by Tamim Ansary
Egypt had no democratic process with which to co-opt the Brotherhood’s hold on the underclass. Nasser relied instead on police power to quell demonstrations and on secret police to nip conspiracies in the bud.
Qutb and his brotherhood were all the more irritating to Nasser because he had plenty of other rivals assailing him, more daunting ones, he thought. The rulers of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq envied Nasser’s popularity, and they were doing their best to discredit him. Ba’ath activists challenged his status among Arabs, claiming that they were the real pan-Arab nationalists. Then there were Egypt’s communists. At the height of the Cold War, given their pipeline to Soviet support, they no doubt seemed more dangerous than some cult organizing the Muslim rabble. And finally there were the frankly antirevolutionary monarchs and the tribal dynasts who still ruled some of the Arab states, and who disapproved of everything Nasser stood for.
In 1963, Nasser blundered into a proxy war in Yemen. He sent troops in only as a gesture, to show support for a socialist party that had seized power there by ousting the tribal monarchy; but as soon as Egyptian troops arrived in Yemen, Saudi Arabia began pumping money and guns to the royalists. Suddenly Nasser found himself bogged down in a quagmire of a war that dragged on without result for years.
Meanwhile, Sayyid Qutb went on preaching his doctrines from prison. Nasser decided that, frustrated though he was on other fronts, he didn’t have to put up with this gadfly. In August 1966, he did what men with too much power and too few procedural restraints often do: he had Qutb hanged—only to see him hailed as a martyr by a frighteningly far-flung network of admirers.
Just three months later, Syria and Israel got locked into a cycle of raids and counterraids back and forth across their border, which escalated for six months, growing ever more bloody. Ba’athists ruled Syria by this point. They were Nasser’s main rivals in the secular modernist camp and by going toe-to-toe with Israel, they were gaining credibility at Nasser’s expense, among Arabs generally and among the Palestinians in particular, those wretched refugees still mired in the camps.
So there was Nasser, hero of the Arab world, besieged by his own Arab Muslim masses, eclipsed by his Arab secular modernist rivals, bogged down in an endless war—with other Arabs. Clearly he needed to do something! And clearly it could not be directed against any other Arab country, group, or movement.
This is where matters stood in the spring of 1967, just before one of the most seminal events of modern history, at least as seen through Islamic eyes: Israel’s Six Day War against her Arab neighbors.
17
The Tide Turns
1369-1421 AH 1950-2001 CE
IN MAY, 1967, Nasser began to spout martial rhetoric at Israel; to prove he meant business, he even blockaded Israel’s access to the Red Sea. Actually, of course, with seventy thousand of his best troops bogged down in Yemen, Nasser could not possibly take any real military action; but a man can talk. Talk, if it’s tough enough, will sometimes do the job.
And sometimes not. On June 5, without warning, Israel attacked Egypt, Jordan, and Syria simultaneously. “Without warning” should be uttered with an asterisk here: Arab-Israeli tension had been ratcheting up for months. Yet none of the Arab states were expecting a war on that June morning; and none of them were ready.
In the first twenty-four hours, Israel destroyed virtually the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. In the next five days, Israel conquered all the territories penciled in by the United Nations as the state of Palestine. These became instead the Occupied Territories, ruled by Israel but populated mostly by Palestinians. By the seventh day, the war was over, and the world would never be the same.
You might think there can be no such thing as a triumph too decisive. And maybe not, in a conflict between two monolithic sides. But in 1967, when Israel won the most decisive victory in the history of modern warfare, it wasn’t clashing with a monolith. The Arab side was a querulous scramble of contradictions locked in struggle with one another.
The Six Day War humiliated Nasser, finished his career. Within four years the man was literally dead. If Nasser had really been the leader of a monolithic Arab bloc, his defeat might have forced “the Arabs” to come to terms with Israel and work out some basis for eventual peace.
But there was no “the Arabs.” Nasser was in fact just one contender among several for leadership of just one current among all who called themselves Arabs: secular modernism. When Israel attacked the Arabs, it really attacked only this current; and when it crushed Nasser, it damaged only this Westernizing, modernizing, secular, nationalist tendency, and not even every expression of that. With Nasser’s fall, down went “Nasserism,” that odd mélange of secular modernism and Islamic socialism. Into the power vacuum left by its demise flowed other, more dangerous forces, some of them more primal, more irrational.
In the wake of the war, the Arab refugees clumped along the borders of Israel gave up hope that any Arab state would save them and decided to rely only on themselves henceforth. These refugees, their numbers swelled to more than a million by the latest mayhem, could properly be called Palestinians at this point, because their intense shared historical experience had certainly given them a common identity and made them a “nation” in the classic sense. They were now the “people without a land” and among these Palestinians sprouted many groups dedicated to the restoration of Palestine by any means. The biggest of them drifted into a coalition called the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had been founded in 1964 as a mechanism by which Arab governments could “manage” the Palestinians. After the Six Day War, Palestinians took control of this organization and made it their own. A part-time engineer and full-time revolutionary named Yasser Arafat emerged as its chairman 1, and with the PLO as their quasi-government, the Palestinians dug in for a protracted war with Israel. This was the first consequence of the Six Day War.
Second, the fall of Nasser created an opening for the other secular Arab nationalist movement, the one founded by Michel Aflaq. His party had joined with the Syrian Socialist Party to form the Ba’ath Socialist Party, the ideology of which combined state-glorifying socialism with Arab-worshipping nationalism. After the Six Day War, disgruntled army officers flooded into this new Ba’ath, giving the already unhealthy nationalist-socialist mixture a militaristic cast. What had started out as a fairly liberal, modernist movement, dedicated to women’s rights, equality for religious minorities, freedom of speech, civil liberty, democracy, literacy, and other such progressive ideals, now skewed sharply toward nationalistic developmentalism with totalitarian overtones. The Ba’ath credo boiled down to a shout of, “Our Nation! Our nation must develop factories, industry, bombs!” Even before the Six Day War, the Ba’ath Party had taken control of Syria; after the Six Day War, a second branch of the party seized power in Iraq and began to build a police state soon to be headed up by that take-no-prisoners dictator Saddam Hussein. Both Ba’ath parties had popular support at first, because the Arab citizens of their countries were frightened by Israel and wounded by the debacle of 1967; they were desperate for someone to restore their pride. But the glow faded as the middle-class masses in Syria and Iraq tasted life under the boot of an ideology that had nothing at its core but power. And this was a second consequence of the Six Day War.
The third consequence was the most ominous. The Six Day War marked a turning point in the general struggle between the secular modernists of the Islamic World and adherents of those other currents of Islamic thought and action coming out of the nineteenth century: Wahhabism and the various strains of political Islamism.
In Saudi Arabia, Wahhabis already had a state of their own. Though Egypt had a long claim to being the center of the Arab world, Saudi Arabia could bid for that status too, in part because it controlled the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Any weakening of Egypt added to Saudi Arabia’s power—and what power it was! Oil gave the Wahhabis wealth, and U.S. arms gave them military strength. With Egypt in disarray, Wahhabi clerics quietly began u
sing their resources to fund missionary activity throughout the Muslim world, setting up religious schools, building mosques, appointing imams, and establishing charities that extended their reach into the lives of poor and rural Muslims everywhere, extended south into sub-Saharan Africa and east to the southern Pushtoons of Afghanistan, and on into Pakistan, where Wahhabi ideology already had millions of adherents.
Then there was the Muslim Brotherhood. When Nasser lost face in the Six Day War, the Egyptian masses simply abandoned him. They turned instead to the vast anti-Nasserite movement permeating their country. And now, the Muslim Brotherhood metastasized. The organization itself thrust beyond the borders of Egypt, into Syria, into Jordan, into the Arab emirates and the rest of Arab heartland. What’s more, the original movement began sprouting offshoots, each one more radical than the last. One such branch was Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, founded by a man named al-Zawaheri, who in turn mentored the now-infamous Saudi jihadist Osama bin Laden.
Some ideologues inspired by Qutb began to teach that jihad was not only “an obligation” for devout Muslims but the “sixth pillar” of Islam, on a par with prayer, pilgrimage, fasting, charity, and the creed of monotheism. A few extremists, such as Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, went even further and declared that participation in jihad was the only way to distinguish a Muslim from a non-Muslim: according to his doctrine, anyone who held back from armed struggle was fair game.2 These hardcore revolutionaries should properly be called “jihadists” rather than simply “Islamists.” Their ideology was plainly off the charts for the vast majority of Muslims, hardly even recognizable as Islam to most: it was a sliver of Islamism, itself a sliver of political Islam, itself one branch of Islam as a whole.
Overall then, what did the Six Day War accomplish? Israel gained the Occupied Territories. They were supposed to buffer the country against further attacks. Instead, within those same territories, Israeli authorities have faced ever-mounting insurgencies called intifadas, to which they have responded with ever more brutal measures. Year after year and decade after decade, this strike-and-counterstrike syndrome has drained the nation’s energies and compromised its moral arguments in the world.
On the other side of the ledger, the war radicalized and “Palestinianized” the PLO, empowered the Ba’ath party, and energized the Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned Jihadist splinters as the years went by, ever more extremist zealots who mounted increasingly horrific attacks not just at innocent bystanders who got in the way—a tragic byproduct of virtually all wars—but against anyone who could be gotten and the more innocent the better, the distinctive genre of violence known today as terrorism. In short, the Six Day war was a crushing setback for world peace, a disaster for the Muslim world, and not much good in the end even for Israel.
Such was the narrative that unfolded in the Arab heartland after World War II. Let me go back now and follow another thread of narrative further east, in the Persian heartland. There too a seminal event took place, almost as world-changing as the Six Day War, because it established, in the Islamic world, an image of the United States that has proved intractable.
It was only after World War I that Muslims really started taking notice of the United States, and their first impression was highly favorable. Right through World War II, they admired America’s sleek efficiency, its ability to pour out wonderful goods, its military strength, especially in light of the higher values the United States proclaimed—freedom, justice, democracy. They respected the American argument that its political system could save people of every nation from poverty and oppression. American idealists proffered democracy with something of the same ardor enjoyed by religious movements, making it a competitor to other world-organizing social ideas such as communism, fascism, and Islam. Religious Muslims may have rejected America’s moral claims, but secular modernist Muslims saw great hope in it, and found no inherent contradiction between American ideals and Islam as they understood it.
When Wilson’s Fourteen Points came to nothing, Muslims didn’t blame the United States; they blamed the European old guard. In the last days of World War II, American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt renewed America’s moral leadership by issuing (with Winston Churchill) the Atlantic Charter, a document calling for the liberation and democratization of all countries. Churchill later said he didn’t mean it, but American leaders never repudiated the charter. In fact, just after the war, the United States took the lead in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was issued by the United Nations, more proof, if any were needed, that America was committed to supporting political freedom and democracy everywhere.
All this looked very good to Iranians. In the wake of World War II they were ready to resume a project dear to the secular modernists among them: replacing dynastic despotism with homegrown democracy. Reza Shah Pahlavi had blocked this project for decades, but he was gone, finally: the Allies, the wonderful Allies, had removed him during the war for flirting with the Nazis. The stage was set for Iranians to restore their 1906 constitution, resurrect their parliament, and hold real elections: at last they could build the secular democracy they had dreamed about for so long.
With high hopes, then, Iranians went to the polls and voted a secular modernist named Mohammad Mosaddeq into power as their prime minister. Mosaddeq had pledged to recover total control of the country’s most precious resource, its oil, and accordingly upon taking office he canceled the lease with British Petroleum and announced that he was nationalizing the Iranian oil industry.
Nice try.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency immediately moved to stop “this madman Mosaddeq” (as U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles called him). In late August of 1953, a faction of the Iranian military carried out a bloody CIA-funded coup that left thousands dead in the streets and put Iran’s most popular political figure under house arrest from which he never emerged. In his place, the CIA restored the son of Reza Shah Pahlavi (also called Reza Shah Pahlavi) as the country’s king. The young shah signed a treaty with the United States giving an international consortium of oil corporations the job of “managing” Iran’s oil.
It would be hard to overstate the feeling of betrayal this coup embedded in Iran or the shudder of anger it sent through the Muslim world. Just three years later, Eisenhower’s intervention secured the Suez Canal for Egypt, but the United States reaped no public relations benefit out of it among Muslims: Nasser got all the credit. Why? Because the damage done by the CIA coup in Iran was too deep. Across the Islamic heartland and indeed throughout the once-colonized world, the conviction took hold that the imperialist project was still alive, but with the United States at the helm now, in place of Great Britain. From the perspective of the Islamic narrative, the history unfolding in Iran still revolved around the struggle between secular and religious impulses. How best to revive Islam, how to recover Muslim strength, how to cast off the weight of the West—these were the issues that drove events. But Iran was also part of the world narrative now, and that narrative revolved around the superpower competition for control of the planet. From that perspective, what shaped events were Cold War strategic considerations and the politics of oil. The same held true throughout the Middle World, and these two sets of issues continued to intertwine throughout Dar al-Islam to the end of the century.
East of Iran, the Cold War simply looked like the Great Game revisited. The differences were only cosmetic. What had been czarist Russia was now called the Soviet Union. The role once played by Great Britain now belonged to the United States. The dynamics, however, were the same: the intrigues, the pressures, the threat of violence, and the actual bloodshed.
The scale was bigger, though. The Great Game had unfolded along the line where the Russian Empire butted against the British one. The Cold War was driven by U.S. determination to block Soviet expansion around the world; and since new nation-states were emerging everywhere, and most of them had the potential to end up as either Soviet or U.
S. allies, the line of scrimmage in the Cold War could be anywhere on earth. Every potentially disputed country could receive money and guns from both superpowers, one funneling aid to the government, the other to some anti-government insurgency, depending on which way that country tilted.
The core battlefield of the Great Game had been Iran, Afghanistan, and central Asia, and this region remained in play. The Russians of the nineteenth century had wanted to push south through Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf to secure a warm water port for their navies and shipping. The Soviets had the same interest, but with added stakes: geologists were now confirming that roughly 65 percent of the world’s petroleum lay under and around the Persian Gulf and in a few other Muslim countries of North Africa (and much of the rest of it, geologists would later find, lay in the Muslim countries of Central Asia, north of Afghanistan.) With global industrialization escalating off the charts, the significance of oil was still soaring.
Although oil had a huge political impact on the Muslim world, its social impact was probably even deeper. Ever since the 1930s, countries that had oil had been chipping away at the rapacious terms of those early leases. Every few years one or another of them had managed to renegotiate its agreements with foreign oil corporations and come away with incrementally better terms. By 1950, the “oil exporting” countries were generally receiving as much as 50 percent of the revenues from their oil, and from that time on considerable wealth began flowing into the region.
This sudden gush of wealth might have had a very different impact if only democratic institutions had emerged in the oil-rich nations before oil was discovered. With power distributed throughout society in these countries, with avenues of participation available to people of all classes, the wealth might have empowered the creative energies of millions and sparked a cultural renaissance.
