Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

  In some places, even the separate existence of given countries remained open to question. Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan—these were still congealing. Their borders existed, they had separate governments, but did their people really think of themselves as different nations? Not clear.

  In the Arab world, ever since Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the watchword had been self-rule, but this tricky concept presumed some definition of a collective “self ” accepted by all its supposed members. Nationalists throughout Arab-inhabited lands were trying hard to consolidate discrete states: Libya, Tunisia, Syria, even Egypt . . . but the question always came up: who was the bigger collective self? Was there “really” a Syrian nation, given that the Syria seen on maps was created by Europeans? Could there be such a thing as Jordanian nationalism? Was it true that people living in Iraq were ruling themselves so long as their ruler spoke Arabic?

  The most problematic single territory for the competing claims of nationalism versus nation-statism was Palestine, soon to be known as Israel. Before and during World War II, the Nazis’ genocidal attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe confirmed the worst fears of Zionists and gave their argument for a sovereign Jewish homeland overwhelming moral weight, especially since the Nazis were not the only anti-Semites in Europe, only the most extreme. The fascists of Italy visited horrors upon Italian Jews, the French puppet government set up by the Germans hunted down French Jews for their Nazi masters, the Poles and other Eastern Europeans collaborated enthusiastically in operating death camps, Great Britain had its share of anti-Semites, Spain, Belgium—no part of Europe could honestly claim innocence of the crime committed against the Jews in this period. Millions of Jews were trapped in Europe and perished there. All who could get away escaped in whatever direction lay open. Boatloads of Jewish refugees ended up drifting over the world’s seas, looking for places to land. A few were able to make their way to the United States and resettle there, but even the United States imposed strict quotas on Jewish immigration, presumably because a single country could absorb only so many immigrants of any one group; but just perhaps some anti-Semitism was mixed into that policy as well.

  The one place where the refugees could land was Palestine. There, earlier immigrants had bought land, planted settlements, and developed some infrastructure of support. Toward that slender hope of safety, therefore, the refugees headed, overcoming heroic hardships to begin building a new nation in an ancient land inhabited by their ancestors. Such was the shape of the story from the Jewish side.

  From the Arab side, the story looked different. The Arabs had long been living under two layers of domination by outsiders, the first layer being the Turks, the next the Turks’ European bosses. Then, in the wake of World War I, amidst all the rhetoric about “self-rule” and all the hope aroused by Wilson’s Fourteen Points, their land was flooded by new settlers from Europe, whose slogan was said to be “a land without a people for a people without a land”3—an alarming slogan for people living in the “land without a people.”

  The new European immigrants didn’t seize land by force; they bought the land they settled; but they bought it mostly from absentee landlords, so they ended up living among landless peasants who felt doubly dispossessed by the aliens crowding in among them. What happened just before and during World War II in Palestine resembled what happened earlier in Algeria when French immigrants bought up much of the land and planted a parallel economy there, rendering the original inhabitants irrelevant. By 1945, the Jewish population of Palestine almost equaled the Arab population. If one were to translate that influx of newcomers to the American context, it would be as if 150 million refugees flooded in within a decade. How could that not lead to turmoil?

  In the context of the European narrative, the Jews were victims. In the context of the Arab narrative, they were colonizers with much the same attitudes toward the indigenous population as their fellow Europeans. As early as 1862, a German Zionist, Moses Hess, had drummed up support for political Zionism by proposing that “the state the Jews would establish in the heart of the Middle East would serve Western imperial interests and at the same time help bring Western civilization to the backward East.”4 The seminal Zionist Theodor Herzl wrote that a Jewish state in Palestine would “form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”5 In 1914, Chaim Weitzman wrote a letter to the Manchester Guardian stating that if a Jewish settlement could be established in Palestine “we could have in twenty to thirty years a million Jews out there. . . . They would develop the country, bring back civilization to it and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.”6 Arabs who saw the Zionist project as European colonialism in thin disguise were not inventing a fantasy out of whole cloth: Zionists saw the project that way too, or at least represented it as such to the imperialist powers whose support they needed.

  In 1936, strikes and riots broke out among the Arabs of Palestine, serving notice that the situation was spiraling out of control. In a clumsy effort to placate the Arabs, Great Britain issued an order limiting further Jewish immigration to Palestine, but this order came in 1939, with World War II about to break out and the horrors of Nazism fully manifest to European Jews: there was no chance that Jewish refugees would comply with the British order; it would have been suicidal. Instead, militant organizations sprang up among the would-be Jewish settlers, and since they were a dispossessed few fighting the world-straddling British Empire, some of these militant Jewish groups resorted to the archetypal strategy of the scattered weak against the well-organized mighty: hit and run raids, sabotage, random assassinations, bombings of places frequented by civilians—in short, terrorism. In 1946, the underground Jewish militant group Haganah bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one ordinary civilians, the most destructive single act of terrorism until 1988, when Libyan terrorists brought down a civilian airliner, Pan Am Flight 103, over Scotland, killing 270.

  The horrors of Nazism proved the Jewish need for a secure place of refuge, but Jews did not come to Palestine pleading for refuge so much as claiming entitlement. They insisted they were not begging for a favor but coming home to land that was theirs by right. They based their claim on the fact that their ancestors had lived there until the year 135 CE and that even in diaspora they had never abandoned hope of returning. “Next year in Jerusalem” was part of the Passover service, a key cultural and religious rite in Judaism. According to Jewish doctrine, God had given the disputed land to the Hebrews and their descendants as part of His covenant with Abraham. Arabs, of course, were not persuaded by a religious doctrine that assigned the land they inhabited to another people, especially since the religion was not theirs.

  In the aftermath of World War II, the United States led efforts to create new political mechanisms for keeping the peace, one of which was the United Nations. Palestine was just the sort of issue the United Nations was designed to resolve. In 1947, therefore, the United Nations crafted a proposal to end the quarrel by dividing the disputed territory and creating two new nations. Each competing party would get three patches of curiously interlocking land, and Jerusalem would be a separate international city belonging to neither side. The total territories of the proposed new nations, Israel and Palestine, would be roughly equal. Essentially, the United Nations was saying, “It doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong; let’s just divide the land and move on.” This is the sort of solution that adults typically impose on quarreling children.

  But Arabs could not agree that both sides had a point and that the truth lay somewhere in the middle: they felt that a European solution was being imposed on them for a European problem, or more precisely that Arabs were being asked to sacrifice their land as compensation for a crime visited by Europeans on Europeans. The Arabs of surrounding lands sympathized with their fellows in Palestine and saw their point; the world at large did not. When the matter was put to a vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations, the vast majority of non-Muslim countries vot
ed yes to partition.

  Most Arabs had no personal stake in the actual issue: the birth of Israel would not strip an Iraqi farmer of his land or keep some Moroccan shop-keeper from prospering in his business—yet most Arabs and indeed most Muslims could wax passionate about who got Palestine. Why? Because the emergence of Israel had emblematic meaning for them. It meant that Arabs (and Muslims generally) had no power, that imperialists could take any part of their territory, and that no one outside the Muslim world would side with them against a patent injustice. The existence of Israel signified European dominance over Muslims, Arab and non-Arab, and over the people of Asia and Africa generally. That’s how it looked from almost any point between the Indus and Istanbul.

  ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

  On May 15, 1948, Israel declared itself born. Immediately, Arab armies attacked from three sides, determined to crush the new country before it could take its first breath. But instead, Israel did the crushing, routing the armies of its three Arab adversaries, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, and so it was Palestine, not Israel, that became the stillborn child. When the war ended, a war that Israel remembers as their War of Independence but that Arabs called the Catastrophe, some seven hundred thousand Arabs found themselves homeless and stateless, living as refugees in the neighboring Arab countries. The lands that were supposed to become Palestine were annexed (mostly by Jordan). The bulk of the Arab refugees collected on the West Bank of the Jordan River, where they seethed and stewed and sometimes staged small raids into the land that had once been theirs.

  In the aftermath of the war of 1948, the Arabs lost the public relations battle even more drastically than they had lost their land. For one thing, some prominent Arabs publicly and constantly disputed Israel’s “right to exist.” They were speaking within the framework of the nationalist argument: Zionists wanted Israel to exist, the Arabs of Palestine wanted Palestine to exist, and since they claimed the same territory, both could not exist: the assertion of each nation’s “right to exist” was inherently a denial of the other nation’s “right to exist.” But in the shadow of the Nazis’ attempted genocide, asserting that Israel had no right to exist sounded like saying, “Jews have no right to exist.”

  To make matters worse, at least one Arab notable made no bones about actually endorsing Nazi anti-Semitism. This was the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had lived in Nazi Germany during the war and now spouted racism from many pulpits including his radio broadcasts. The weight of world opinion, the tone of media reporting, and the rantings of Arabs such as this mufti subtly conflated the Arab cause with Nazism in the public mind, especially in the West. Arabs not only lost the argument about the land but in the process became the Bad Guys who deserved to lose their land. This combination of feeling wronged and feeling vilified fed a spiraling resentment that rotted into the very anti-Semitism of which Muslims stood accused.

  One man who took part in the debacle of 1948 was Egyptian army officer Gamal Abdul Nasser. Nasser was born in southern Egypt, the son of a humble postman. Even as a boy, he felt keenly wounded by his country’s subservience to Europeans. At an age when most boys were starting to obsess about girls, Nasser was obsessing about his nation’s “honor.” His prospects for doing anything about it looked dim, however, until a sudden need for army officers opened up places for lower class boys in the country’s elite military schools and Nasser rode this opportunity all the way to the rank of colonel.

  The Arab defeat in 1948 deepened his sense of grievance. He blamed the country’s king for it, and so he conspired with some hundred other army officers (“the Free Officers Club”) to overthrow the monarchy and set up a republic. One morning in the summer of 1952, the Free Officers struck hard and fast: a nearly bloodless coup—two casualties and the monarchy was gone.

  Getting rid of the king was the easy part, though. The big step was getting the British out of Egypt. For this step, however, Nasser needed serious firepower. The Cold War being in full swing at this time, almost any emerging nation-state could get arms from one of the two superpowers, so Nasser approached the Americans; but they didn’t see Egypt as a key to “containing” Communism and mistrusted what this Arab fellow would do with weapons, so they turned him down. Nasser then went to the Soviets and from them got mountains of weaponry—which made the Americans sit up and take notice. In typical Cold War fashion, they decided Egypt was important after all. In a bid to win Nasser back, they offered to build him the world’s biggest dam, right across the Nile River at a place called Aswan, a dam that would multiply Egypt’s farmland and produce enough electricity to vault the country into the ranks of industrialized nations instantly! A breathtaking vision—the fulfillment of the secular modernist dream!

  But when Nasser looked at the fine print, he saw that the aid agreement included U.S. military bases on Egyptian soil and U.S. oversight of Egypt’s finances: here was the thin end of the imperialist wedge once again entering his country’s heart. Nasser refused the aid, but could not stop dreaming of the Aswan Dam. But how could he finance the dam without selling his country to one of the superpowers?

  Then he saw the answer: the Suez Canal, of course. The canal was pulling in about $90 million a year, and Egypt was getting only $6.3 million of it, roughly. Here was the money Egypt needed for its development, and it was mostly draining away to Europe! In 1956, Nasser suddenly poured troops into the Canal Zone and took over the canal.

  A furor broke out in Europe. British politicians called Nasser another Hitler, a madman with a grandiose scheme of world conquest. The French press said Egyptians were too primitive to run the canal; they would disrupt global trade and wreck the world economy. These two European countries colluded with Israel in a complicated scheme to bomb Cairo, kill Nasser, and recover the canal.

  Just in time, however, U.S. president Ike Eisenhower heard about the scheme and flew into a rage. Didn’t the Europeans know there was a Cold War on? Didn’t they know their little plot could deliver the whole Middle East to the Soviets? Eisenhower ordered the Europeans to give the canal back to Egypt and go home, and U.S. dominance was such that both countries (and Israel) had to obey.

  Arabs saw this as a great victory for Nasser. For the next eleven heady years, Nasser was the decolonizing hero, the prophet of Arab unity, and the avatar of “Islamic Socialism,” by which he meant a classless society achieved not through class warfare, as in Marxism, but through class cooperation regulated by the principles of Islam—a vigorous “socialist” restatement of the basic secular modernist Muslim creed.

  Nasser built his dam and electrified his nation. He also joined with India’s Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Sri Lanka’s Bandaranaike, and several others to forge the Non-Aligned Movement, a bloc of neutral countries intended to counterbalance the two Cold War superpowers.

  Nasser’s big deeds and global stature won him countless new admirers at home, and not just in Egypt. Arabs of all classes and countries found him intoxicatingly charismatic. As a speaker, no one could touch him. When he spoke, Arabs (who heard him mostly on the radio) said they felt like he was in the room with them, addressing each person eye to eye, drawing each one into a conversation about what was to be done, as if all of them were in this thing together and every one of them mattered.

  Nasser’s popularity got him to dreaming of something bigger than a sovereign Egypt—a pan-Arab nation! This was exactly what the Ba’ath Party had been preaching in Syria. In fact, in 1958, Egypt and Syria tried to form one big country, the United Arab Republic, but Syria seceded three years later—a blow to Nasser’s prestige.

  Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood was still alive. In 1952, they had helped overthrow the Egyptian king but as soon as Nasser’s secular government commenced operations, they turned against him, even attempting to assassinate him. Nasser retaliated by putting the movements’ leaders in prison, where he had them tortured.

  Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, had been assassinated before Nasser’s day, but a nervous, brilliant, erratic, anxi
ous intellectual zealot named Sayyid Qutb had taken charge of the Brotherhood in his place. Qutb’s outlook had been shaped by a curious two-year sojourn at a teacher’s college in Greeley, Colorado, where the Egyptian government had sent him to study U.S. educational methods. The materialism Qutb saw in America repelled him, the individualism disturbed him, the social freedoms unnerved him, and the sexual mores shocked him—the sight, for example, of young men and women square dancing together at a church social!

  Qutb came home convinced that the United States was a Satanic force and had to be destroyed. He began publishing political tracts. He wrote that Islam offered a complete alternative, not just to other religions such as Christianity and Buddhism, but also to other political systems, such as communism and democracy, and he renewed the call for Muslims to rebuild one big universal Muslim community. And if that sounded like he was saying that the Muslim Brotherhood should seize power in Egypt, so be it.

  Nasser clapped this man in prison: big mistake, it turned out. There in prison, garbed in the glamour of victimhood, Qutb wrote his most incendiary work, a book called Milestones. Here, he proposed a radical reinterpretation of Sayyid Jamaluddin’s pan-Islamist modernism. He revived the ancient theoretical schema of a world divided between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the realms of (Muslim) peace and (infidel) violence. Qutb was no ranter. His prose was cool and measured; he picked his words precisely. And in this steady, lucid, unblinking language, he called on every Muslim to embrace and practice jihad, not just against non-Muslims but against Muslims who faltered in their allegiance to Islam or collaborated with the enemy.7 Under Qutb’s leadership, the Muslim Brotherhood basically declared war against the governments of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordon, and Lebanon and against all the secular modernists who supported them.