Western empires and islamization

Review of the relationship in recent history between Islam and the Western sphere.

The gruesome murder of a 47-year-old history teacher, Samuel Paty, gave Macron the perfect opportunity to reopen the fervid topic of “Islamist separatism”. Many believe that this discourse, which some call Islamophobic, is an attempt to appeal the right-wing audiences, and is intensifying the animosity of the French population against the already marginalized Arab and Muslim minority with the impression that France is at the risk of losing its identity, freedom and peaceful future to alleged Islamist forces. This phenomenon has been taking place in other Western countries such as the US, the UK, Germany and Poland. Western media and politicians have been portraying Islam as an uncontrollable and unpredictable foreign beast, who is unstoppably infiltrating western societies in order to establish Sharia law in western democracies.  Neo-conservatives and Orientalists also portray Islam as unchanging, monolithic, acontextual and radical. Hence, they usually link contemporary groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to classical Islam, in other words, they see Osama bin Laden, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and other terrorists as a direct result of the teachings of prophet Muhammad. 

However, in this article I want to take a step back to look at the past, in order to explore the origins of this “unfamiliar beast”. We all know the ancient conflicts between Christendom and Islam that started with the expansion of the Umayyad Caliphate, continued with the Battle of Tours, the Crusaders and the Siege of Vienna. But let’s take a look at what happened afterwards, and let’s see what history teach us.
 

One of the main contemporary western misunderstandings is that Islam is stagnant and acontextual, however Islam, as any other religion, is very dynamic, swinging from more radical waves to more progressive. Likewise, Islam has been influenced and shaped by its social and political context over history. 

Western colonialism in the Middle East began with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798. Christian Cherfils published in 1914 a book about the French attempts to exploit Islam politically, where he explains how the French colonial authorities administered Egypt using the Islamic judicial system, sharia courts and employing religious leaders. The Koran was repeatedly interpreted in favor of the occupying regime, and Napoleon attended a public celebration of the Prophet’s birthday (al-Mawlid) in Cairo.  It became a common practice for the French Empire to employ religious dignitaries and leaders to reinforce control and order. They integrated Islamic institutions like mosques, law courts, and madrassas in the colonial state and controlled and regulated of religious rituals, like the pilgrimage to Mecca (Motadel, 2012). So, surprisingly the French did not end the institutionalization of Islam, but continued and even reinforced the practice.

Years later, in Morocco, a crucial innovation in the imperial administration tactics brought by Marshal Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934) revolutionized colonial practices. Lyautey built France’s control over the countryside on three indigenous pillars: tribal leaders; on mystical (Sufi) Islamic brotherhoods whose network of lodges spanned the country; and the indigenous Berber people (Rogue, 2017). The French soon became convinced that it was more useful to co-operate with the Sufi sheikhs  of the Sufi brotherhoods than with the less influential traditional chiefs. The sheikhs and their brotherhoods were granted full autonomy, and, in return, they endorsed the colonial regime, some even legitimizing French rule in religious terms. Then the French helped the sheikhs to consolidate their position and expand, that is why nowadays the brotherhoods have so much power in West Africa. Lyautey’s system resulted very successful since it provided local leaders incentives to collaborate with, rather than fight, the French colonial administration. For this reason, the system was exported to other French colonies and copied by the British. 

By establishing this cooperation, European empires used Jihad to stir up Muslims in order to fight adversaries. For instance, the  British, French, and the Ottoman used it in the Crimean War (Figues, 2010) , or in WWI both sides – Germany and the Ottoman Empire in one side, and the UK, France and the Hashemites on the other– called for Jihad in order to mobilize Muslims to their side. 
 

After World War II, the European powers began to decolonize many of their territories in the Arab World.  However, most of the countries faced almost constant interference from their western overlords and later on from the USA.

At the beginning of the Cold War Truman appealed for a “moral and spiritual awakening,” a “renewal of religious faith,” and a “revival” (Wallace, 2013). Without renewed religious faith, he declared, “we are lost.” From this, we can infer that religion and the Cold War were strategically intertwined from the very start. The US portrayed the Cold War as a world divided between the believers in the Almighty and the atheists. By the time of Eisenhower, the US Government approached the Muslim leaders based on Christianity’s and Islam’s mutual belief in one God, inciting them to join with the United States in the “holy war” against Communism. The Department of Defense and the CIA devised a plan to provide funds, arms, and other support to Arab leaders who would join sides with the United States against the Soviet Union. Herzog employs a unique metaphor to epitomize the era: “the spiritual-industrial complex” (Wallace,2013).

Client postcolonial states were being settled at the commencement of the Cold War in the MENA region, such a King Farouk I in Egypt, King Abdullah I in Jordan or Sultan Mohammed V in Morocco. Soon leftists and nationalist movements started to become popular in the region, so the heads of the newly formed States started to collaborate with the followers of political Islam and helping them broaden and organize politically into a potent social forces, following the USA commands of fighting 'godless' communism through faith. In return, the USA provided moral and material support to these regimes, such as Jordan, Iran and Libya. Ironically, at the beginning most Muslim-majority states were hostile towards political Islam's followers . By the same token, the USA also established direct relationships in the 1950s and 1960s with Islamist groups, such as the Al-akhwan Al-Muslmoun (the Muslim Brotherhood) in Egypt or Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan.
 

Let’s take the example of Jordan, which royal family presumes of a strong Islamic pedigree, since the Hashemites trace their lineage all the way back to the Hashim clan of the Prophet Muhammad. That is why the official of the country is the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The first ruler of Jordan, Emir (and later King) ‘Abdullah I, was probably cognizant of his Meccan origin and the fact that the country was basically a colonial creation and that these factors decreased his popularity. Therefore, he relied on his lineage as a source of legitimacy and nurtured the Islamization of Jordan. The state is based on Sunni Islamic infrastructure with sharia judges, a Ministry of Religious Endowments and a Fatwa Department influenced by the Hanafi and Maliki schools of Islamic law (Wagemakers, 2019). Likewise, he supported the early Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in the country with an official license in 1946. The Hashemites found in the movement what they were seeking: religious and popular legitimacy. The Muslim Brotherhood also constituted a touchstone of the “efforts in defending and protecting the homeland from the leftist expansion at the time. An expansion that sought to undermine the state and the regime” – quoting King Hussein (Al Shalabi, 2011). They were also crucial in the opposition to Nasserite nationalism, and when the national socialist party won the first and only democratically elected government of the country, the Muslim Brotherhood backed King Hussein’s “preemptive coup” in 1957.  This Cold War policies have shaped Jordan’s religious conservatism and created a perfect environment for the rise of Islamic movements of various types, such as Salafism. This last movement, which is the ideological source of many terrorist organizations, has found in Jordan, for decades, a leading center for Salafi intellectual output (Al Shalabi, 2011). 

Another interesting example is the House of Saud’s emergence. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Saud family was only reigning in Najd – in modern day central Arabian Peninsula-, the British realized the Wahhabis’ potential to disintegrate the Ottoman empire. Hence, in 1865, they put the Saud family on the imperial payroll and by 1915 British and Saudis concluded a treaty by which the UK gave Ibn Saud £20,000, a monthly stipend of £5,000 and a large number of rifles and machine guns, intended to be used against the Ottomans (Rogan, 2017). Later on, in an interview with the Washington Post in 2018, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said the Saudi-funded spread of Wahhabism, such as investments in mosques and madrassas overseas were rooted in the Cold War, when [Western] allies asked Saudi Arabia to use its resources to prevent inroads in Muslim countries by the Soviet Union (DeYoung, 2018).
 

Another astonishing example is the one when the Sha of Iran was overthrown in the Revolution of 1979 by of religious groups and left-wing forces, the US backed the establishment of political Islam by supporting the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini. Additionally, Western media promoted his return from exile in Paris. All this was intended to prevent the rise of Communism in the country at all costs.

Finally, it is important to remember that, with the military and financial support of the United States and Saudi Arabia, religious armies were formed in Afghanistan and Pakistan to wage the Jihad. In the case of Afghanistan, the government, called PDPA, was backed by the USSR, so the USA favored the formation of the Afghan Mujahideen to oppose the PDPA government, with Saudi and Pakistani military assistance.
 

In conclusion, it could be argued that the West was not only participant in the radicalization of this “unknown and unpredictable beast”, but also that our ancestors used for their own interests what today frightens us so much, the Jihad. The increasing radicalization of the right among Muslim populations and, to a lesser extent, in the Muslim diaspora in the West, dates back to the Cold War era, when the United States collaborated with political Islam through postcolonial states. Finally, the current War on Terrorism - War on Terror -, is a war against militant Islam, an offshoot of political Islam.

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