The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (20 page)

The success of Islamist movements in dominating the opposition and establishing themselves as the only viable alternative to incumbent regimes was also greatly helped by the policies of those regimes. At one time or another during
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the Cold War many governments, including those of Algeria, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, and Israel, encouraged and supported Islamists as a counter to communist or hostile nationalist movements. At least until the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states provided massive funding to the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist groups in a variety of countries. The ability of Islamist groups to dominate the opposition was also enhanced by government suppression of secular oppositions. Fundamentalist strength generally varied inversely with that of secular democratic or nationalist parties and was weaker in countries, such as Morocco and Turkey, that allowed some degree of multiparty competition than it was in countries that suppressed all opposition.
[28]
Secular opposition, however, is more vulnerable to repression than religious opposition. The latter can operate within and behind a network of mosques, welfare organizations, foundations, and other Muslim institutions which the government feels it cannot suppress. Liberal democrats have no such cover and hence are more easily controlled or eliminated by the government.

In an effort to preempt the growth of Islamist tendencies, governments expanded religious education in state-controlled schools, which often came to be dominated by Islamist teachers and ideas, and expanded their support for religion and religious educational institutions. These actions were in part evidence of the government’s commitment to Islam, and, through funding, they extended governmental control over Islamic institutions and education. They also, however, led to the education of large numbers of students and people in Islamic values, making them more open to Islamist appeals, and graduated militants who went forth to work on behalf of Islamist goals.

The strength of the Resurgence and the appeal of Islamist movements induced governments to promote Islamic institutions and practices and to incorporate Islamic symbols and practices into their regime. At the broadest level this meant affirming or reaffirming the Islamic character of their state and society. In the 1970s and 1980s political leaders rushed to identify their regimes and themselves with Islam. King Hussein of Jordan, convinced that secular governments had little future in the Arab world, spoke of the need to create “Islamic democracy” and a “modernizing Islam.” King Hassan of Morocco emphasized his descent from the Prophet and his role as “Commander of the Faithful.” The sultan of Brunei, not previously noted for Islamic practices, became “increasingly devout” and defined his regime as a “Malay Muslim monarchy.” Ben Ali in Tunisia began regularly to invoke Allah in his speeches and “wrapped himself in the mantle of Islam” to check the growing appeal of Islamic groups.
[29]
In the early 1990s Suharto explicitly adopted a policy of becoming “more Muslim.” In Bangladesh the principle of “secularism” was dropped from the constitution in the mid 1970s, and by the early 1990s the secular, Kemalist identity of Turkey was, for the first time, coming under serious challenge.
[30]
To underline their Islamic commitment, governmental leaders—Özal, Suharto, Karimov—hastened to their
hajh.

Governments in Muslim countries also acted to Islamicize law. In Indonesia
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Islamic legal concepts and practices were incorporated into the secular legal system. Reflecting its substantial non-Muslim population, Malaysia, in contrast, moved toward the development of two separate legal systems, one Islamic and one secular.
[31]
In Pakistan during the regime of General Zia ul-Haq, extensive efforts were made to Islamicize the law and economy. Islamic penalties were introduced, a system of
shari’a
courts established, and the
shari’a
declared the supreme law of the land.

Like other manifestations of the global religious revival, the Islamic Resurgence is both a product of and an effort to come to grips with modernization. Its underlying causes are those generally responsible for indigenization trends in non-Western societies: urbanization, social mobilization, higher levels of literacy and education, intensified communication and media consumption, and expanded interaction with Western and other cultures. These developments undermine traditional village and clan ties and create alienation and an identity crisis. Islamist symbols, commitments, and beliefs meet these psychological needs, and Islamist welfare organizations, the social, cultural, and economic needs of Muslims caught in the process of modernization. Muslims feel the need to return to Islamic ideas, practices, and institutions to provide the compass and the motor of modernization.
[32]

The Islamic revival, it has been argued, was also “a product of the West’s declining power and prestige. . . . As the West relinquished total ascendance, its ideals and institutions lost luster.” More specifically, the Resurgence was stimulated and fueled by the oil boom of the 1970s, which greatly increased the wealth and power of many Muslim nations and enabled them to reverse the relations of domination and subordination that had existed with the West. As John B. Kelly observed at the time, “For the Saudis, there is undoubtedly a double satisfaction to be gained from the infliction of humiliating punishments upon Westerners; for not only are they an expression of the power and independence of Saudi Arabia but they also demonstrate, as they are intended to demonstrate, contempt for Christianity and the pre-eminence of Islam.” The actions of the oil-rich Muslim states “if placed in their historical, religious, racial and cultural setting, amount to nothing less than a bold attempt to lay the Christian West under tribute to the Muslim East.”
[33]
The Saudi, Libyan, and other governments used their oil riches to stimulate and finance the Muslim revival, and Muslim wealth led Muslims to swing from fascination with Western culture to deep involvement in their own and willingness to assert the place and importance of Islam in non-Islamic societies. Just as Western wealth had previously been seen as the evidence of the superiority of Western culture, oil wealth was seen as evidence of the superiority of Islam.

The impetus provided by the oil prices hikes faded in the 1980s, but population growth was a continuing motor force. While the rise of East Asia has been fueled by spectacular rates of economic growth, the Resurgence of Islam has been fueled by equally spectacular rates of population growth. Population
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expansion in Islamic countries, particularly in the Balkans, North Africa, and Central Asia, has been significantly greater than that in the neighboring countries and in the world generally. Between 1965 and 1990 the total number of people on earth rose from 3.3 billion to 5.3 billion, an annual growth rate of 1.85 percent. In Muslim societies growth rates almost always were over 2.0 percent, often exceeded 2.5 percent, and at times were over 3.0 percent. Between 1965 and 1990, for instance, the Maghreb population increased at a rate of 2.65 percent a year, from 29.8 million to 59 million, with Algerians multiplying at a 3.0 percent annual rate. During these same years, the number of Egyptians rose at a 2.3 percent rate from 29.4 million to 52.4 million. In Central Asia, between 1970 and 1993, populations grew at rates of 2.9 percent in Tajikstan, 2.6 percent in Uzbekistan, 2.5 percent in Turkmenistan, 1.9 percent in Kyrgyzstan, but only 1.1 percent in Kazakhstan, whose population is almost half Russian. Pakistan and Bangladesh had population growth rates exceeding 2.5 percent a year, while Indonesia’s was over 2.0 percent a year. Overall Muslims, as we mentioned, constituted perhaps 18 percent of the world’s population in 1980 and are likely to be over 20 percent in 2000 and 30 percent in 2025.
[34]

The rates of population increase in the Maghreb and elsewhere have peaked and are beginning to decline, but growth in absolute numbers will continue to be large, and the impact of that growth will be felt throughout the first part of the twenty-first century. For years to come Muslim populations will be disproportionately young populations, with a notable demographic bulge of teenagers and people in their twenties (
Figure 5.2
). In addition, the people in this age cohort will be overwhelmingly urban and have at least a secondary education. This combination of size and social mobilization has three signif-cant political consequences.

First, young people are the protagonists of protest, instability, reform, and revolution. Historically, the existence of large cohorts of young people has tended to coincide with such movements. “The Protestant Reformation,” it has been said, “is an example of one of the outstanding youth movements in history.” Demographic growth, Jack Goldstone has persuasively argued, was a central factor in the two waves of revolution that occurred in Eurasia in the mid-seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries.
[35]
A notable expansion of the proportion of youth in Western countries coincided with the “Age of the Democratic Revolution” in the last decades of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century successful industrialization and emigration reduced the political impact of young populations in European societies. The proportions of youth rose again in the 1920s, however, providing recruits to fascist and other extremist movements.”
[36]
Four decades later the post-World War II baby boom generation made its mark politically in the demonstrations and protests of the 1960s.

Figure 5.2 – The Demographic Challenge: Islam, Russia, and the West

The youth of Islam have been making their mark in the Islamic Resurgence. As the Resurgence got under way in the 1970s and picked up steam in the
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1980s, the proportion of youth (that is, those fifteen to twenty-four years of age) in major Muslim countries rose significantly and began to exceed 20 percent of the total population. In many Muslim countries the youth bulge peaked in the 1970s and 1980s; in others it will peak early in the next century (
Table 5.1
). The actual or projected peaks in all these countries, with one exception, are above 20 percent; the estimated Saudi Arabian peak in the first decade of the twenty-first century falls just short of that. These youth provide the recruits for Islamist organizations and political movements. It is not perhaps entirely coincidental that the proportion of youth in the Iranian population rose dramatically in the 1970s, reaching 20 percent in the last half of that decade, and that the Iranian Revolution occurred in 1979 or that this benchmark was reached in Algeria in the early 1990s just as the Islamist FIS was winning popular support and scoring electoral victories. Potentially significant regional variations also occur in the Muslim youth bulge (
Figure 5.3
). While the data must be treated with caution, the projections suggest that the Bosnian and Albanian youth proportions will decline precipitously at the turn of the century. The youth bulge will, on the other hand, remain high in the Gulf states. In 1988
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Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia said that the greatest threat to his country was the rise of Islamic fundamentalism among its youth.
[37]
According to these projections, that threat will persist well into the twenty-first century.

In major Arab countries (Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia) the number of people in their early twenties seeking jobs will expand until about 2010. As compared to 1990, entrants into the job market will increase by 30 percent in Tunisia, by about 50 percent in Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco, and by over 100 percent in Syria. The rapid expansion of literacy in Arab societies also creates a gap between a literate younger generation and a largely illiterate older generation and thus a “dissociation between knowledge and power” likely “to put a strain on political systems.”
[38]

Table 5.1 – Youth Bulge in Muslim Countries

Larger populations need more resources, and hence people from societies with dense and/or rapidly growing populations tend to push outward, occupy territory, and exert pressure on other less demographically dynamic peoples. Islamic population growth is thus a major contributing factor to the conflicts along the borders of the Islamic world between Muslims and other peoples. Population pressure combined with economic stagnation promotes Muslim migration to Western and other non-Muslim societies, elevating immigration as an issue in those societies. The juxtaposition of a rapidly growing people of one culture and a slowly growing or stagnant people of another culture generates pressures for economic and/or political adjustments in both societies. In the 1970s, for instance, the demographic balance in the former Soviet Union shifted drastically with Muslims increasing by 24 percent while Russians increased by 6.5 percent, causing great concern among Central Asian communist leaders.
[39]
Similarly, rapid growth in the numbers of Albanians does not reassure Serbs, Greeks, or Italians. Israelis are concerned about the high growth rates of Palestinians, and Spain, with a population growing at less than one-fifth of 1
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percent a year, is uneasy confronted by Maghreb neighbors with populations growing more than ten times as fast and per capita GNP’s about one-tenth its own.