Sounds like an interesting book, anyone read it?
REVIEWS: It is not religion
Reviewed by M. Abul Fazl
“The attacks on the USA in September 2001” were, according to Halliday, the author of this book, “the first time in five centuries that a ‘Southern’ enemy has hit back in a major assault on the territory of a Western State…” The US’s response was “war on terrorism, which goes beyond terrorism proper to reshape international relations”.
Halliday himself takes the event as a point of departure to examine the thesis of a developing clash between the West and the Islamic countries, a clash not in the sense of contradictions between two centres of power but with something primordial, mystical about it. And he rejects it.
This thesis of conflict is being built up not only by some interested theorists in the West but also by the Islamists in the Muslim world. The author has a simple answer. There have been trade or territorial conflicts between them but none up to now which could be termed “civilizational”. Anyway, neither the Muslim world is undifferentiated nor the European one. There are possibly more conflicts among the Muslim countries than they have with the West.
The Europeans seem to think primarily of the Middle East when they speak of the Muslim world, although it has only a small part of the world Muslims. The reason was originally strategic, to which the discovery of oil added an economic dimension. The important point here is that the old ruling classes continued to retain power in the newly independent countries and thus enter into a neo-colonial relationship with Europe and, later, the US.
Halliday also notes the special nature of oil production. It creates no backward and forward linkages and, therefore, no secondary development. The income generated from it is rentier. He should have added that its political effect is powerful making the rentier state strong against its own people and commensurately vulnerable to the advanced world.The third historic development in the region was the Jewish immigration, as Britain closed its own doors to the European Jews but opened those of Palestine to them. The defeat of the Arab states by Israel was a shock to the Arabs but the Palestinian problem was used by the Arab states mainly for demagogic purposes. The Palestinians were left practically to their own fate.
The point, however, is that none of these conflicts - struggle of the radical movements against their own regimes, anti-Western movement or the Arab Israeli conflict - is of a religious nature. They are about the issues that engage the people throughout the world.
Again the Iranian revolution, though expressing itself in religious idiom, was about mundane issues. The rapid pace of economic change in the later years of the Shah’s rule had brutally unsettled the middle class and the peasants which mobilized to overthrow him. But the revolutionary authority conducted itself like any Iranian nationalist government.
Halliday holds the revolution was “comprehensively reactionary harking to previous older and rejecting ideas of historical progress”. However, he overlooks the fact that ideology often hides the real interests of the revolutionary class. The mobilized Iranian masses confronting the army and forcing it to surrender meant it was a genuine revolution with power shifting within the bourgeoisie, from the compradors to the nationalists.
However, his belief that it was made mainly by those who had benefited from the Shah’s modernization is not correct. It was propelled not only by those who had been marginalized.
The greatest failure of the Islamist movement in general, according to Halliday, is its lack of an economic programme.
The Gulf war of 1990-91 was, of course, partly a result of the Iraq-Iran war. But its roots lay in the Baath regimes’ inability to solve Iraq’s problems. The rentier scheme could increase social benefits or finance arms purchase. It could not bring development. The war had two results: (a) end of the Arab nationalist movement as it had shaped since the fifties (b) the legitimization of large scale US intervention in the region.
On the thesis of an Islamic threat to the West, he says the Muslim states are too weak to pose it. He also denies that the West needs an enemy. But he does not explain, or not adequately, why the spectre of an Islamic threat arose in the West and racism in Europe took on a more explicitly anti-Muslim character after the Bolshevik menace was eliminated.
The Islamist movements, he says, are aimed at the post-colonial regimes of the Muslim world, who have so clearly failed to solve the problems of these countries. They may turn against the West as the protector of these regimes. However, there is nothing in Islam to encourage terrorism. Further, it is wrong to treat Islam as timeless. Politics and economics of the Muslim countries evolve like those of others. Their people conduct themselves according to the problems they face today.
The modern anti-Muslimism, according to Halliday, is not a revival of old animosity but a new phenomenon, though it may draw upon old myths. Anti-Muslimism in modern Europe combines popular prejudice with strategic fear born of the rise in oil prices, the Iranian revolution, etc. Relations of the Jews with the Muslims deteriorated after the establishment of Israel, as the immigrant Jews not only displaced the Palestinians but also exhibited civilizational arrogance.
The book also discusses Orientalism following Edward Said’s critique. Said is right that it is a discourse of domination. But, more importantly, Halliday points out, its assumption is the basic staticity of the “Orient”. And there is a new trend now. Instead of the advanced countries’ orientalists travelling to the Muslim lands to study them for the education of their own ruling classes, the oriental orientalists settle in the West to perform the same job for them. The previouspractice characterized territorial colonialism. The present one suits new-colonialism.
Every book by Halliday on the Arab East and Iran enriches the readers’ thought. This book is no exception. The fact that it was written before the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq does not take away any of its value.
http://www.dawn.com/weekly/books/books15.htm
Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East
By Fred Halliday
Tauris, London.
Available at Vanguard Books, 45 The Mall, Lahore
Tel: 042-7243783
Email: [email protected]
ISBN 1-86064-868-1
255pp. Rs1,295