The Pandora's box of the American Empire is still open, releasing fears and monsters into a world which is not fully under control. One such monster has been very visible during the current crisis, lurching between television studios, talking of a barbarian threat posed to our world capitalist civilisation.
In 1993 Samuel P Huntington, former counter-insurgency expert for President Johnson's administration in Vietnam and later director of the Institute of Strategic Studies at Harvard University, published his now notorious book Clash of Civilisations (1). This was conceived as a polemic against a rival State Department theorist: Francis Fukuyama with his end-of-history thesis. Huntington argued that while the defeat of the Soviet Union had ended all ideological disputes, it did not mean the end of history since culture, not politics or economics, would in future dominate world politics.
He listed eight cultures: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slav-Orthodox, Latin American and, perhaps, African. Why perhaps? Because he was not sure whether Africa was really civilised. Each of these embodied different value-systems symbolised by religion, which Huntington argued was perhaps the central force that motivates and mobilises people. The major divide was between the West and the rest, because only the West valued individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets. Therefore the West (the United States) must be prepared militarily to deal with threats from these rivals. The two most menacing were, predictably, Islam and Confucianism (oil and Chinese exports) and, if they united, the core civilisation would be threatened. He concluded, sinisterly: "The world is not one. Civilisations united and divide mankind blood and belief are what people identify with and what they will fight and die for." Osama Bin Laden would have no problem agreeing.
This simple-minded, but politically convenient, analysis provided an extremely useful cover for policy-makers and ideologues in Washington and elsewhere. Islam was seen as the biggest threat because much of the world's oil comes from Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. When Huntington was writing, the Islamic Republic in Iran was 14 years old and still hostile to the US, the Great Satan; Iraq's social, economic and military strength was being further eroded in the post-Gulf war era, but Saudi Arabia remained a safe haven, its monarchy protected by US troops. Western civilisation (supported by its Confucian and Slav-Orthodox colleagues) organised the slow death of Iraqi children who were denied food and medicines because of UN-imposed sanctions.
There are two immediate answers to Huntington and the civilisation-mongers. First, the world of Islam has not been monolithic for over a thousand years. The social and cultural differences between Senegalese, Chinese, Indonesian, Arab and South Asian Muslims are far greater than the similarities they share with non-Muslim members of the same nationality. Over the last century, the world of Islam has had wars and revolutions like every other society.
The 70-year war between US imperialism and the Soviet Union affected every civilisation. Communist parties sprouted and gained mass support in Lutheran Germany, Confucian China and Muslim Indonesia. During the 1920s and 1930s, Arab intellectuals were divided between the cosmopolitan appeal of Marxism and the populist challenge of Mussolini and Hitler. Liberalism, seen as the ideology of the British Empire, was less popular. Today the fundamentalists can be seen as the Muslim version of the National Front in France or the neo-fascists in the Italian government. A Western writer greatly appreciated by Muslim thinkers, a writer whose work fuels radical Islam, is Alexis Carrel, a Petainist whose books are also studied avidly in Le Pen's training camps.
The second point to be made is that, after the second world war, the US backed the extreme reactionaries as a bulwark against communism or progressive nationalism. Often these were religious fundamentalists: the Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser in Egypt; the Sarekat-i-Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, the Jamaat-I-Islam against Bhutto in Pakistan, and later Osama Bin Laden and others against the secular-communist Muhammad Najibullah, who was dragged out of his refuge by the Taliban, killed, and his naked body, with penis and testicles stuffed in his mouth, hanged publicly in Kabul. Not a single Western leader registered dissent.
The only exceptions to this policy were Iraq and Iran. There was no potential in 1960s Iraq for creating an opposing group. The Communist party was the most significant social force in the country and it could not be allowed a victory. The US backed the gangster wing of the Baath party and encouraged it to destroy first the communists and then the oil-workers' unions. Saddam Hussein complied and was rewarded by the West with arms and trade contracts till his misjudgment on Kuwait in 1990.
In Iran, the West backed the despotic Shah who trampled on the rights of the people and crushed the communists of the Tudeh party through torture and exile. The vacuum was occupied by clerics who captured the leadership of the mass uprising that toppled the monarchy in 1979.
In the oil-rich Arab lands the West had a double strategy. The first was Saudi Arabia, a 1930s creation of the US oil-giant Aramco, which needed a local state to defend its interests. The federation of tribes in the region fought a bitter civil war before the victory of the al-Saud faction. With this came a virulent and ultra-puritanical strain of Islam: Wahhabism, named after its 18th-century founder Muhammad Abdel Wahhab. He preached the virtues of a permanent jihad against Islamic modernisers and infidels. He won favour with a local ruler, Mohammed Ibn Saud, who needed the fervour for his own plans of conquest. Wahhabism, which has been the state religion of Saudi Arabia since 1932, has been exported with petro-dollars and used to fund extremism elsewhere in the Muslim world including the religious schools in Pakistan where the Taliban were created.
The other part of the strategy was Israel, the West's most reliable relay in the region. Relations between Muslims and Jews had been historically relatively harmonious. In Spain, the Jews were protected by Muslim rulers. In the Arab East, Saladin re-took Jerusalem from the Crusaders and led the Muslims and Jews back into the city. After the Catholic reconquest of Spain, the Jews were given asylum and refuge by the Ottoman Empire.
The nakba of 1948 created the first real breach between Arabs and Jews. The Zionist leaders, with a suppressed guilt towards the displaced Palestinians, became more belligerent, more arrogant: they happily played their role in 1956 (Suez), 1967 (the Six Day war), 1982 (the Lebanese war), just as they do today.
The failure of the West to guarantee a viable and independent Palestinian state for fear of destabilising their military in the Middle East is the deep-rooted cause of the discontent in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, two countries from which some hijackers came. Politics, economics and western double standards are at the base of the present crisis. A new war will only make the rivers of bitterness overflow.
* Pakistani and British writer, author of The Stone Woman (Verso, 2000) and Introducing Trotsky and Marxism (Totem Books, 2000).
(1) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Touchstone, 1998.
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