Islam and the World

Islam is a monotheistic religion founded by Muhammad (ca. 570-632). The word Islam means "submission" to God (Allah), and Muslim means "one who submits." Muslims believe that Muhammad was a prophet who received Allah's teachings in a vision. These divine instructions constitute the Koran (or Qur'an), meaning "recitation."

It is the political application of Islam by Muslims that interests us here (Esposito, 1997). A central Islamic concept is the ummah, which encapsulates the idea that Muslims are or should be a united spiritual, cultural, and political community. Muhammad was the first leader of the ummah. Muslims distinguish between Muslim-held lands, which they call dar al-Islam (the domain of Islam), and non-Muslim lands, which are termed dar al-harb (the domain of unbelief). One of the tenets of Islam is the jihad, "struggle" in the name of Allah. Those who struggle to defend or promote Islam are sometimes called mujahedin. It is important to stress that jihad does not necessarily mean either expansionist or armed struggle. It can also mean peacefully spreading Islam or defending the faith (Johnson, 1997).

The political ramifications of Islam are important because there are over one billion Muslims spread widely over the world, as demonstrated by the accompanying map of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. They are a majority among the Arabs of the Middle East and also in non-Arab countries like Algeria, Bangladesh, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Turkey, several of the former Soviet republics (FSRs: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), and Indonesia (whose 207 million people make it the most populous Muslim country). There are other countries, such as Nigeria and the Philippines, in which Muslims constitute an important political force. Indeed, only about one of every four Muslims is an Arab. To explore political Islam, we can examine five factors: the political heritage of Muslims, Islam and nationalism, Islam and the non-Islamic world, Islamic sectarianism, and Islamic traditionalism and secularism.

The Political Heritage of Muslims

The attitudes of Muslims toward the non-Muslim world are shaped by three historical elements (Lewis, 1996). The first is a triumphant past. During Islam's early period, Muslim zeal sparked rapid religious and political expansion by peaceful conversion and violent conquest. This drive was led at first by Arabs, then by Ottoman Turks and other Muslim dynasties. At their farthest, the boundaries of Muslim domination encompassed the Middle East, North Africa, southwestern Asia to the Ganges River, Spain, and central Europe to just south of Vienna.

Conflict with Christian powers, especially those of Europe, is a second element of Muslim political heritage. At the urging of Catholic popes, the Christian kings of England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire led the Crusades against the Muslims. Muslims also clashed for hundreds of years with Christianity's Orthodox emperors of Byzantium and later with the Orthodox czars of Russia. Later still, most Muslim lands fell under the colonial rule of Christian European powers. Even today, in the view of many Muslims, Christian powers still dominate the world and beset them. Many Muslims are dismayed, for example, by the fact that all of the UN Security Council's permanent members except China are countries with a Christian heritage. Moreover, two council members, Great Britain and France, are the same countries that led the Crusades and later colonized a good portion of the Muslim world.

The third element of Muslim political heritage is the decline of their power and the eventual domination of Muslims by others. After about the year 1500, Muslim secular strength declined slowly over the centuries. A variety of European powers had by the late 1800s come to dominate many of the Muslim areas from Mauritania in Africa to Indonesia in Asia. The last vestige of Muslim power was eclipsed when the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War I. In the aftermath, the British and the French became the colonial overlords of the Middle East. As a result, most Muslim countries, whatever their location, share an experience of recent colonial domination by mostly European, Christian-heritage powers (Lustick, 1997).

During the last half century, direct political domination ended with the collapse of colonialism. New countries came into being; others moved from autonomy to full independence. As with most new countries, the Muslim states fiercely guard their sovereignty. Most Muslims also chafe under the foreign control that has frequently persisted through economic dominance and other neocolonialist techniques exercised by the Western powers. In recent years, this indirect domination has been eased by the growth of oil power, and there has been a concurrent growth of Islamic fundamentalism, pride, and militancy that has interacted with and supplemented the nationalism of Islamic countries.

Islam and Nationalism

There are elements of the reawakening of Muslim assertiveness that support the unification in the ummah. After centuries of outside political, economic, and cultural domination, the people in the region that stretches from Morocco to Afghanistan have begun to reclaim their heritage in what might be called a "Muslim pride" movement.

The resurgence of Islam also includes international support for the strengthening of Muslims. Islamic solidarity efforts have ranged from coordination in protecting Islamic holy places, through support of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to some Muslim leaders' support of Pakistan's possession of nuclear weapons (referred to by some as "Islamic bombs"). Among Arab Muslims, the common tie of Islam has helped promote Pan-Arab sentiment. This Pan-Arab feeling has led to the establishment of some regional cooperation (the Arab League, for example) and even attempts to merge countries.

Despite all of these elements of Pan-Muslim and Pan-Arab sentiment, it is unlikely that Muslims will reestablish the ummah in the foreseeable future. Ethnonationalism is one factor that will prevent this. Many Muslim countries have sharp differences and vie with one another for regional influence (Tibi, 1997; Lefebvre, 1996). Some Muslims, notably the Kurds who live in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere, want to form their own countries. Further solidifying nationalism, there are major ethnic differences within Islam. Culturally, Indonesians are no more like Syrians than are Canadians.

Indeed, Indonesians are ethnically not even like one another, and their political views are more strongly tied to ethnicity and other factors than to religion. According to a study of Indonesia's 1999 elections, there was a "lack of strongly positive relationship between religion, especially Muslim variants, and partisan choice." By contrast, the identification of voters as Javanese, Sudanese, Batak, Balinese, Malay, or one of the other linguistically and culturally distinct groups in Indonesia "played a larger independent role" in the elections than expected (Liddle & Mujani, 2000:37, 25).

Islam and the Non-Islamic World

Muslim political history influences current Muslim attitudes toward the domain of unbelief in several ways. One is the frequent evidence of anti-Western feeling. In the eyes of many Muslims, the United States is the most recent dominant Euro-Christian power. Americans have therefore inherited Muslim resentment based on what one Arab leader describes as "Western behavior over centuries that has been unfair to Muslims."¹ Muslims also see the struggle with Israel, especially the issue of Jerusalem, as part of a long, ongoing history. They tend to view Israel as partially a creation of the Western powers in the latest round of the ancient contest for control of Jerusalem and the surrounding region.

The Muslims' often unhappy history of interaction with the West also explains why so many of them were ambivalent about Iraq's aggression. Many Muslims were appalled when Iraq invaded Kuwait, yet they also admired Saddam Hussein because, as a rug merchant in Damascus proclaimed colorfully, "He is breaking the head of the U.S. He is sticking his finger up its nose. He has made America crazy."² These attitudes have persisted during the recurrent U.S.–led confrontations with Iraq over its alleged attempts to hide weapons of mass destruction from UN inspectors. Arabs often note, for example, that the United States has never protested against Israel's nuclear weapons capability, and they suspect that racism is the reason. "There is a deep feeling that when it comes to the Arabs, it's always very harsh treatment, and when it comes to the Israelis, it's easy," notes an Egyptian analyst.³

Islamic Sectarianism

Religion is not always a source of Islamic unity. Instead, religious conflict has been sparked by sectarian splits. The most important of these separates the majority Sunnis and the minority Shiites (Francke & Fuller, 1999). The issues between the two sects involve doctrinal matters beyond our scope of inquiry here. What is important here is that the sometimes quiescent Sunni-Shiite rivalry was reignited in 1979 when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led fundamentalist Shiites to power in Iran. One of Khomeini's proclaimed goals was to reestablish Islamic unity under Shiite leadership by displacing Sunni control of Saudi Arabia (which controls Mecca, the holiest of Muslim places) and other countries. The most serious clash was Iran's war with Iraq (1980-1988). There were territorial and other nationalistic causes behind the war, but Khomeini's determination to overthrow Iraq's Sunni-dominated regime was also a cause of the war and of the millions of casualties that occurred.

The death of Khomeini in 1989 eased, but did not end, Sunni-Shiite strife. Among other places, Muslim sectarianism has spelled continuing tragedy for Afghanistan. Various rebel factions fought together in a 14-year effort to evict the Soviet invaders and to oust Afghanistan's communist government. Then, with victory in 1992, rebel unity dissolved, and the various factions have continued to fight a civil war that has taken countless lives and utterly destroyed the country's cities and infrastructure. Ethnic divisions were one source of the trouble, but these intermingle with and are supplemented by the contest for power between Sunni and Shiite factions. The Sunni Taliban government of Afghanistan has also had numerous border clashes with Shiite Iran.

Islamic Traditionalism and Secularism

A second point of division within Islam separates Muslim traditionalists and secularists. Traditionalist (fundamentalist) Muslims want to resurrect many of the cultural traditions, such as banning alcohol and having women cover their faces, which were weakened under the influence of Western culture. Fundamentalists also want to establish legal systems based on the shari'ah (the law of the Koran) rather than on Western legal precepts. The traditionalists also look forward to the reestablishment of the ummah. "The notion that a majority should rule and the notion of the political party are all Western notions," explains one ranking Muslim theologian. What "Islam calls for," he continues, is "obedience to the ruler, the unification of the nation and advice by religious scholars."⁴

Secularists, by comparison, believe that within Islam there can be many Muslim states and that religious and secular law should be kept separate. A top Arab jurist argues, for example, that "politicized Islamic groups proclaim Islam to be a nation when in fact Islam is a religion."⁵ Whatever may be theologically correct, the fact is that traditionalist Muslim movements during the 1990s gained strength in Algeria, Iran, Turkey, and several other Muslim countries.

Does any or all of this mean that there is a "green peril," a term that relates to the traditional association of the color green with Muslims? Not necessarily. Just as it would be wrong to ignore the role of religion in politics, it would be misleading to make dire predictions (Faksh, 1997). One limit is that there is an ebb and flow of the strength of traditionalism and secularism. Moreover, as one study has recently found, "Democracy itself and Islam are not mutually exclusive," although there are often cultural differences about how democracy is understood and implemented (Midlarsky, 1999-504). For example, the balance has begun to shift away from traditionalism in Iran, which for more than 20 years was dominated by conservative Shiite clerics. The parliamentary elections in Iran in February 2000 resulted in serious losses for religious conservatives and gains for the more secular opposition, which won 59 percent of the seats in the parliament. Subsequently, in the May presidential election, the moderate candidate, Mohammad Khatami, won 70 percent of the votes cast, trouncing his conservative opponent.

Another reason to be wary about alarmist views of religious traditionalism is that mixing any religion, including Islam, with politics is not inherently explosive. Religion most often promotes peace. Certainly, as with any movement, there are extremists who have lost their sense of proportion. But there are also many devoutly religious people who think and act with moderation. It should also be remembered that, where it exists, fanaticism is often a by-product of deprivation, frustration, and other ills. To a substantial degree, Muslims are merely reacting against what they believe are the wrongs of the recent past and are attempting to uplift the circumstances of Muslims everywhere. Perhaps the best lesson to draw is that religion is a significant factor in international relations. Like any set of coherent ideas, religion helps define who is on which side and thus often plays a powerful role in shaping the perceptions of political leaders and the actions of the countries they command.

Notes

1. Former Syrian prime minister Maaruf al-Dawalibi, quoted in the New York Times, June 2, 1993, p. A3.

2. Time, October 2, 1990, p. 55.

3. New York Times, February 27, 1998, p. A8.

4. Sheik Abdalah bin Biyah, a member of the Supreme Council of Mosques and a professor of theology at King Abdelziz University in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, quoted in the New York Times, June 2, 1993, p. A3.

5. Mohammed Said al-Ashmawi, a justice on Egypt's Supreme Court, quoted in the New York Times, June 2, 1993, p. A3.

References

Esposito, John L., ed.1997. Political Islam: Revolution, Radicalism, or Reform? Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Faksh, Mahmud A. 1997. The Future of Islam in the Middle East: Fundamentalism in Egypt, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Fuller, Graham E., and Rend Rahim Francke. 1999. The Arab Shi'a. New York: St. Martin's.

Johnson, James Turner. 1997. The Holy War Idea in Western Islamic Traditions. University Park: Pennsylvannia State University Press.

Lefebvre, Jeffery A. 1996. "Middle East Conflicts and Middle Level Power Intervention in the Horn of Africa." Middle East Journal. 50:387-404.

Lewis, Bernard. 1996. The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. New York: Scribner.

Liddle, William, and Saiful Munjani. 2000. "The Triumph of Leadership: Explaining the 1999 Indonesian Vote." Paper presented at the International Political Science Association convention. August 2000, Quebec, Canada.

Lustick, Ian S. 1997. "The Absence of Middle Eastern Great Powers: Political 'Backwardness' in Historical Perspective." International Organization, 51:653-684.

Midlarsky, Manus. 1999. "Democracy and Islam: Implications for Civilizational conflict and the Democratic Peace." International Studies Quarterly, 42:485-512.

Tibi, Bassam. 1997. Arab Nationalism: Between Islam and the Nation-State. New York: St. Martin's.