AUTHOR'S NOTE: I wrote the following in July 2013 as a section of a book chapter that discusses a number of alternative paradigms to the Westphalian system of sovereign territorial states that might be in play in the 21st century. I readily admit that I viewed the transnational Islamic state as a long-term rival vision of international order to the Westphalian system rather than as an entity with which Westphalian states would forcefully engage in the immediate future. Events have moved far faster than I imagined.
The lead section of the same book chapter is "The Submerged State." --TG
The lead section of the same book chapter is "The Submerged State." --TG
Samuel P. Huntington (1993;
1996) challenged Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) thesis that the collapse of communism signaled
the approaching “end of history,” that capitalism had triumphed as the only
rational economic system and liberal democracy had triumphed as the only
legitimate form of government, and that it was only the dwindling number of
states that had yet to embrace these twin inevitabilities that were still “in
history.” Huntington argued that there was some history yet to come in that
there were still issues over which the human race could pick fights, predicting
a coming series of struggles rooted in contending religion-based world views.
In drawing these cultural tectonic plates that he called “civilizations,” he
identified Western Christendom, Eastern Christendom, Animist Sub-Saharan
Africa, Islam, Hindu India, Buddhist Southeast Asia, Confucian China, and
Shinto Japan. In particular, he singled out Islam’s propensity for violence.
[Conflict] has been most frequent and most
violent between groups belonging to different civilizations. In Eurasia the
great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame. This is
particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of
nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia. Violence also occurs between
Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel,
Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has
bloody borders (Huntington 1993, 34-35).
Shahrough Akhavi of the University of South
Carolina mischaracterizes Huntington’s work, claiming that “the
1990s witnessed an influential academic theory alleging an inevitable clash
between Muslim and Western civilisations (Akhavi 2003, 545).” In fact, Huntington alleges nothing of the
sort. Rather, he discusses problematic Muslim states such as Libya, Iraq, and
Iran, and also notes the connections between a few Muslim states and states in
the “Confucian civilization.” Although he does not specify those connections,
it is known that there has been sharing of nuclear and missile technology.
Thus, Huntington concludes, quite reasonably, that “a central focus of conflict
for the immediate future will be between the West and several Islamic [and]
Confucian states (Huntington 1993, 48).” But “several” is a far cry from “all,”
so to characterize this as “alleging an inevitable clash between Muslim and
Western civilisations” is an egregious overstatement.
On the other hand, Huntington does point out the Manichean rhetoric
in both Islam and the West.
On both sides the interaction between Islam and
the West is seen as a clash of civilizations. The West’s “next confrontation,”
observes M. J. Akbar, an Indian Muslim author, “is definitely going to come
from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from the
Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new world order will begin.”
Bernard Lewis comes to a similar conclusion (Huntington 1993, 32):
We are facing a mood and a movement far
transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue
them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations--the perhaps irrational but
surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian
heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both (Lewis
1990).
Huntington further notes that several prominent
figures deliberately framed the 1991 Operation Desert Storm as being part of a
larger conflict between Islam and the West, conveniently ignoring the fact that
a broad international coalition, that included Muslim states in support roles,
liberated one Muslim state that had been occupied by another Muslim state
(ruled by a secularist regime) with the objective of annexing it.
“It is not the world against Iraq,” as Safar
Al-Hawali, dean of Islamic Studies at the Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca, put
it in a widely circulated tape. “It is the West against Islam.” Ignoring the
rivalry between Iran and Iraq, the chief Iranian religious leader, Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei, called for a holy war against the West: “The struggle against
American aggression, greed, plans and policies will be counted as a jihad, and
anybody who is killed on that path is a martyr.” “This is a war,” King Hussein
of Jordan argued, “against all Arabs and all Muslims and not against Iraq
alone.” (Huntington 1993, 35-36).
Thus, Huntington is not promoting a jihad versus
crusade “clash of civilizations,” he is merely reporting the words of others;
this is no reason to “shoot the messenger.” In fact, Huntington presents a more
complex picture:
Historically, the other great antagonistic
interaction of Arab Islamic civilization has been with the pagan, animist, and
now increasingly Christian black peoples to the south. In the past, this
antagonism was epitomized in the image of Arab slave dealers and black slaves.
It has been reflected in the on-going civil war in the Sudan between Arabs and
blacks, the fighting in Chad between Libyan-supported insurgents and the government,
the tensions between Orthodox Christians and Muslims in the Horn of Africa, and
the political conflicts, recurring riots and communal violence between Muslims
and Christians in Nigeria. The modernization of Africa and the spread of
Christianity are likely to enhance the probability of violence along this fault
line (Huntington 1993, 33).
Had Huntington written fifteen years later, he
might also have cited non-Western Russia’s wars to keep Muslim Chechnya from
gaining its independence, as well as the Muslim terrorist attack non-Western
India’s financial capital of Mumbai and Muslim Uighur unrest in non-Western
China’s Xinjiang province. Furthermore, the first reported skirmish in space
involved a Muslim state’s (Indonesia) corporation jamming a Chinese owned
satellite in geostationary orbit (Satellite News 1997). Again,
the evidence suggests rather than having conflictual relations with the West
alone, Islam has a problem with “the rest.”
Within a few years, the
“Clash of Civilizations” envisioned by Huntington manifested in the War on
Terrorism, announced following the al Qaeda attacks on the United States on 11
September 2001. Although this transnational terrorist network had previously
struck isolated US targets elsewhere in the world, on that day al Qaeda earned
its place as a serious player on the geopolitical stage in that it brought the
most powerful
nation-state on the planet to a shuddering halt, inflicting thousands of deaths
(indeed, the largest number of deaths on domestic territory due to a single
hostile foreign act in US history), billions of dollars in property damage, and
more billions of dollars in economic damage as the national civil aviation
infrastructure shut down entirely for several days and took months to fully
recover. For weeks following the attacks, US airports were spooky ghost towns,
peopled mainly by roving teams of armed National Guard troops. The War on
Terrorism was a largely Western response to the rise of a new threat to the
international system, and the West took further hits from its transnational
adversary in Bali (12 October 2002) and in London (7 July 2005). Following the
11 March 2004 terror bombings in Madrid, a self-proclaimed al Qaeda
spokesperson declared that “the international system built-up by the West since
the Treaty of Westphalia will collapse; and a new international system will
rise under the leadership of a mighty Islamic state (Berman 2004).”
Hizb ut-Tahrir, the “Party of Liberation,” is an international Sunni
political organization that has as its goal the unification of all Muslim
countries as an Islamic state or caliphate ruled by Islamic law and with a
caliph head of state elected by Muslims. Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, an Islamic
scholar and appeals court judge, founded the organization in 1953 in Jerusalem.
In 60 years Hizb ut-Tahrir has spread to more than 40 countries, and by one
estimate has about one million members. It is active in the West as well as in
Muslim states, despite being banned by some governments. The party has a strong
presence in the United Kingdom and a growing presence in North America. Hizb
ut-Tahrir believes a caliphate would provide stability and security to both
Muslims and non-Muslims in the predominantly Muslim regions of the world. The
party promotes a detailed program, including a constitution, for the
institution of a caliphate that would establish shari’a (the legal tradition stemming from the Quran). Hizb
ut-Tahrir is also strongly anti-Zionist and calls for Israel, which it calls an
“illegal entity,” to be dismantled. Some observers believe Hizb ut-Tahrir is
the victim of false allegations of connections to terrorism, pointing out that
the organization explicitly commits itself to non-violence, while others
postulate that the party’s opposition to violence is tactical and temporary,
and that it works to create a politically charged atmosphere conducive to
violence. In any case, the caliphate would be based on a form of democracy that
would include women, but only Muslims would be allowed to vote, and Muslim
women would be banned from the highest offices of the state (Wikipedia 2012b).
Once established, the caliphate would seek to expand into non-Muslim parts
of the world. According to al-Nabhani’s work, The Islamic State, Muslim minorities “should work towards turning
their land where Islam is not implemented, and which [is therefore] considered
as Dar al-Kufr into Dar al-Islam (al-Nabhani
1998, 238).” Thus the ultimate aim is to create a
global caliphate, which causes some observers to believe that during this phase
the professions to nonviolence would be dropped, that “the gloves would be off”
in a bare-knuckled contest for control of the planet. Zeyno Baran of the Nixon
Center describes the party as a “vanguard party,” as Russia’s Bolsheviks were a
century ago, in that it is interested in achieving power through “hundreds of
supporters in critical positions” rather than “thousands of foot soldiers
(Baran 2005).”
Muslim culture can be
visualized as an inverted U curve in terms of the relative value it places on
social units; both the individual and the state rank lower than the tribe or
clan. In the West, however, the curve is an upright U, with both the individual
and the nation ranking higher than the tribe or clan. This mirror image of
values can be extended further; in the West, which has become quite secular,
people have stronger ties of loyalty to their nation than to their religion,
whereas in Islam it is the reverse. Given these diametrically opposed system of
values, it is easily explained why a mob in Benghazi, angered by a
poorly-produced trailer for an alleged American film, titled Innocence of Muslims, blaspheming
against the Prophet, would lash out against this freedom of individual
expression by murdering four individuals in the American consulate; neither the
individual’s right of self-expression nor the inviolability of a nation’s
diplomatic personnel are respected. Since these values are hard-wired into the
culture, they will be very slow to change, requiring decades if not centuries.
It cannot be mere coincidence, that not only was there violence against the US
diplomatic mission in Libya, which had recently liberated itself from the
tyranny of Moammar Qaddafi with the help of NATO air support, but also in Cairo
and Sana’a, the capitals of states that also had recently rid themselves of
their dictators. On the one hand, the simultaneous violence in three states
that have taken their first steps on the path to democracy can be explained as
the release of pent-up rage by long-repressed peoples unused to the exercise of
free expression and unacquainted with the concept of tolerance for diverse
opinions. On the other hand, given the additional “coincidence” that the
violence began simultaneously in Benghazi and Cairo on the eleventh anniversary
of the devastating al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
there is every reason to suspect that the violence was coordinated and
orchestrated by al Qaeda cells, which used the offensive video as a convenient
focus of anger. Probably all of the above explanations are valid, and although
demonstrators may have been manipulated into committing anti-Western violence,
these incidents were not indicative of any widespread movement to create a
transnational Islamic state. Naturally, the Libyan, Egyptian, and Yemeni governments,
being newly minted and struggling democracies, were profoundly embarrassed by
the violence, and they were profuse in their apologies and condolences.
However, the calls of some officials for the US government to “do something”
about the offensive film were doomed to come to naught, and this points up the
tragedy of relations between Islam and the West. Islam does not embrace the
Western concept of individual freedom of expression as a fundamental human
right, nor does it appreciate that it is the duty of the state to protect that
right, not to suppress it. The West does not embrace the Muslim concept of shari’a as Allah’s supreme law over
human beings, nor does it accept that it is the duty of every Muslim to defend
the faith. There would seem to be little room for reaching a compatible world
view; the latter concept (shari’a) is
an absolute, and the former concept (freedom of expression) is subject to very
few restrictions.
Although Akhavi’s opening volley against Huntington
is off-target, fortunately it is not the focus of his paper; rather, he
presents a valuable summary of Islamic values.
The dictionary states that religion means
“action or conduct indicating a belief in, reverence for, and desire to please
a divine ruling power; the exercise or practice of rites implying this;”
“recognition on the part of man of some higher unseen power as having control
of his destiny, and as being entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship; the
general mental and moral attitude resulting from this belief, with its
reference to its effect on the individual or community.” Muslims specifically
add to these general points that they must materialise God’s commands as
members of a living community. The interest of this community must be fostered,
promoted and defended. Failing in this risks the lapse of the religious
injunctions.
True, many Muslims compartmentalise their lives
so as to keep religion in a purely private sphere and behave in the external
world on the basis of non- religious criteria. Or, if they allow matters of
religion to intrude into public arenas, they limit them to purely moral and
pietistic concerns that bear not on social policy and politics but on ethical
devotions—such as affirming the unity of God and Muhammad’s prophecy,
congregational prayer, fasting during the month of Ramadan, pilgrimage to
Mecca, and paying poor dues. For them, observing these is sufficient warrant to
claim that they have materialised God’s commands as members of a community. For
present purposes I will label this orientation the “minimalist view.”
For other Muslims, however, this
compartmentalisation is risky at best and, at worst, an abandonment of the
categorial imperatives of the faith. In their view the materialisation of God’s
commands in their daily lives cannot be accomplished unless they construct the
requisite economic, political, and social institutions. For them, Islam is both
“religion and politics.” I will refer to this orientation as the “maximalist
view (Akhavi 2003, 545-46).”
Akhavi
conducts the reader on a whirlwind tour of the rise of Islamic philosophy,
which in its golden age eagerly imbibed Syriac, Persian, and Indian philosophy,
and especially Greek rationalism. In
such an intellectual environment, Islamic science flourished; however, by the
end of the 10th century, Islamic civilization was already beginning its long
decline. The leaders of Turkic tribes migrating from Central Asia into
the heartland of the Middle East challenged the authority of the caliph.
Although they converted to Islam, their seizure of power seize in various
regions of the caliphate represented major threats to the center. The ensuing
political compromises of necessity undermined the political theory that was the basis of the caliphate. Further
stressing the caliphate were the Crusaders’ invasion of the Muslim
heartland in a series of campaigns between 1095 and 1291. Meanwhile, in 1258
the Mongols destroyed Baghdad, seat of the caliphate.
In the face of the threats posed to Muslim
institutions by the Turkic tribes, the Mongols and the Crusaders, the ulama became
increasingly defensive and promoted emulation of the ideas of previous
generations as a way to protect the faith. This imitative reaction formation
was to reinforce even further the bias of Ash’arism against rationalism, innovation
and reform. Although Muslim thinkers… would occasionally criticise the decline
of Islam these were basically lone voices. Islamic thought entered a long
period of stagnation that was to last until the 19th century (Akhavi 2003, 551).
With the passing of the caliphate, Arabia ceased to
be the center of Islam. The powerful states of Islam were now
the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, and the Mughal Empire. These states were
little influenced by European developments such as the spread of information via
the printing press, the separation of church and state, and the scientific and
industrial revolutions until after the French Revolution. Napoleon marched his
troops into Egypt, several decades later a French joint stock company cut the
Suez Canal, and France projected its power into the Levant to protect
Christians from Turkish oppression. Naturally, wherever the French went, the
British had to counterbalance them. Thus the Muslim world became acquainted
with European modernity through Franco-British military and political intervention. Over time, Muslim rulers became more
convinced that reforms based on Western patterns could ensure their societies’
survival without losing their cultural identity. The clergy was split into
conservative and reformist camps.
The great reform movement of Islam known as the
salafiyya (literally, return to the model of the ancestors) during the
years 1880–1935 was open to a dialogue with the West…. The leaders of this
movement… all agreed that Islam had nothing to fear from science…. Muslim
modernists could find a retroactive authorisation in the Qur’an for parliaments
and modern constitutions, invoking the sacred text itself on behalf of a
variant of social contract theory that most observers in the West relate to
Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Ferguson.
...Liberalism’s roots in capitalism are in
principle not an obstacle to the acceptance of parts of the model’s economic
features in Islamic societies…. [D]emocracy features a number of elements that
are not absent in Islamic history and traditions…. Equality of believers is a
central value in the Islamic tradition, even though the actual political and
economic equality of all individuals in the social order has proven
elusive.
Instead, it is proprietary individualism that
underpins the difficulty modernist Muslims have with liberal democracy. Note
that is it not individualism per se that is problematical. Even the most
dedicated Muslim communitarians today are perfectly content to allocate an
arena of life in which the individual may express herself or himself. Instead,
the problem seems to be what C. B. MacPherson has called “the political theory
of possessive individualism” that is endemic to mainstream liberal thought. In
MacPherson’s view, possessive individualism is at the heart of liberalism, with
roots extending back to Hobbes (1588–1679) and Locke (1632–1704) (Akhavi 2003, 553-54).
Quoting
MacPherson, Akhavi points out that, to Muslims, the flaw in liberalism is that
it ultimately treats the individual:
…as essentially the proprietor of his own
person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them. The individual was
seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as an
owner of himself. The relation of ownership, having become for more and more
men the critically important relation determining their actual freedom and
actual prospect of realizing their full potentialities, was read back into the
nature of the individual. The individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as
he is proprietor of his person and capacities. The human essence is freedom
from dependence on the wills of others, and freedom is a function of
possession. Society becomes a lot of free equal individuals related to each
other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have acquired by
their exercise. Society consists of relations of exchange between proprietors.
Political society becomes a calculated device for the protection of this
property and for the maintenance of an orderly relation of exchange (MacPherson
1964, 3).
This perspective is far from any Muslim
theory of society, including those, such as that of the modernist Muslim
Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), that emphasise the self-affirmation of the
individual. In all Muslim outlooks the arrant individualism that MacPherson has
described is simply missing. Efforts to establish liberalism in the Muslim
world have been resisted because it conflicts with the central idea of
salvation in Islam, according to which God has placed the human being on earth
as His trustee, whose full potential can be realised only by membership in a
community of believers, a community whose existence and welfare is warrant for
the religious injunctions. The individual’s moral worth is shaped by the
contributions of the community of believers, even as that community is itself
shaped by what that individual has to offer it (Akhavi 2003, 555).
Akhavi puts Islamic violence in perspective.
All these violence-prone Islamist groups hold
the “minimalist perspective” identified earlier to be a mortal threat to
“Islam.” The only way to triumph against this threat is to support the
“maximalist perspective,” which means restoring the integration of religion and
politics and making the shari’a the exclusive law of the land. None of
these violence-prone groups shares the tolerance of earlier Muslims for those
of other religions, much less of different Islamic sects (Akhavi 2003, 556).
However, this kind of antipathy is not endorsed
by the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the world. Even in areas where violence-prone
political Islam has earlier been strong, it is in retreat…. In Yemen since 1994
the trends have also seemed potentially significant, as a movement has swept
society there that is basically anti-authoritarian. In Jordan and Kuwait,
tentatively but noticeably, social movements are taking root that no longer
accept the old clichés from rulers that stability is necessary above any
immediate desires on the part of the population for greater autonomy from the
state (Akhavi 2003, 558).
Huntington also points to economic, political, and
social forces currently at work in the Muslim world.
Many Arab countries, in addition to the oil
exporters, are reaching levels of economic and social development where
autocratic forms of government become inappropriate and efforts to introduce
democracy become stronger. Some openings in Arab political systems have already
occurred. The principal beneficiaries of these openings have been Islamist
movements. In the Arab world, in short, Western democracy strengthens anti-Western
political forces. This may be a passing phenomenon, but it surely complicates
relations between Islamic countries and the West (Huntington 1993, 32).
This is a key observation;
indeed, a prophetic one in light of the extreme level of public rage against Innocence of Muslims in Islam’s emerging
democracies. As the Muslim world transitions from autocracy and poverty to
democracy and a higher material standard of living, it faces what is primarily
an internal struggle, a struggle to define Islam’s place in the modern world.
An interesting question is whether as it modernizes Islam can retain its
communitarian values more successfully than Christendom has. Also, while the
West may judge democratization of the Muslim world according to its own standards,
Akhavi would be quick to point out that Muslims
should devote more attention to rediscovering the democratic and pluralist
traditions in their own faith than to aping Western models. This suggests that the
great civilizational clash of the 21st century is not between Islam and “the
rest,” nor even between Islam and the West, but within Islam itself, to which
the War on Terror is merely a side battle. To the point that the West
represents modernity and secular, humanist values rooted in the European Enlightenment,
a strict, fundamentalist, medieval interpretation of the Prophet will
inevitably view the West as an existential threat and will act accordingly;
unfortunately, modernity is all around, and the Muslim world is getting more
modern every day, which both heightens the threat level to these frightened,
angry, medieval minds and affords them a target-rich environment. Such people
will inflict much misery on the human race in the name of Allah.
Whereas Friedrichs discusses
the transnational forces of globalization as facilitating a “new medievalism,”
of which the project of European integration is an exemplar, and even the
quasi-statehood of Taiwan and Hong Kong within the orbit of the People’s
Republic of China can be viewed in this light, the project of erecting a
transnational Islamic state today may be taken as an example of “old
medievalism,” in that such a project faces many of the same social, political,
and economic forces that made it impossible to hold the Holy Roman Empire
together under the moral authority of the Catholic Church four centuries ago;
an increasing percentage of Muslims are reading for themselves and thinking for
themselves, and with the exception of defending their freedom to do so if
necessary, most of them want to live in peace with their neighbors, whoever
they may be, as long as they keep the noise down. Additionally, the project of
establishing a transnational state would face problems that the Holy Roman
Empire never faced, such as the lack of a core ethnicity and a common language,
and an exploding population that is increasingly unemployed. Also, would all
sects of Islam participate in the governance of such a state, or a few, or only
one?
Medieval Europe was
relatively isolated from the world’s other civilizations and the Thirty Years’
War had no effect on them; the 21st century may be witnessing in the glare of
the global media Islam’s Reformation, and as this is a struggle without
territorial boundaries, some of us are among the bystander casualties in what
may well be Islam’s Thirty Years’ War. Given that the Peace of Westphalia was
born of that European struggle, which transformed the basis of political
structure in Christendom, whatever Islamic peace emerges from the present
turmoil will profoundly transform the basis of political structure in Islam,
and in turn may have implications for the Westphalian system. The prospect a
transnational Islamic state may seem farfetched to Western eyes, but stranger
things have occurred in history, and such a state might well be unrecognizable
to the founder of Hizb ut-Tahrir.
…[T]oday’s criticism of the West in the Muslim
world, frequently accompanied by a rejection of Western secular culture, seems
to be positively correlated with the Muslims’ sense of weakness and
vulnerability in the face of powerful Western states and economic domination.
This suggests that if the relationship between the Muslim and Western worlds
were to become more equal in the future, Muslim rejectionism could be expected
to be transformed into more tolerant attitudes and behaviour. The bitterness
toward the West associated with the most radical Islamist movements in the
1980s and 1990s should be seen in the historical context of their era.
Historical circumstances, by their nature, are not constant but, rather, variable.
…[I]t is likely that, even if pluralist trends
are not suppressed and in some cases allow movements based on them to take
power, they will not result in systems rooted in proprietary liberal democracy
(i.e. Western models). This is because of the West’s devaluation of the
individual as a moral being in favour of the individual as a proprietor of him-
or herself.
…[P]rospects exist for an increasing
valorisation in the Muslim world of trends all democrats value: contestation of
spaces, multiplicity of interpretations, indeterminacy and contingency of
positions, and non-finality of solutions. Democracy can grow under these
conditions, but it will be institutionally different from the Westminster
model. This difference, far from being fatal for the relationship between Islam
and the West, would be liberating for both (Akhavi 2003, 559).
1: "The Submerged State"
3: "The Celestial Constellation"
4: "The Transnational Islamic State"
4: "The Transnational Islamic State"
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