Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution

by Alastair Crooke

Overview

This book traces the essence of the Islamist Revolution from its origins in Egypt, through Najaf, Lebanon, Iran and the Iranian Revolution to today. Alastair Crooke presents a compelling account of the ideas and energy which are mobilising the Islamic world.

Crooke argues that the West faces a mass mobilisation against the US-led Western project. The roots of this conflict are described in terms of religious themes that extend back over 500 years. They represent clashing systems of thinking and values. Islamists have a vision for the future of their own societies which would entail radical change from Western norms. Resistance is presented as the means to force Western behaviour to change and to expose the essential differences between the two modes of thinking.

This is a rigourous account that traces the threads of revolution of various movements, including the influence of 'political Shi'ism' and the Iranian Revolution and its impact on Hezbollah and Hamas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745328850
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	04/20/2009
Pages:	328
Sales rank:	822,458
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Alastair Crooke was advisor to EU High Representative, Javier Solana, in the Middle East, 1997-2003. He was involved in facilitating a series of de-escalations of violence and military withdrawals in Palestine with Islamist movements from 2000-2003 and the end to the Bethlehem Church of the Nativity siege. He was a staff member of the Mitchell Committee into the causes of the Intifada in 2000. He is Director and founder of Conflicts Forum.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

IN THE SERVICE OF GOD AND THE INTERESTS OF THE PEOPLE

On 17 September 1656, Oliver Cromwell, a Protestant puritan who had fought a civil war in England, deposed and executed the King, and addressed the English Parliament as its new 'Protector'.

He began by asking his Protestant revolutionary Parliamentarians: 'Who are our enemies; and why do they hate us?' There was, he said, an axis of evil abroad in the world:

... they hate us because they hate God and all that is good ... they hate us from that very enmity that is in them against whatsoever should serve the glory of God and the interests of the people; which they see to be eminently, yea most eminently patronised and professed in this nation – we will speak it not with vanity – above all the nations in the world.

This axis, this axis of evil, had a leader, he told them: a great power – Catholic Spain – and explained that this 'hate' which his countrymen faced was, at its root, a problem of the Spaniard having placed himself in the service of 'evil'. This 'evil' was the evil of a religion – Catholicism – that 'refused the Englishman's desire for simple liberties ... that put men under restraint ... under which there was no freedom ... and [under which] there could be 'no liberty of individual consciousness'.

Since Cromwell's day, the mainly English-speaking world has come to regard their enemies as 'haters of liberty and God' who possess no morality, and will do anything to win. English 'hawks', however – often Puritans and merchants – wanted an aggressive anti-Spanish policy that would weaken and undermine the Pope for more political ends too – principally in order to open new markets to burgeoning English trade.

The problem with Catholicism, Cromwell hinted, was not religion per se, but its 'restraint' – the imposition of moral and communal norms and the 'lack of liberty' imposed by Spain on English traders and commerce: in short, at its crux, was the Puritans' objection to the moral values of a religiously inspired community that would not commit to embracing individual enterprise and free trade.

They saw in Catholicism an ethos that acted rather to preserve social continuities, and insisted on a timeless moral code of social responsibility to others – in short, one that was not welcoming to the restructuring of community around individualism, to personal pursuit of trade and profit, and to free markets. This was not an ethos in which the nascent capitalism of the time could thrive: this was the evil that the Anglo-Saxon world defined then – and condemns as vehemently today in Islam.

Cromwell's words symbolised the Protestant ethic that has taken the West to unrivalled power, and which has so shaped the European political project over the last 300 years. It gave western politics many of its key characteristics – and also one of its key instruments of power: the nineteenth-century concept of the nation-state as a community of individuals whose collective will manifested a new secular 'sovereignty' in the place of God.

Power was to be wielded by a tight and immensely powerful central elite enjoying a monopoly of violence – both internal and external. This elite enjoyed the additional ability imperceptibly to constrain and control peoples' behaviour and speech in many ways: a web of pressures, social conventions and norms set by institutions and economic interests both controlled behaviour and insisted on a top-down homogeneous unitary national 'family' that legitimised strong central government.

These power relationships, together with the press, provided the 'unitary, disciplinary power of modernity'5 – insidious tools that enabled a collective of ostensibly 'free' and 'individual' citizens to be mobilised collectively and hegemonically as the sovereign 'will' of the nation-state. It was an instrument of immense power.

It was to this conceptualisation that our Iranian cleric referred at our meeting in Qom: just as Cromwell had complained of Spanish and English Catholics who were opposed to those 'who served the Glory of God and the interests of the People', the Hojat al-Islam pointed out it was Muslims today who were perceived to be frustrating the 'will of God' by clinging to the failings of a static and backward religious ethos.

Max Weber, in his 1905 essay on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, had identified a widespread belief in his day, dating back to puritan Calvinism, that market economies and social change manifest the 'will of God': to live in communion with God and to experience the hope of salvation meant, Weber suggested, furthering the waves of social change that capitalism unleashed – increasingly religion not only had to tolerate change, it had to advance it.

Although they speak of 'democracy', democracy only possesses meaning for [western leaders] if it embodies their concept of the human being. In this context, their concept of the nation-state is no more than an instrument to achieve their goals. When a [Muslim] nation pursues any different path – inevitably it meets resistance from the western world.

The West, the cleric implied, had lost the sense of what these ideas and the consequent huge project of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nation-state building – as a recipe for 'peace and freedom' – had wrought in Muslim societies. 'Only from such introspection can we begin to address what went wrong,' he argued.

It is from this point – the last 200 years of nation-state building – that this book starts its story of the emergence of the Islamist revolution. It would be possible to place the starting point at other staging-posts on the path of Islam; but the purpose of this account, as indicated in the introduction, is to try to convey the essence and the spirit behind the rising resistance to the West – rather than to attempt a historical survey.

The Protestant Ethic and the Demonisation of the Ottomans

The dynamic Protestant ethic that Cromwell had contrasted so unfavourably with static Catholicism drew on puritan Calvinism's emphasis on each individual's duty to use his or her talents as a call from God. This gave new significance and meaning to economic endeavour and to secular work: to serve the world in expanding the means of production was to serve God – and to prosper materially in this way, in trade or commerce, was a sure sign of God's grace. Salvation was achieved by work, and in such an environment social esteem and wealth would follow, Calvinists believed.

Above all, Protestants in Europe and in America came to believe that Abraham, the common ancestor of all religions, symbolised this new insight. Abraham's readiness to leave his home, sever his family ties and even to sacrifice his son Isaac, all exemplified a supreme readiness to 'embrace change'. It also exemplified 'faith'. Abraham was obedient to the call from God: Abraham had abandoned past beliefs; had quitted the familiar worlds and ideas of the past, and had journeyed toward a new 'promised land'. Embracing change – justified by faith alone, rather than reasoning – became a kind of sacrament. The new mission was 'like that of the Jews in Canaan, "to subdue the land and possess it"'.

In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, Richard Cobden and Jean Baptiste Say articulated the vision of how this ethos would usher in a millennial age of peace: free trade would promote peace between nations based on common interests and increasing prosperity. Jean Say wrote that 'the theory of markets will necessarily scatter the seeds of concord and peace', and Cobden believed that the spread of market principles and free trade would create a peaceful order of free countries in Europe. This has remained the enduring western vision of utopia, despite it failing, over and over, to reflect reality of the tragedies to which it has given birth.

While both Protestantism and Catholicism have recently lost much of their influence on the European population, these principles represent ideas of Protestant origin that have moved well beyond the bounds of religion. This ethic has fused to the 'dynamic' of capitalistic change. The most important pieces of this construct also underlie modern secularism.

Modern secularists adhere to moral values that they believe are universally valid, and should be established and implanted – by force if necessary – around the world until history as a linear continuum converges on its victorious utopian close. And like their Christian counterparts, who stress the personal and individual in their relationship with God, modern secularists prize above all else personal choice: Americans, secular and Christian, are all Abrahamic now – above all, their journey in life is about confronting 'personal choice' that will shape their destinies.

While many of the nineteenth-century thinkers were not particularly religious, their belief that 'order' arises spontaneously, as if by the workings of an 'invisible hand' from the free play of market forces within a powerful and centralised nation-state, is a way of restating some of the most powerful spiritual convictions of the English-speaking world, and subsequently of the western world. It makes those who hold these unrecognised spiritual convictions both individualistic and optimistic.

In the United States changes in society – the decline of the old East coast elites, the ascendancy of the South and the mass mobilisation of evangelical Christians over the last 30 years – have enhanced the power of the Protestant vision. President George Bush, who has embodied beliefs that resonate closely with Cromwell's speech of 1656, has promoted a tone of belligerent optimism, which links him with a powerful utopian current of Christianity in believing that evil can be defeated. At the same time he draws on both the early Christian apocalyptic theme that expects imminent catastrophe, as well as on secular hopes for continuing 'progress'.

The impact of these ideas, and of the anthill of western constructions of nation-states in their societies, has been for Muslims an absolute disaster – more than a disaster. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century obsessive pursuit of the centralised nation-state has been a tragedy that created millions of victims – as it did also in Europe and the US. But it also, in one of those unintended quirks of history, facilitated the emergence of a revived Islamism that today is directly challenging the western vision.

Powerful, centralised western Great Powers began in the eighteenth century their mission to 'subdue the land and possess it' – with the optimistic intention that, by opening free markets, they would give rise to a more prosperous and peaceful order.

But it was in the subsequent century that the Ottoman Empire, which was the institutional structure embracing the majority of Muslims, came under massive and sustained attack – particularly in its western provinces. The Great Powers' competitive drive towards new markets of course could draw on the militarism of the era and its new technologies; but it was the Great Powers' focus on the leveraging of ethnicity and confessionalism – particularly among Christian communities within the western Ottoman Empire, with the aim of fostering and creating new Christian states emerging from out of the parts of the Ottoman Empire – that unleashed the bitterest clashes, genocide, massacres and deportations.

The relationship between the Christian Great Powers and intercommunal strife in these Ottoman societies dates back to 1569, when France was granted 'capitulations'. These subsequently were gifted to other European powers and made permanent. Christian powers vied to be named 'protectors' of Christian minorities under these aptly named 'capitulations', with the object of creating wedges to hammer into the edifice of Ottoman politics. Exhorted, encouraged and often armed by western powers, the Ottoman Christian minorities rose to fight for independence.

The most bitter wars were fought in what today is Greece and in the Balkans. Both were Christian semi-autonomous communities in the Ottoman western provinces. According to historian Justin McCarthy's Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922, approximately 5 million European Muslims were driven from their homes between 1821 and 1922.11 This forced deportation represented the worst example of ethnic cleansing in Europe until the removal of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia following the Second European War.

A century of ethnic cleansing and murder converted the former western territories of the Ottoman Empire from having an absolute majority of Muslims to a region with a Christian majority. Between 1912 and 1920 alone, an estimated 62 per cent of the Muslim population of south-eastern Europe (excluding Albania) disappeared, fled, or was killed or driven into exile.

Competing identities and affiliations were perceived by Europeans to dilute and threaten the homogeneity necessary to empower a strong central government to emerge, and when these competing identities occurred, western powers – such as Germany, which was the Ottoman Empire's chief ally during this period – encouraged 'reformists' and emergent states to sweep them aside, ruthlessly and bloodily.

This ruthlessness was justified by almost every one of the German officials posted to the Ottoman territories in the late Ottoman period through the expressions of the disdain that they felt for one or other of the ethnic groups with whom they came into contact. These feelings were clearly predicated on a sense of European cultural superiority and the idea of a hierarchy of races in which nature dictated that the weakest racial groups were predestined to disappear from history.

Military pressure on the Ottoman Empire was accompanied by relentless western demands for 'reform'. The 1856 reform package effectively was drafted by Lord Stratford, the British ambassador, and imposed on the Ottomans; and, as historian Donald Bloxham has noted, the one consistent British demand in all their calls for reform was for liberalised markets. However, as Bloxham subsequently notes, the British and French 'reform' of seizing control of Ottoman fiscal policy – to ensure repayment of defaulted loans owed to the western powers – 'actually inhibited the ability of the Ottoman state to develop the economy'.

This persistent pressure on the Ottoman leaders for reform sprang from a far-reaching experiment in social engineering conducted in England with the objective of freeing economic life from social and political control. This was done by constructing a new institution, the free market – and by demanding the weakening of social institutions and the breaking up of the more socially rooted markets that had existed in England. The rupture in economic life produced by the creation of the free market has been called the 'Great Transformation'.

Its effect was to sever cultural and institutional continuities in England, and its pursuit resulted in economic dislocation, social chaos and political instability in hugely different countries throughout the world. The economies of the West did not emerge through a series of incremental 'reforms' as proposed by Lord Stafford to the Ottomans – they came about through the massive use of state power to impose the disruptive social change that free markets required. This was a power that the Ottoman state in any case did not possess, as it was organised on the basis of the devolution of authority rather than on its centralisation.

It is a myth to believe that free markets emerged 'naturally' once 'artificial' restraints were eliminated; and, as John Gray has noted, it is doubtful whether the free market would ever have been engineered in England if a popular voice had been able to articulate its protests at the miseries which this social engineering had brought to them. Whatever the intended purpose of the European insistence on 'reform', it was not about spreading democracy or popular consent.

Much of the demonisation of the Ottoman Empire as the 'sick man' of the region, and the consequent pressure on it to 'reform', it has been argued, has been shown by recent historical research to be largely a Euro-centric construct. Emphasising that the Ottoman Empire did not share in Europe's semblance of coherence and common purpose, and consequently was held in European thinking to be 'decayed', threw into relief the western narrative of the inevitability of the 'rise of the West'.

Homogenising Identity

Eventually, in 1908, 'reformers' did take over the Ottoman state. The ruling faction in the government, known as the 'Young Turks', took control. The Young Turk leaders:

... were explicitly atheistic, schooled in western secular thought whence they imbibed the anti-religious positivism of thinkers such as Auguste Comte and embraced the social Darwinism popular amongst nationalists across Europe at the turn of the century. These ideas would not only provide the ideological justification for removing Christians, but by freeing their proponents from notions of religious confraternity they also meant that [the Young Turk] leaders could begin to think about the destruction of ethnic Kurdishness.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Resistance"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Alastair Crooke.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I - Existential Threats
Chapter One: In the Service of God and the Interests of the People
Part II - Ideology of Revolution
Chapter Two: The Awakening of Resistance
Chapter Three: Political Shi'ism
Chapter Four: Social Revolution
Chapter Five: God is a Liberal
Part III - Practising Resistance
Chapter Six: A Culture of Willpower and Reason
Chapter Seven: Refusing Subservience
Part IV - Demonisation
Chapter Eight: Resistance and the normalisation of Injustice

Chapter Nine: The Nature of Power
Conclusion
Chapter Ten: The Limits to the Present
Epilogue
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

'Erudite, and most readable. Educates us about the history and philosophy of the Islamic world, and its various factions''Required reading at a time when alternative perspectives on the causes of global terrorism and new Western diplomatic initiatives urgently need to replace the failed policies of the Bush administration-led 'War on Global Terrorism'

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