A History of the Middle East (53 page)

Two weeks later Muawwad was assassinated by a car bomb in west Beirut. Under Syrian protection the deputies then elected yet another Christian president, Elias Hrawi, whom the rebel general found equally unacceptable. Although Hrawi was recognized by the Arab states and the rest of the world Aoun maintained his defiance. But his authority over Christian Lebanon was challenged by the Christian militia group in the Lebanese Forces. A bloody conflict ensued, causing atrocious suffering to the people of east Beirut and leaving General Aoun in control of only one third of the Christian enclave. The
de facto
partition could not be permanent and the issue of a death certificate for the Lebanese Republic was still postponed.

Aoun’s nemesis was not long delayed. In October 1990, as world attention was diverted towards the Gulf and the containment of Iraq (which had supported Aoun in his hostility towards Damascus) the Syrians were able to overrun the general’s fortress enclave in alliance with Lebanese forces loyal to President Hrawi and bring about his surrender. The Syrians now dominated all of central Lebanon but their first aim was to extend the Lebanese government’s authority throughout the one hundred square miles of greater Beirut, ensure the withdrawal of the rival militias and reopen communications. If the Lebanese heartland could be secured, even under Syrian hegemony, the Lebanese Republic still had a chance of survival.

Islamic Reassertion, Revolution and War

With the decline and defeat and dismemberment in 1918 of the Ottoman Empire – the last Muslim great power in global terms – the world of Islam was on the defensive. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century the Arabs came under some form of Western
colonial domination. The Muslims of central Asia were absorbed into the Russian Empire, the Muslim former rulers of India became part of the British Raj, and the Persian/Iranian Empire suffered a joint Russian–British hegemony. It was only in Turkey, the former heartland of the Ottoman Empire, that a nation-state which was strong enough to remain independent of the European colonial powers was forged, by the political and military genius of Kemal Atatürk. But his cause was secular Turkish nationalism and not Islam.

The Arab and Iranian response to European domination differed from Turkey’s in that it was neither purely secular nationalism nor an Islamic counter-offensive but a combination of both. The Islamic cultural element was supremely important. As Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquais intellectual who joined the Algerian revolution against France, pointed out in his classic work
The Wretched of the Earth
: whereas European colonizers thought of black Africans in essentially racial terms, their attitude towards the Arab world was different. Here they were confronted by a specific and unified, if not homogeneous, culture which was derived from its Arab/Islamic tradition. Beyond doubt it was the indestructibility of this culture which prevented France from not only colonizing Algeria but also turning it into a permanent European dependency as at one time seemed perfectly feasible.

However, to say that Arab resistance to European domination drew its inspiration from Islam and its heritage does not mean that in this respect it was pure and uncompromising. The great nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Muslim reformers such as al-Afghani, Abduh and Rida reached the conclusion that the world of Islam began to decline when the Turks took over its leadership from the Arabs. Although this was not their intention, their ideas provided the intellectual basis for Arab nationalism. The Arabs of the Middle East formed an alliance with the European colonizers to overthrow Ottoman Turkish rule, but when this succeeded they were left with weak Arab nation-states under European domination. The pan-Arab nationalist movement which developed in the 1920s
and 1930s was given a powerful fresh impetus by the loss of Arab Palestine in the 1940s and reached its peak in the 1950s under Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, who aimed to overcome this weakness and throw off European hegemony. But although Arab nationalism was not purely secular, neither was it wholly Islamic. Unlike the nationalism of Atatürk, it could not be entirely secular for the obvious reason that for any Arab – even a non-Muslim – to cut himself off from his heritage of Islamic civilization would be to deny his own identity. But equally the pan-Arab movement could not be purely Islamic in its ideology, in the sense of regarding Islam as the sole path to the true self-determination of the Arab peoples. This was not only because some of the leading exponents of pan-Arabism, such as the Baath ideologist Michel Aflaq, were Christians: its Muslim leaders were also strongly influenced by European and American concepts of secular nationalism. Many had been educated at Western institutions or trained by European officers. However grudgingly, to some extent they accepted Atatürk’s belief that it was reactionary Islam which had allowed the West (and the Zionists) to defeat and dominate the peoples of the Middle East – Turks, Persians and Arabs.

Among the Arabs who most fiercely resisted Western domination there were indeed some who saw nothing of value outside Islam. These were Muslim nationalists rather than Arab nationalists; today they are called fundamentalists. They had, and have, a utopian view that if Muslims were to set up an Islamic order in which the holy
sharia
would be the only authority, all the internal problems of government and society and the external problems of un-Islamic domination and influence would be solved. While their dedication and readiness for martyrdom made them formidable, they remained a minority in the Arab struggle for full independence from the West. Their refusal to compromise and their willingness to use violence against anyone who did not wholly share their views alienated potential allies. Whenever there seemed a chance that they might gain power, they deeply alarmed the majority. Their first organized movement in the modern Arab world – the Muslim Brotherhood,
in Egypt – believed that it was on the point of overthrowing a corrupt monarchy but was then, as we have seen, swept aside by the Nasser Revolution.

A seeming exception to the rule that militant Islamic fundamentalists are unlikely to be successful in winning control of an Arab state in the twentieth century occurred in Arabia. Here the puritanical Wahhabi reformers, allied to the House of Saud, had in the eighteenth century been the first Arab movement to challenge the authority of the Ottoman sultan/caliph and to denounce the religious backsliding of their fellow-Muslims. Defeated in the early nineteenth century by the secular power of Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman governor of Egypt, they finally triumphed in the 1920s through the political and military genius of Ibn Saud. Here at last the uncompromising forces of Islam were in power. But King Ibn Saud knew his limitations. Although he enjoyed prestige as the custodian of the holy places of Islam, his new kingdom was remote, desperately poor and militarily weak. It was in no position to spread its puritan revolutionary movement northwards to the great centres of Arab population – Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad. Moreover – and most important – the grinding poverty of the people of Saudi Arabia caused Ibn Saud and his sons who succeeded him to ally themselves with the West – especially the supremely secular United States – to relieve the country’s economic backwardness. Ironically, the puritanical Saudis subsequently proved to be endowed with unimaginable natural wealth, but, although the Saudi kingdom then acquired prestige and influence in the councils of the world, it needed non-Muslims even more – for the development and protection of its newly discovered resources. The alliance with the West deepened with the added spur of the Saudi fear and detestation of communism.

So it was that, although the Saudis were amazingly successful in preserving their identity through the retention of their system of government and laws and their conservative social mores, their inter-relationship with and dependence on the West was also undeniable. Saudi Arabia might take the lead in creating international bodies
and organizations to increase the links between the Muslim states, and it lavishly endowed Islamic missions and mosques throughout the world – all of which powerfully assisted the reassertion of Islam in modern times – but the militant Islamic fundamentalists were not satisfied. They wanted to exclude the West from the world of Islam. In 1979 the House of Saud was made brutally aware of their existence even inside the kingdom when a group of young fanatics, denouncing the corruption of their rulers, seized and held for a time the Great Mosque at Mecca – the holiest shrine of Islam.

After the Arab catastrophe in 1967, volatile world opinion seized on the possibility of an Islamic fundamentalist revolution sweeping through the Arab countries. In the heyday of pan-Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, the importance of Islam as a political force was grossly underestimated by the majority of Western journalists and academics – and, indeed, by much of the Arab intelligentsia. A common view was that the Arabs were determined to catch up with the West’s material and technical progress, and for this Islam had nothing to contribute. After 1967 there was a sudden reversal of this opinion. Secular Arab nationalism had been proved a failure and was dead; the masses would reject Western progress and turn to fundamentalist Islam as their only hope.

Both views were misleading. Islam had never ceased to be a supremely powerful underlying force; it was only reasserting itself more openly in the wake of the Arab defeat. On the other hand, nationalism was far from dead, even if it had to modify its form. All the regimes of the Arab states – even in Saudi Arabia – still subscribed to the notion that the Arabs form a single nation which should be more closely united. There was no question of breaking up the League of Arab States. At the same time, it was apparent that there had been a strengthening of territorial nationalism – the local patriotism that had grown up around the flag and capital of the individual Arab states (however artificial their creation by the West may have been) and that supported their particular interests. There was no likelihood that an Islamic revolution would be able to sweep all this away.

The Islamic revolution which did occur took place not in the predominantly Sunni Muslim lands but in Shiite Iran. All but a very few of the closest observers were taken by surprise.

Since the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953, Iran had come to be seen as an example of the progress and development which were widely held in the West to be synonymous with westernization. In the 1950s, elections to the Majlis were carefully controlled to ensure that acceptable candidates were elected. The National Front ceased to function as an organized political force and the communist Tudeh Party was proscribed. Power was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the shah. However, the task of the shah’s loyalist governments was not easy. Their hope was that economic growth would dampen opposition to the control of political life but, although oil revenues expanded, the large-scale projects to develop the infrastructure took time to mature and there was widespread corruption and inefficiency. Anti-Western nationalist feelings, inflamed during the Mossadegh crisis, were by no means extinguished. They gained strength from the regime’s close identification with the Western camp, symbolized by Iran’s adherence to the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact in 1955.

In 1961 the unrest obliged the shah to appoint as prime minister Ali Amini, a wealthy aristocrat with a reputation as a liberal reformer. He tackled government extravagance and corruption and relaxed controls on the National Front and left-wing opposition. He brought into the cabinet as minister of agriculture Hassan Arsanjani, a radical politician committed to land reform and the break-up of the large estates consisting of scores of villages. Amini persuaded the shah to allow him to dissolve the Majlis and rule by decree to push through his reforms. But his reformist experiment was short-lived. He aroused opposition on all sides – from the landowners and the army as well as the politicians who demanded the restoration of the Majlis. Within a year he had been forced to resign and the shah reasserted his authority.

The shah nevertheless pursued and even intensified some of the reform measures – notably land reform, which was extended to the
Islamic
waaf
properties (whose revenues were used for the upkeep of mosques or charitable works), while the large landowners were limited to the holding of one village. Female suffrage was introduced, and women’s rights were legally extended. A Literacy Corps was founded to enable high-school students to teach in village schools as an alternative to military service. In this way the shah’s government retained the initiative. The National Front declared that it favoured the reforms but said that they were ‘unconstitutional’, while the mullahs, whose most effective spokesman was Ayatollah Khomeini of Qum, denounced them as ‘un-Islamic’ as well as unconstitutional. In 1963 the National Front was disbanded by the government and then disintegrated. Khomeini and other religious leaders were arrested, and a year later Khomeini was sent into exile and took up residence in the Shiite region of southern Iraq. The religious opposition resorted increasingly to underground activity and violence, but this was ineffective and the government was able to denounce both the nationalists and mullahs as reactionary opponents of reform.

For more than a decade the shah could rule without serious opposition pressure. He reconvened the Majlis and allowed it to function with officially sponsored political parties and an opposition which consistently voted for government bills. Outside parliament the ubiquitous SAVAK secret police relentlessly suppressed dissent.

The shah showed increasing self-confidence and a vaulting ambition to make his country the indisputably dominant regional power. The West was always ready to provide him with the most sophisticated modern weapons. Although remaining in the Western camp, however, he improved relations with the Soviet-bloc countries and signed with them a series of large-scale industrial agreements. He secured greatly improved terms from the oil companies, which amounted to the National Iranian Oil Company taking over control of operations. In 1967 he amended the constitution so that the queen would automatically become regent in the event of his death before the crown prince reached his majority, and in the twenty-sixth year of his reign he and the queen were crowned in a wholly un-Islamic
ceremony. In 1971 he celebrated the two-thousand-five-hundredth anniversary of the Persian monarchy with colossal extravagance at the ancient capital of Persepolis.