Imperial Islam

Shortly after 9/11, and before the warship upon which I then had the pleasure to serve departed for an extended deployment to the Arabian Gulf in the winter of 2002, I read “The Middle East – A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years,” by Princeton Professor or Near Eastern Studies Bernard Lewis. It’s an impressive book if you haven’t had the chance to read it, and Lewis deals with his topic in scholarly – but accessible – detail. He demonstrates not just an understanding of his subject, but also a genial admiration of Islam’s many social, scientific and medical triumphs during a time when all of Europe was in darkness.

It wasn’t all beer and skittles in the dar as-salaam, obviously, and eventually the imperial ambitions of the Ottoman caliphate came into conflict with an emergently advanced Western culture that, having centuries before lost its Levantine grip on the “crusader kingdoms,” was finally incentivized to stand and defend itself on the home turf. The collapse of the first siege at Vienna in 1683, preceded as it was by the 1492 reconquista in Spain – or, depending on your point of view, al-Andalus – was the high water mark of Islamic imperial ambition. With the final destruction of the Ottoman empire after World War I, the caliphate’s centuries-long decline at last hit its terminus.

But if you haven’t had the chance to read Lewis’ tome (or the patience to work through all 400-odd pages), this Wall Street Journal article by Efraim Karsh, University of London’s (King’s College) head of Mediterranean Studies captures everything worth remembering – well, everything I remembered – from Lewis’s oeuvre, as well as a useful reminder that, pace Fukuyama, history declines to stop because we ourselves have had enough of it – do read it all:

Osama bin Laden has repeatedly alluded to the collapse of Ottoman power at the end of World War I and, with it, the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate. “What America is tasting now,” he declared in the immediate wake of 9/11, “is only a copy of what we have tasted. Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated.” Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s top deputy, has pointed still farther into the past, lamenting “the tragedy of al-Andalus”–that is, the end of Islamic rule in Spain in 1492.

These historical claims are in turn frequently dismissed by Westerners as delusional, a species of mere self-aggrandizement or propaganda. But the Islamists are perfectly serious, and know what they are doing. Their rhetoric has a millennial warrant, both in doctrine and in fact, and taps into a deep undercurrent that has characterized the political culture of Islam from the beginning. Though tempered and qualified in different places and at different times, the Islamic longing for unfettered suzerainty has never disappeared, and has resurfaced in our own day with a vengeance. It goes by the name of empire.

Not all of the umma feel this way of course, but the part we’re fighting against certainly does. It’s useful to keep in mind that while we’re used to seeing ourselves as in a position of technological superiority vis-?†-vis the Middle East, it was not always so – for hundreds of lovingly remembered years, Islam had a great deal more to teach the West than it had to learn. And for those of us who believe in the West’s cultural superiority, it’s worth remembering that the East has never conceded that point to us, with many in the region eager to use the kinds of technology that only a post-enlightenment society can fashion against that same society’s institutions.

For the Islamist faithful, it has always been a “long war.”

The Islamists are not just at war with the West, they are also at war with those in the Arab Middle East (and the broader umma at large) who yearn for a culturally acceptable version of the Western ideals of freedom and democracy – modernization, in other words – but who also fear the toxic side effects of Western-style liberalization.

In that sense, there is in fact a “civil war” going on in Iraq, but it is not just between the Sunni and Shia sectarians, but also between those who voted to join the 21^st century by going to the polls and choosing their own destinies, and those in Iraq – and elsewhere – who would prefer to yank them back to an idealized 7^th century.

This conflict between the forces of moderation and modernization on the one hand, and the Islamist ideal of an onward moving, irresistibly expanding empire of the faithful, brought as a benefice to its new converts with an open hand if they choose to accept it, or beaten into conquered peoples with the pommel of a sword if necessary on the other – but brought to them nonetheless – is the civil war that the Middle East is engaged in. We ourselves, as an interested party, have joined it.

And whether or not the “long war” ever ends will depend upon who wins.