Efraim Karsh is head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, University of London, and has recently published his new book, “Islamic Imperialism: A History.”
“I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’ ” With these farewell words, the prophet Muhammad summed up the international vision of the faith he brought to the world. As a universal religion, Islam envisages a global political order in which all humankind will live under Muslim rule as either believers or subject communities. In order to achieve this goal, it is incumbent on all free, male, adult Muslims to carry out an uncompromising “struggle in the path of Allah,” or jihad. As the 14th-century historian and philosopher Abdel Rahman ibn Khaldun wrote, “In the Muslim community, the jihad is a religious duty because of the universalism of the Islamic mission and the obligation [to convert] everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”
It was not coincidence that Osama bin Laden echoed these words in his glee after September 11: “I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah and his prophet is Muhammad.”
Bernard Lewis, a leading scholar of Islamist rage, places the fault line at the failure of the Muslim world to keep up with the West in the modern world. Diminishing Muslim power is both a humiliation and in Muslim minds a reversal of divine law, driving the losers to pick through the verses of the Koran to find justification for violence against winners. For many centuries Islam was the greatest civilization on Earth — the richest, the most powerful, the most creative in every significant field of human endeavor. Its armies, its teachers and its traders were advancing on every front in Asia, in Africa, in Europe, bringing, as they saw it, civilization and religion to the infidel barbarians who lived beyond the Muslim frontier. And then everything changed, and Muslims, instead of invading and dominating Christendom, were invaded and dominated by Christian powers. The resulting frustration and anger at what seemed to them a reversal of both natural and divine law have been growing for centuries, and have reached a climax in our own time.
Other scholars blame Western colonialism and imperialism, along with Judeo-Christian traditions, as contributing to the violent mentality of the extremists.
But there’s another, more correct, view. “The Middle East’s experience is the culmination of long-existing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior, first and foremost the region’s millenarian imperial tradition,” writes Efraim Karsh. “External influences, however potent, have played only a secondary role, constituting neither the primary force behind the Middle East’s political development nor the main cause of its notorious volatility.”
As a historical matter, the birth of Islam was inextricably linked with empire. Unlike Christianity and the Christian kingdoms that once existed under or alongside it, Islam has never distinguished between temporal and religious powers, which were combined in the person of Muhammad. Having fled from his hometown of Mecca to Medina in 622 c.e. to become a political and military leader rather than a private preacher, Muhammad spent the last ten years of his life fighting to unify Arabia under his rule. Indeed, he devised the concept of jihad shortly after his migration to Medina as a means of enticing his local followers to raid Meccan caravans. Had it not been for his sudden death, he probably would have expanded his reign well beyond the peninsula.
Islamic history has been anything but reactive. From Muhammad to the Ottomans, the story of Islam has been the story of the rise and fall of an often astonishing imperial aggressiveness and, no less important, of never quiescent imperial dreams. Even as these dreams have repeatedly frustrated any possibility for the peaceful social and political development of the Arab-Muslim world, they have given rise to no less repeated fantasies of revenge and restoration and to murderous efforts to transform fantasy into fact. If, today, America is reviled in the Muslim world, it is not because of its specific policies but because, as the preeminent world power, it blocks the final realization of this same age-old dream of regaining, in Zawahiri’s words, the “lost glory” of the caliphate. Islam is not a religion of peace and co-existance, and never has been. Islam has always been a cult of death bent on world domination.
Muhammad proselytized with violence and used violence to consolidate conquest. Occupying territory was as important as converting or killing unbelievers. When the Jews of Medina resisted Muhammad in the 7th century, he beheaded the men and sold their women and children into slavery - actions completely opposite of another Middle East prophet - Jesus. Muhammad, who claimed to derive his power and authority from Allah, was not only head of the captured states but was the single religious authority. “This allowed the prophet to cloak political ambitions with a religious aura,” writes Mr. Karsh, “and to channel Islam’s energies into its instrument of aggressive expansion.” The ultimate goal would be for the world either to embrace Islam or live under its domination - a goal still envisioned today.
And this vision is not confined to a tiny extremist fringe. This we saw in the overwhelming support for the 9/11 attacks throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds, in the admiring evocations of bin Laden’s murderous acts during the crisis over the Danish cartoons, and in such recent findings as the poll indicating significant reservoirs of sympathy among Muslims in Britain for the “feelings and motives” of the suicide bombers who attacked London last July. In the historical imagination of many Muslims and Arabs, bin Laden represents nothing short of the new incarnation of Saladin, defeater of the Crusaders and conqueror of Jerusalem. In this sense, the House of Islam’s war for world mastery is a traditional, indeed venerable, quest that is far from over.
What the people who blew up little schoolgirls and shot nuns in the back fear is not that the US is going to permanently occupy Iraq. They fear that we’re going to permanently change Iraq and the hearts and minds of its citizens - the Islamists’ cannon fodder.
Some analysts now see a new “axis of Islam” arising in the Middle East, uniting Hizballah, Hamas, Iran, Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood, elements of Iraq’s Shiites, and others in an anti-American, anti-Israel alliance backed by Russia.
As one of the Islamic fanatics who inspired al-Qa’eda said: “We are not trying to negotiate with you. We are trying to destroy you.” The Islamic terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center, those who bombed Bali, and whoever it was in Spain who demonstrated a comparable appetite for indiscriminate killing, do not have specific political goals. They wish to destroy the whole basis of Western society - secular democracy, individual liberty, equality before the law, toleration, and pluralism - and replace it with a theocracy based on a perverted and dogmatic interpretation of the Koran. That is why the suggestion that we should try to negotiate with such terrorists is so fatuous: there is nothing whatever to negotiate about.
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All the above brought only angry but empty words and, at most, a few misdirected missiles. The conclusion bin Laden and others drew was that the United States had become feeble and frightened and incapable of responding. The crimes of Sept. 11 were the result of this perception and were intended to be the opening salvo of a large-scale campaign to force Americans and their allies out of Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world, to overthrow the corrupt tyrants America supports, and to prepare the ground for the final world struggle. You choose whether you will roll over and play dead, or defend your freedom and liberty against tyrany.
The fuel of Islamic imperialism remains as volatile as ever, and is very far from having burned itself out. To deny its force is the height of ignorance and blindness, and to imagine that it can be appeased or deflected is to play into its hands (Europe, are you listening?). Only when it is defeated, and when the faith of Islam is no longer a tool of Islamic political ambition, will the inhabitants of Muslim lands, and the rest of the world, be able to look forward to a future less burdened by Saladins and their gory dreams.
Until then we continue within World War III.
Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, Muhammad, Islam, Muslim, bin Laden, Allah, Arabia, Ottoman
