Fields of Blood (60 page)

Throughout the Muslim world,
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), founder of the modern republic of
Turkey, seemed to personify the violence of secularism. After the
First World War, he had managed to keep the British and French out of
Anatolia, the
Ottoman heartland, so Turkey had the great advantage of avoiding colonization. Determined to deprive Islam of all legal, political, and economic influence, Atatürk is often admired in the West as an enlightened Muslim leader.
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In fact, he was a dictator who hated Islam, which he described as a “putrefied corpse.”
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He proceeded in the usual belligerent manner to outlaw the
Sufi orders, seize their properties, shut down the madrassas, and appropriate the awqaf. Most important, he abolished
Shariah law, replacing it with a legal code essentially adopted from
Switzerland that was meaningless to most of the population.
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Finally, in 1925, Atatürk declared the caliphate null and void. It had long been a dead letter politically but had symbolized the unity of the ummah and its link with the Prophet; at this bleak moment in their history,
Sunni Muslims everywhere experienced its loss as a spiritual and cultural trauma. Western approval of Atatürk led many to believe that the West sought to destroy Islam itself.

In order to control the rising merchant class, the last Ottoman sultans had systematically deported or killed their
Greek and
Armenian subjects, who constituted about 90 percent of the
bourgeoisie. In 1908 the
Young Turks, a party of modernizers, deposed Sultan Abdul-Hamid II in a coup. They had absorbed the antireligious positivism of such Western thinkers as Auguste Comte (1798–1857) as well as the new “scientific” racism, an outgrowth of the Age of Reason that came into good use in the Age of Empire. During the First World War, in order to create a purely Turkic state, the Young Turks ordered the deportation and “resettlement” of Armenian Christians from the empire on the pretext
that they were conniving with the enemy. This led to the first
genocide of the twentieth century, committed not by religious fanatics but by avowed secularists. Over a million
Armenians were slaughtered: men and youths were killed where they stood, while women, children, and the elderly were driven into the desert where they were raped, shot, starved, poisoned, suffocated, or burned to death.
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“I came into this world a Turk,” declared the physician
Mehmet Resid, the “Executioner Governor.” “Armenian traitors had found a niche for themselves in the bosom of the fatherland; they were dangerous microbes. Isn’t it a duty of a doctor to destroy these microbes?”
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When
Atatürk came to power, he completed this racial purge. For centuries
Greeks and Turks had dwelled together on both sides of the Aegean. Atatürk now partitioned the region and organized a massive exchange of populations. Greek-speaking Christians living in what is now Turkey were deported to what would become Greece, while Turkish-speaking Muslims living in Greece were sent the other way. For many in the Muslim world, therefore, Western secularism and
nationalism would be forever associated with ethnic cleansing, virulent religious intolerance, and a violent destruction of precious Islamic institutions.

In
Iran,
Reza Khan courted the Westernized upper and middle classes but took no interest in the peasant masses, who therefore relied more than ever on the ulema. Two nations were developing in the country, one modernized, the other excluded from the benefits of modernity and cruelly deprived of the religious traditions that gave their life meaning. Determined to base the state’s identity on ancient Persian culture rather than on Islam, Reza summarily outlawed the
ashura mourning rituals for
Husain, forbade Iranians to make the
hajj, and drastically curtailed the scope of the
Shariah courts. When
Ayatollah Modarris objected, he was imprisoned and executed.
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In 1928 Reza issued the Laws on the Uniformity of Dress, and with their bayonets his soldiers tore off the women’s veils and ripped them to pieces in the street.
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On Ashura 1929, the police surrounded the prestigious Fayziyah Madrassa in Qum, and when the students spilled out after their classes, they were stripped of their traditional clothes and forced into Western garb. In 1935 the police were ordered to open fire on a crowd who had staged a peaceful demonstration against the dress laws in the holy shrine of the Eighth
Imam in
Mashhad and killed hundreds of unarmed Iranians.
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In the West, the secular nation-state had been set up to curb the violence of religion; for many
thousands of people in the Middle East, secular nationalism seemed a bloodthirsty, destructive force that deprived them of the spiritual support that had been their mainstay.

The Middle East had thus been brutally initiated into the new system of oppression and violence that had come into being during the colonial period. These former provinces of the mighty
Ottoman Empire had been aggressively reduced by the colonialists almost overnight to a dependent bloc, their laws replaced by foreign codes, their age-old rituals abolished, and their clergy executed, impoverished, and publicly humiliated. Surrounded by modern buildings, institutions, and Western-style street layouts, people no longer felt at home in their own countries. The effect of their transformation has been compared to watching a beloved friend become slowly disfigured before one’s eyes by mortal sickness.
Egypt, always a leader in the Arab world, had had a particularly difficult transition to
modernity, with a much longer period of direct Western rule than many other Middle Eastern countries. This persistent foreign presence and the lack of spiritual and moral leadership had created a dangerous malaise in the country and a corrosive sense of humiliation, which neither the British nor the new Egyptian government seemed willing to address. Some reformers belonging to the traditional Egyptian
elite tried to counter this growing alienation.
Muhammad Abdu (1849–1905), sheikh of Al-Azhar, suggested that modern legal and constitutional arrangements should be linked to traditional
Islamic norms that would make them comprehensible. As it was, the people were so bewildered by the secular legal system that Egypt was effectively becoming a country without law.
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Lord Cromer, however, who regarded the social system of Islam as “politically and socially moribund,” would have none of it.
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In the same vein,
Rashid Rida (1865–1935), Abdu’s biographer, wanted to establish a college where students would be introduced to modern jurisprudence, sociology, and science at the same time as they studied Islamic law, so that it might be possible one day to modernize the Shariah without diluting it and to formulate laws based on authentic Muslim tradition instead of a foreign ideology.
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But these reformers failed to inspire disciples who could carry their ideas forward. Far more successful was
Hassan al-Banna (1906–49), founder of the
Muslim Brotherhood and one of the more positive “free
lances” who would step into the spiritual leadership vacuum created by the modernizers.
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A schoolteacher who had studied modern science, Banna knew that modernization was essential but believed that because Egyptians were deeply religious, it could succeed only if accompanied by a spiritual reformation. Their own cultural traditions would serve them better than alien ideologies that they could never make fully their own. Banna and his friends had been shocked and saddened by the political and social confusion in Egypt and by the stark contrast between the luxurious homes of the British and the hovels of the Egyptian workers in the Canal Zone. One night in March 1928, six of his students begged Banna to take action, eloquently articulating the inchoate distress experienced by so many:

That very night Banna created the Society of Muslim Brothers, which inaugurated a grassroots reformation of Egyptian society.

The Society clearly answered an urgent need because it would become one of the most powerful players in Egyptian politics. By the time of Banna’s assassination in 1949, it had two thousand branches throughout Egypt, and the Brotherhood was the only Egyptian organization that represented every social group—civil servants, students, urban workers, and peasants.
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The Society was not a militant organization but sought simply to bring modern institutions to the Egyptian public in a familiar Islamic setting. The Brothers built schools for girls and boys beside the mosque and founded the
Rovers, a scout movement that became the most popular youth group in the country; they set up night schools for workers and tutorial colleges to prepare students for the civil service examinations; they built clinics and hospitals in the rural areas; and they involved the Rovers in improving sanitation and health education in the poorer districts. The Society also set up trade unions that acquainted workers with their rights; in the factories where the Brotherhood was a presence,
they earned a just wage, had health insurance and paid holidays, and could pray in the company’s mosque. Banna’s counterculture thus proved that, far from being some obsolete vestige of another era, Islam could become an effective modernizing force as well as promote spiritual vitality. But the Brotherhood’s success would prove double-edged, for it called attention to the government’s neglect of education and labor conditions. Banna’s Society of
Muslim Brothers thus came to be perceived not as a help but as a grave threat to the regime.

The Society was not perfect: it tended to be anti-intellectual, its pronouncements often defensive and self-righteous, its view of the West distorted by the colonial experience, and its leaders intolerant of dissent. Most seriously, it had developed a terrorist wing. After the creation of the State of
Israel, the plight of the
Palestinian
refugees became a disturbing symbol of Muslims’ impotence in the modern world. For some, violence seemed the only way forward.
Anwar Sadat, future president of
Egypt, founded a “murder society” to attack the British in the Canal Zone.
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Other paramilitary groups were attached to the palace and the
Wafd, and so it was perhaps inevitable that some Brothers should form the “
Secret Apparatus” (
al-jihaz al-sirri
). Numbering only about a thousand, the Apparatus was so clandestine that even most of the Brothers had never heard of it. Banna denounced the Apparatus but could not control it and eventually it would both taint and endanger the Society.
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When the Apparatus assassinated Prime Minister
Muhammad al-Nuqrashi on December 28, 1948, the Society condemned the
atrocity in the strongest terms. But the government seized this opportunity to suppress it. On February 12, 1949, almost certainly at the behest of the new prime minister, Banna was gunned down in the street.

When Nasser seized power in 1952, the Society had regrouped but was deeply divided. In the early days while he was still unpopular, Nasser courted the Brotherhood, even though he was a committed secularist and an ally of the
Soviet Union. When it became clear that he had no intention of creating an Islamic state, however, a member of the Apparatus shot him during a rally. Nasser survived, and his courage under attack did wonders for his popularity. He now felt able to move against the Society, and by the end of 1954 more than a thousand Brothers had been brought to trial, and uncounted others, many of whom had committed no greater offense than distributing leaflets, never had even a day in court but languished in prison uncharged for fifteen years. After
Nasser became a hero in the larger Arab world by defying the West during the
Suez Crisis of 1956, he intensified his efforts to secularize the country. But this state violence simply spawned a more extreme form of
Islam that called for armed opposition to the regime.