dreamed of playing any jihad holy war card against the British and the French. He wasn’t that stupid.

After World War I, the parliamentary democracies of Britain and France, the nations that had won the Great War, seemed to the peoples of the Middle East to offer the best path to the restoration of their national independence, eventual prosperity, and national dignity. The charismatic example and success of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in neighboring Turkey also suggested this was the way to go. But then, in the 1930s, the rise of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany seemed to humble the exhausted parliamentary democracies. Arab political leaders were far from unique in being impressed by the Fascists and the Nazis. The military leaders in many Latin American countries, in Japan, and even Chiang Kai-shek in China made the same mistake.

Gamal Abdel Nasser’s success in defying Britain and France with Soviet support in the 1956 Suez crisis convinced millions of people across the region that Arab socialism modeled on and backed by the Soviet Union was the way to go. Nasser’s repeated failures and humiliation with Syria, in Yemen, and repeatedly at the hands of the Israelis in the 1960s helped deflate that idea. Stable Ba’ath socialist regimes weren’t established in Iraq and Syria until 1968 and 1970, respectively. But they proved less than attractive to neighboring countries.

This Arab socialist cycle backed by the Soviets lasted about thirty years—from the establishment of the State of Israel to the start of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1978. Since then, the main focus for the frustrations, aspirations, and ambitions of the Arab world has been fundamentalist Islamism. This hasn’t had a steady record of failure or success either. The early prestige of Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers in Iran was dented profoundly by their repeated military defeats at the hands of the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq War. At least half a million Iranian soldiers, many of them just teenagers or even younger, died in crazed and futile suicide attacks. The actual figure may even be far higher. But at the same time, a new generation of young Islamists was winning credit across the Arab world, especially in traditional societies like Saudi Arabia, for their bravery and effectiveness in fighting the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan. Ironically, the government of President Ronald Reagan was their most important supporter and supplier.

When Saddam Hussein conquered Kuwait and for six months defied the United States and its allies in 1990–1991, he briefly enjoyed the kind of acclaim as a popular warrior-hero that Nasser had enjoyed in the years after Suez. But it didn’t last. Saddam was never able to undermine or destabilize Arab governments around the region the way Nasser had managed to do after Suez. On the contrary, not only Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but even Syria rallied to the United States to contain him. They had good reason to be scared of him. So Saddam’s pan-Arab and quasi-Muslim rhetoric, like that of so many before him, fell flat.

Osama bin Laden did a lot better than that when his success in killing three thousand Americans in a single day, mauling the Pentagon, and destroying the World Trade Center made him a popular hero across the Arab world. All of a sudden, extreme Islamism looked like a heroic success story again. Since then, U.S. bungles in Iraq and Israeli missteps with the Palestinians have seen Hamas seize power in Gaza and Islamist guerrillas continue to terrorize Iraq.

What’s a Wahhabi?

Wahhabism began two hundred years ago as a reform movement to rid Islamic societies of supposedly lax cultural practices and interpretations that had built up over the centuries. Most Wahhabis live in Saudi Arabia, and almost all Muslims in Mecca and Medina are Wahhabis.

The threat posed by extremist Islam and its proliferating groups is very real and shouldn’t be discounted. Our planet’s last hundred years show us clearly that peaceful nations sometimes discount fringe radicals at their own peril. Nobody besides the czars took seriously the obscure, feuding, revolutionary adherents of Karl Marx in Russia before World War I. But then the Soviet Union was created and the Communist fringe controlled the largest nation on earth. In 1920, its armies swept west and until they were stopped by the Poles in the Battle of the Vistula River looked ready to turn Germany Communist and then dominate the rest of Europe. Similarly, in 1923 and for years later, Adolf Hitler seemed like nothing more than a bad joke to the governments of the world, including that of his own country. No one dreamed he would become the greatest continental conqueror since Napoleon and the most merciless killer since Genghis Khan.

Bin Laden’s al Qaeda and its related groups should be seen in this light. If they can be contained, and if the national governments committed to eradicating them are not undermined, the prospects for marginalizing them remain excellent. But that situation can rapidly change. As it is, the Bush administration’s fateful enthusiasm for spreading Western-style democracy as rapidly and completely as possible across the Middle East was arguably a bungle at least as fateful as Eisenhower rescuing Nasser in 1956 or Jimmy Carter undermining the shah in 1977.

The bottom line is that the Arab Middle East went through two full political cycles after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The first, from 1917 to around 1950, saw it try on liberal parliamentary democracy. When that didn’t fit, and when the main semi-parliamentary states of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq failed to eradicate Israel in the 1947–1948 war, the second thirty-year cycle began. That was the cycle of revolutionary Arab socialism backed by the Soviet Union. The Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan put paid to that and launched the third cycle: the period of extreme Islamic fundamentalism. This appeared to be very much on the retreat until September 11, 2001, until bin Laden’s attacks and America’s long, painful occupation of Iraq rejuvenated it.

The Middle East gets religion: 1977–1980

If you examine all the conflicts the Middle East endured in the sixty years following the fall of the Ottoman Empire, you would be struck by the how small a role religion played in most of them. In only three short years during the Carter administration, this changed fundamentally, and the consequences are with us to this day.

First, in late 1978, the Islamic Revolution toppled the shah in Iran. The form of Shia Islam that Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini crafted in the hour of his victory was not remotely a return to tried-and-true religious practices, as he presented it. Like the greatest and most formidable revolutionaries throughout history, Khomeini proved to be a master at presenting radically new ways, usually the very opposite of the old ones he claimed to restore, in the camouflage of old, comforting images.

The Nazis championed the wholesome values of patriotism and family life while preparing genocidal wars of hitherto unimaginable horror. Likewise, Khomeini turned Shia Islam, for more than a millennium the most quiescent and politically passive form of Islam, into the prototype of a fierce new revolutionary fanaticism. He claimed the mantle of fundamentalism, but in reality was heavily influenced by the most murderous totalitarian secular ideologies of the century. This would not have been possible if a wise or competent president had been occupying the White House. President Jimmy Carter displayed consistent ignorance, complacency, and ineptitude in dealing with the mounting crisis in Iran. The end result was the worst humiliation the United States had ever experienced in the region and its expulsion from Iraq, less than a decade after President Richard Nixon had decided he would build it up as a major regional power and U.S. surrogate in the region.

The Islamic Revolution was really just the start of things to come. In November 1979, a year later, Iranian extremist students backed by Khomeini’s revolutionary government stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and seized fifty-two Americans as hostages. They were held captive, abused, and in many cases tortured for 444 days.

Poisonous Prophet

Sayyid Qutb, one of the founders of modern radical Islam, studied in the United States and became convinced America was a den of depraved sexual iniquity. He didn’t come to this conclusion after visiting Las Vegas, Manhattan, or Los Angeles, but after attending Protestant church socials in Greeley, Colorado, from 1948 to 1950. Qutb was also appalled by the American passion for sports, especially boxing, and for jazz, which he once described as “created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires.” He complained, too, that Americans were too restrictive about divorce (which in Islam is not a big deal). He remained a lifelong bachelor himself.

Qutb was the driving force of the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1950s. More radical than Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser—who wouldn’t ban alcohol, and whom the Brotherhood tried to assassinate—Qutb and other Brotherhood leaders were arrested in 1954. Qutb spent a decade behind bars, where he wrote his book Milestones. In it he urged the universal application of sharia (Islamic law). He was executed in 1966, but his writings guided the radical revival of Sunni Islam in the late 1970s, and inspired Osama bin Laden.

Carter unerringly made the crisis worse. Instead of publicly downplaying it or distancing himself from it, while working privately to either threaten the Iranians or bring ruthless military force to bear on them, he grandiosely proclaimed his personal dedication to getting the hostages freed, wrongly imagining he could ride to reelection on a successful resolution of the affair. All he did was bog down the most powerful nation in the world in an apparently unending global humiliation.

Meanwhile, Khomeini’s personal prestige and that of his revolution soared across the Middle East. Islamic fundamentalism, soon to hatch in the Sunni world as well, suddenly replaced the discredited model of Nasser’s state socialism and alignment with Soviet Communism. The tough, ruthless, well-established dictatorships of Hafez Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq were not shaken or threatened. But they had no appeal beyond their own borders. Khomeini did.

In December 1979, Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev poured gasoline on the already burning fundamentalist flames, sending the Red Army into Afghanistan to put a Soviet favorite back into power. It proved to be the mother of all Soviet mess-ups.

For 160 years Afghanistan has been easy to conquer but impossible to hold. The British Empire conquered it three times between 1840 and 1920. The first time they made the mistake of trying to hold it. Literally less than a handful—fewer than five—of the 10,000 men made it back to India alive.

The Red Army suffered a very similar experience. They took Kabul within hours, and the tribes rose against them. It was widely seen as a jihad against godless atheists. The Soviets eventually lost 15,000 dead in a war that did much to discredit their regime and prepare the way for its fall. For President Reagan and his advisors, it seemed a heaven-sent opportunity to pay the Soviets back for bleeding the United States so badly in Vietnam. Just as Moscow had sent the North Vietnamese all the arms they needed, Reagan and his energetic director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, did the same thing for the mujahedin.

It was classic Reagan—acting shrewdly and subtly with a touch that Bismarck at his best could not equal. But in the long run there was a totally unanticipated and catastrophic “blowback” effect. Thousands of idealistic young Muslims from around the Middle East flocked to support the mujahedin. What the U.S. saw as a strike against our rival for global power, young Arab Muslims saw as a battle against godless infidel occupiers. The mujahedin became radicalized by the experience while getting an excellent grounding in modern guerrilla warfare. One of them came from one of the wealthiest, most prestigious families in Saudi Arabia. His name was Osama bin Laden.

Saudi Arabia, with the full approval of the United States, used its vast oil wealth to fund the mujahedin. Neither government dreamed of the true nature of the forces they were unleashing. Iran had successfully defied and humiliated one of the two thermonuclear superpowers in the hostage crisis and lived to tell the tale. Now the “muj” in Afghanistan were withstanding the Red Army, the most powerful military ground force on earth, an army that had not known defeat in war for more than sixty years.

The revolution drew blood in Egypt in 1981. President Nasser of Egypt, in 1966, had hanged Sayyid Qutb, the visionary prophet of the Sunni Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood), with impunity. Fifteen years after Qutb was hanged, soldiers in the Egyptian army broke ranks during a parade to celebrate the 1973 Yom Kippur War and gunned down Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat. They were motivated by Qutb’s fierce dreams.

Nasser’s brutal state suppression of religion was the norm in the region. The blowback would have been contained to Sadat’s assassination—and Qutb’s ideas would not have caught fire—if not for the bungles of the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1979, and those of Jimmy Carter in undermining the shah and assuming that democracy would automatically succeed him. (President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and their policymakers made exactly the same mistake about Iraq after Saddam a quarter century later.)

Dangerous new ideas were on the march.