From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  Although never a European colony, oil-rich Iran had been dominated by British and Russian imperialists since the nineteenth century. Al-Afghani had witnessed the first of the great anti-imperialist movements in 1891. There were more to come after the First World War. Not content with appropriating large parts of the Ottoman Empire, Lord Curzon, then the British foreign minister, hatched a scheme to annex Iran, convinced, as his early biographer Harold Nicolson put it, that ‘God had personally selected the British upper class as an instrument of the Divine Will’. Iranian nationalism strengthened throughout the early half of the twentieth century against a backdrop of such blatant foreign interference. Its galvanizing moment came in 1953 when the CIA, working alongside British intelligence officers, toppled the elected nationalist government of Mohammad Mossadegh that had threatened to nationalize Western oil interests, and re-installed Shah Reza Pahlavi. With a Western-backed despot at its head, Iran seemed to be going backwards in the age of decolonization, and the shah obliged his supporters in the West by undermining all nationalist, socialist and liberal organizations in the country, paving the way, as it turned out, for an explicitly Islamic movement.

  At a time when the ideals of democracy and republicanism inspired masses as well as intellectuals in most postcolonial countries, Iran under the shah seemed to be actively working to depoliticize its citizenry. In lieu of a nation-building ideology, the Pahlavi regime offered a mix of Persian chauvinism, the cult of the shah, and a tarted-up version of Iran’s pre-Islamic history. But it attracted neither the traditionalist masses nor the expanding middle class. The grandiose schemes of land reform, industrialization and urbanization the shah imposed on his largely peasant population led to an ever-deeper discontent. The attempt to push Iran into the twentieth century created a small middle class, but it also uprooted millions of people from their traditional rural homes and exposed them to the degradations of urban life. Inequality increased as a small urban elite prospered and acquired the symbols of a modern consumer economy.

  In the early 1960s, Iranian intellectuals began to republish with new introductions works by al-Afghani; he was a hero among Islamic radicals at Tehran University in the 1970s, the Islamic counter to the icons of Marx, Mao and Che Guevara cherished by left-leaning students – ‘the man’, as Ali Shariati put it in 1970, ‘who first raised the voice of awareness in the dormant East’.52 Building on the visceral anti-Westernism of men like al-Afghani, Iranian intellectuals had by the late 1970s developed a systematic critique of the political and economic systems and ideologies – industrial capitalism, the bureaucratic nation-state, Marxism – created by the revolutions of the West and spread by Western imperialists round the world in the previous two centuries.

  The most prominent among these intellectuals was Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923 – 69), whose neologism gharbzadegi (‘Westoxification’, or more literally ‘West-struckness’, which connotes both bewitchment and sickness), popularized in 1962 in a book that often reads like an Iranian version of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, became synonymous with the pathology of mindless imitation of the West. According to Al-e Ahmad, it was a symptom of rootlessness: ‘the aggregate of events in the life, culture, civilization, and mode of thought of a people having no supporting traditions, no historical continuity, no gradient of transformation.’53 Initially a communist and secular nationalist, Al-e Ahmad claimed (anticipating a Marxist critique that was to become well known in the 1970s) that the global economic system was designed to benefit the West and keep the rest of the world in a perpetual state of underdevelopment. The old world of East-West parity and exchanges had given way to one in which countries that were rich, industrialized, and exporters of finished products and culture lorded it over those that were still largely poor, agricultural, producers of raw materials, and helpless consumers of Western products as well as of Western culture. And development, even if miraculously achieved by Asian countries like Iran and India, was only going to lead to the drab consumerist dystopia of the West.

  Meanwhile, Western oil companies that controlled Iran’s oil were making the country’s economy wholly dependent on the West. Recycling petrodollars for tractors, the West was forcing the mechanization of agriculture; the result was extensive and unmanageable rural migration to the cities. The industrialization championed by the West and its local agents in Iran was also destroying local handicrafts, causing massive unemployment. Echoing al-Afghani, Al-e Ahmad lamented that Iranians received news of the world through such unreliable filters as Reuters, and that an uprooted generation of Westernized or West-returned Iranians had become handmaidens to Western power.

  Initially, Al-e Ahmad thought that gharbzadegi could be countered by sending Iranian students to Japan and India rather than the West: the East-struck Iranians would balance the West-struck ones. Islam played no role at all in this scheme. However, a visit to the then new nation-state of Israel in 1962 impressed upon him the power of political solidarity built upon a shared religion: ‘I as an Easterner [prefer] an Israeli model over all other models of how to deal with the West,’ he wrote in his diary.54 Israel had turned into a modern and independent nation without losing its religious and cultural identity, unlike Turkey. Al-e Ahmad became convinced of the importance of developing an indigenous approach to Iran’s economic and political problems. He identified Shiite Islam as the right kind of vaccine for gharbzadegi, and the ulema as the appropriate doctors to administer it. As he saw it, the clergy were the only group of people in Iran not to be intoxicated by the West, and hence likely allies of secular intellectuals. They were men of learning of mostly lower-class backgrounds who spoke the language of, and were therefore trusted by, the masses. Of course, Al-e Ahmad had in mind the tobacco rebellion in which al-Afghani had played a role in bringing about an alliance between the clergy and nationalist intellectuals that mobilized the Iranian masses in a popular movement.

  Imprisoned by the shah in the early 1960s, Mehdi Bazargan (1907 – 95), a distinguished scientist who was later appointed by Ayatollah Khomeini as the first prime minister of post-revolution Iran in 1979, wrote a history of India’s freedom movement. Bazargan revered al-Afghani and Muhammad Iqbal, but he was particularly attentive to the role of popular religiosity in Gandhi’s mass campaign against the British. It began, he wrote, ‘by a spiritual and mental revolution and conviction, with a pure spiritual force’ and ‘penetrated the hearts and minds of the educated class’, creating ‘leaders and sympathizers’.55 India was now as West-struck as Iran, but for Bazargan its liberation from Western rule together with the charismatic figure of Gandhi, who appealed to the masses as well as to intellectuals, held up an inspiring example to Iranians aspiring to revolutionary change through religion.

  The Paris-educated Ali Shariati went even further in the direction of making Shiite Islam seem a mass-mobilizing ideology. Less intellectually rigorous than Al-e Ahmad, Shariati described in more emotive terms the West’s domination of Iran:

  My friend, I live in a society where I face a system which controls half of the universe, maybe all of it. Mankind is being driven into a new stronghold of slavery. Although we are not in physical slavery, we are truly destined with a fate worse than yours! Our thoughts, hearts, and will powers are enslaved. In the name of sociology, education, art, sexual freedom, financial freedom, love of exploitation, and love of individuals, faith in goals, faith in humanitarian responsibility and belief in one’s own school of thought are entirely taken away from within our hearts! The system has converted us into empty pots which accommodate whatever is poured inside them.56

  Shariati greatly admired the political activism of al-Afghani, but faulted him for depending too much on conservative ruling classes and for failing to see the revolutionary potential of young masses. The translator of Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara, Ali Shariati nevertheless expanded their conventionally anti-imperialist critiques to include the Western secular ideologies of salvation: socialism and communism. He was inspired by, among other Islamic thinkers, Sayyid Qutb, Iqba
l and Abul Ala Mawdudi, whose writings had begun to be translated into Persian in the 1950s. ‘Marxism itself’, he wrote, ‘is utterly a product of the history, social organization, and cultural outlook of this same West’ that it sought to negate.57

  Shariati combined a Western tradition of historical determinism with a Shiite millenarian tradition to argue for Islam as an ideology of emancipation. Such thinkers as Shariati and Morteza Motahhari (1920 – 79), an erudite cleric and activist, laid the intellectual foundations of the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979 by arguing that the history of Shiite imams furnished everything from a specific ‘political strategy’ to a ‘tradition of party campaign and organization’.58

  As it turned out, most Iranians, who saw the corrupt and repressive shah as a tool of American interests, sought political redemption through their faith. The experience of deprivation, loneliness and anomie had made many Muslims in urban centres turn towards rather than away from Islam. The shah alienated them even further with his brutal attempt to create a dictatorship, following the then-fashionable theory outlined by the American social scientist Samuel Huntington, according to which premature democracy in modernizing Third World countries created chaos rather than political stability, undermining the rule of law and the possibility of economic and social development.

  When the revolt finally erupted in Iran in the late 1970s, every major socio-political organization outside the state joined it – secular communists and nationalists as well as religious radicals. Millions of demonstrators and strikers appeared united by their hatred for the American-backed shah. But it was an exiled cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, the charismatic figure dreamt of by Bazargan in the 1960s, who emerged as the most visible face of protest by deftly using the idiom of Shiite Islam – and anti-imperialism: ‘Islam is the religion of militant individuals who are committed to truth and justice. It is the religion of those who desire freedom and independence. It is the school of those who struggle against imperialism.’59

  A referendum held weeks after his triumphant return to Iran in 1979 overwhelmingly endorsed Khomeini; 99 per cent of Iranians voted in favour of Iran being made into an Islamic Republic. ‘Come friends,’ Ali Shariati had paraphrased Frantz Fanon in the 1960s, ‘let us abandon Europe; let us cease this nauseating apish imitation of Europe. Let us leave behind this Europe that always speaks of humanity, but destroys human beings wherever it finds them.’60 Revolutionary Iran seemed to be fulfilling the wildest dreams of such anti-Western radicals as Shariati. Certainly the clerics, while using an explicitly religious idiom to get the Iranian masses on their side, did not just address religious issues. At a dark time in twentieth-century Muslim history, the devil speaking in Muhammad Iqbal’s poem Iblees Ki Majlis-e-Shura (‘The Parliament of Satan’) had lamented:

  I know that this community no longer cherishes the Qur’an

  That capitalism is now also the Faith of the Believer.

  I know too, that in the dark night of the East

  The defenders of faith no longer possess Moses’ illuminating hand

  But the imperatives of the present age make me apprehensive

  That the path of the Prophet may yet reveal itself to the people.61

  So it now seemed to happen. The Iranian clerics used an explicitly Islamic vocabulary with a left-wing programme to propose revisions of property ownership, expropriate the wealth of the bourgeoisie, secure freedom from foreign economic and military domination, control vulgar consumption and promise social welfare to the poor. (It was no accident that two of the main left-leaning intellectuals – Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati – had clerical fathers.)

  As it turned out, Khomeini kept the shah’s authoritarian state more or less intact. Far from expressing a political spirituality, he installed clerics in powerful positions and began to use the shah’s methods – secret police, torture, execution – against his real and perceived opponents, and on a larger scale than the shah. (Opposed to the creeping clerical despotism, Mehdi Bazargan first resigned from the government, and then became an intrepid critic of the Iranian regime.) The long war with Iraq (1980 – 88), initiated by the Western-backed Saddam Hussein, tightened the hold of religious radicals over the levers of state power.

  The early ferocity of the Revolution has abated since then. The regime has relied more upon development fuelled by oil revenues and mass literacy drives than terror for its legitimacy. And there have been reformist trends within the regime. The intellectual Abdolkarim Soroush has rejected Ali Shariati’s description of Islam as an ideology and has called for an ‘Islamic secularism’; he is a major influence upon the country’s pro-democracy Green Movement. The generational shift within Iranian Islam was articulated most cogently by Sayyid Muhammad Khatami, who was twice elected president in the 1990s and zooos. But even Khatami, who emphasizes a ‘dialogue of civilizations’ and concedes many positive aspects to the West, believes that Western civilization is ‘worn out and senile’ and is trying to preserve its dominance by ‘adapting neo-colonialism’ to the new age.62 It is largely due to the Islamic Revolution in Iran that today the basic principles of the first Muslim Westernized elites – that development entails the rejection of Islamic values in favour of Western ones – lie discredited from Tunisia to Xinjiang, and that Islam continues to serve as a focal point of resistance to authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world.

  Khatami’s successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, vends much cruder versions of his ideas, directing populist nationalism against Israel, the old bugbear of politicized Muslims in the region. He supports anti-Western forces across the Middle East, and his obsession with nuclear power, which is backed by all sections of political opinion in Iran including those opposed to the Islamic regime, carefully manipulates the potent sentiments of Iranian nationalism. His populism represents the democratization of anti-Westernism in Muslim countries.

  That resentment has also been globalized, and channelled into acts of spectacular violence in the past two decades by al-Qaeda and its affiliates. It’s no accident that militants from Morocco to Sumatra and Xinjiang to Mozambique found a hospitable home in Afghanistan, another country where Westernized elites violently imposed their ways on a large majority. In the 1970s a communist regime in Afghanistan, propped up by the Soviet Union, tried to modernize hastily and brutally what it saw as a feudal and backward society, uprooting people from their traditional cultures and forcing them into Western-style cities and occupations. There were many who resisted, and within just a few months, 12,000 people considered anti-communist, many of them members of the country’s educated elite, were killed in Kabul alone; many thousands more were murdered in the countryside.

  The rest of this appalling story of Afghanistan’s destruction is better known. The subsequent backlash from radical Islamists was supported by the United States, and turned, with the help of Pakistan’s Islamist dictator General Zia-ul-Haq and Saudi Arabia, into the first global jihad in Islam’s long history. Wherever there were Muslims, Saudi petrodollars underwrote Wahhabist mosques, madrasas and clerics. Victory against Soviet Communism – a godless ideology of the amoral West – emboldened radical Islamists, and expanded their anti-Western agenda.

  In Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and many other countries, Islamists had often articulated popular opposition to Western imperialists, and then acquired greater support as postcolonial elites, which claimed to be nationalist and socialist, proved to be corrupt and despotic. The Islamists invoked, too, the plight of Palestinian refugees and the standing insult the presence of Israel in the Middle East posed to Muslim pride. But it was the experience of training and fighting together during the decade-long anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan that bound the Islamists together into an international community. It defined their enemy more clearly than before – the materialist and imperialist civilization of the West in which both communists and capitalists were complicit – and stoked their fantasy of a global caliphate. In the 1990s, such Afghanistan-trained Islamists declared jihad against Westernize
d and Westernizing elites in their respective countries, and were brutally crushed.

  Many strands and tendencies merged in this joint revolt against local tyrants and their Western allies. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who later became notorious for his brutality as leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, spent five years in a Jordanian prison for conspiring to overthrow the monarchy and replace it with a caliphate. Osama bin Laden was outraged by the Saudi support for the American-led war on Iraq in 1991. Extremist Wahhabism, in the person of bin Laden, joined with Sayyid Qutb’s Egyptian Islamism in the person of Ayman al-Zawahiri, a refugee from a long-running Western-backed secular dictatorship in Egypt who became bin Laden’s deputy. These were the ideological heirs of Qutb, whom they claimed as their inspiration for jihad (they were also indebted to Mawdudi for their idea of a ‘vanguard’ revolutionary movement). Qutb had indeed prophesized a global combat between Islam and the West, and exhorted Muslims to shed their passivity and become self-motivated individuals fulfilling God’s will. But his zealous followers went way beyond anything their mentor advocated in targeting civilians, including Muslims. Failure to topple their own regimes, and news of atrocities committed against the devout in Palestine, Kashmir and Chechnya by pro-Western countries like Israel, India and Russia, made them determined to strike the apparent puppet-master, the United States, and set off a worldwide clash between Muslims and the West. After a series of abortive attempts, the militants finally succeeded on 11 September 2001.