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14. What is Islamic fundamentalism, and why is there so much political violence in the Middle East?

The first highly organized aristocrat peasant societies originated in the Tigris Euphrates valley in Iraq and the Nile valley in Egypt. However, most of the Middle East is too arid and infertile for peasant farmers to produce large food surpluses. The desert lands became the home of the Bedouin tribal Arabs and evolved into a mixed tribal aristocrat form of society.

From the 15th century through the 19th century, most of the Middle East was ruled by the Turkish Ottoman Empire. After the Ottomans were defeated in World War I, most of the area became part of the British and French Empires. The Arabic countries as we know them today and Iran did not become independent nations until after World War II.

The basic culture and way of life in the Middle East was relatively unaffected by either the Ottomans or the European imperialists. Most of the region retained its characteristic tribal aristocrat form of society until the 1960s when the oil boom began to transform the traditional societies.

We have already seen that the change from aristocrat peasant society to modern democrat market society is a very long, violent, and difficult transformation. It appears that the change from tribal and aristocrat tribal forms of society to democrat market society is just as difficult and violent. The Middle East is now in the most difficult part of this transformation. The inevitable result is a large number of wars, rebellions, and periods of anarchy.

The overall revolutionary experience in the Arab world and other parts of the Middle East is not that much different from what it has been in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The revolution typically proceeds in an erratic fashion. There is often a pattern of two steps forward and one step backward. Intense waves of violence are often followed by periods of calm and stability. The massive political and economic transformation that is taking place is still a long way from completion. There is no way to predict how much violence is yet to come, but it is certainly far from being over.

The oil boom in the Middle East is very much of a mixed blessing in terms of this modern transformation. On the one hand, it has brought in a tremendous amount of money, which has been used to jump-start the market economy of the region. On the other hand, this gigantic amount of easy money has reduced the requirement for the people to learn how to produce wealth the old fashioned way. Economic necessity has forced most countries to learn how to create wealth by farming, manufacturing, and the delivery of services. This requirement is not nearly as strong in much of the Middle East, where wealth gushes out of the ground. The reduced level of economic necessity has lead to a greater emphasis on other factors such as religion and traditional animosities.

This short explanation of history is no place for an in-depth analysis of the problems of revolution in the Middle East, but recent events have forced me to try to explain how so much of the Arab world has come into such dramatic conflict with the United States. There are two primary reasons for this conflict. One is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and the other is American political and military intervention in the region.

The Holocaust of the Jews during World War II is the kind of experience that no population can endure without taking extreme measures to ensure that it will never happen again. After the war, the remaining Jewish population universally insisted that they must have their own state where they could rely on themselves to guarantee their own security. This is very understandable and most of the world, including the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union, were in agreement.

The only obvious place for this state was their ancestral homeland of Palestine, where a moderate number of Jews had slowly been infiltrating since the end of the 19th century. The problem is that Palestine was already occupied by Palestinians, who are not Jews and had been living there for thousands of years. The Palestinians were a small population of peasant-farmers. For centuries they had been ruled by the Ottomans and more recently by the British.

In the most successful campaign of terrorism known to history, the Jews forced the British to leave and established their own state. This provoked an immediate war with neighboring Arab states, which was won by the Israelis. Most of the Palestinians then fled their homes and sought refuge in areas controlled by Arab forces in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Jordan River. The Israelis claim that the Palestinians left of their own free will and therefore have no right to return. This is a difficult claim to establish. Refugees have been fleeing from the violence of war for thousands of years. Nearly all of them eventually return home. There is also evidence that the Jewish terrorist group, Irgun, slaughtered the residents of at least two villages for the specific purpose of forcing the Palestinians out of the new state of Israel.

These events happened over fifty years ago, but they created an open sore in the Middle East, which has been festering and growing worse ever since. At the time of the expulsion there were less than one million Palestinians, who were mostly uneducated peasants. They were relatively easy to push around and ignore. Today there are more than four million Palestinians. They have been toughened and hardened by life in the refugee camps. They are educated and intensely aware of all the injustices that have happened to them. The experience has convinced them that they too must have a state of their own.

The question of who has a right to live in Palestine is not just a dispute between Israelis and Palestinians. The surrounding Arab countries have been involved from the very beginning, and they have every right to be involved. If some group came along and threw the Canadians out of Canada and they were living in refugee camps in the United States, it is certain that the U.S. would get involved and make every effort to help restore them to their homeland. The Arab countries feel just as strongly about this as Americans would.

So far there have been four Arab-Israeli wars: 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. As far as the majority of Arabs are concerned, these were battles, and the war will continue until justice for the Palestinian people has been achieved. There is also another reason for the continuation of warfare. War has always been a part of the revolutionary transformation of society.

In America, the French and Indian war prepared the 13 colonies for independence. A great deal of social, economic, and political progress came out of the Revolutionary War. The War of 1812 and the Indian Wars continued this trend. The Mexican-American War helped unify the nation for a time and continued the process of change and development. Prior to the Civil War, the United States was still primarily an agricultural country. During the war and afterwards, we quickly became an industrial nation. World War I brought more social and economic change. World War II led directly to the development of democratic market society. Europe used warfare even more prolifically in its transformation from aristocrat peasant society through oligarchic society to democratic market society.

The Middle East is following the same path. War has been used to pull young men out of the peasant villages, educate them, discipline them, train them to use modern equipment, and instill a sense of patriotism and national pride. All of these factors dramatically increase the speed of social transformation. Wars are not started specifically for this purpose, but they have this effect. The Jews had no way of knowing that their presence in the Middle East would help propel the region into the modern world through the violence of warfare, but that is part of what is happening.

The United States claims to have an evenhanded policy in the Arab-Israeli conflict, but that is obviously not the case. America has given over a hundred billion dollars to Israel in the last three decades, which has been used to buy large quantities of the world’s best weapons and to support a major arms industry in Israel. The Palestinians have received a few hundred million that was mostly needed to buy food for the refugee camps.

A majority of the Arab people believe that the United States deliberately maintains Israel in order to have a strong ally in the region for the primary purpose of watching over it’s oil supplies. This is not true. There are a number of other more important reasons. It is true that a large number of Americans have at times thought along these lines. This is very insulting to the Arab people. It is their oil, not ours. It only becomes ours after we purchase it from them. Buying oil is, and must remain, a purely commercial transaction. Political alliances and military power have no legitimate place in any commercial transaction. What would Americans think if some powerful Arab country were to help an alliance of Indian tribes to take over Kansas in order to watch over their food supplies?

This brings us to the whole question of American political involvement in the Middle East. Since the end of World War II, the United States has made a major effort to maintain peace and stability in the world, or at least that was the general intention. When the British imperialists retreated from the Middle East, they tried to leave it in the hands of monarchs who would be friendly to the West. The Americans believed that the best way to ensure stability was to help these monarchs stay in power.

In 1954 a hesitant and chaotic revolutionary movement in Iran swept the young and inexperienced Shah from power. The United States sent in the CIA, which spent millions of dollars in bribes to pave the way for his return. The CIA congratulated itself on a job well done. The Americans were pleased with the return to power of a political ally. The Shah quickly built up a massive secret police force and bought billions of dollars worth of weapons to prevent such a thing from happening again. As the years went by it became clear that he was relying on the secret police and the American connection to maintain his throne rather than the support of his own people. The Iranian people became more and more opposed to the regime and its Americans backers. They turned to the Islamic clergy for leadership partly because they knew that this was one group that was definitely not controlled by the United States. The resulting revolution in Iran was a major disaster for American policy, and 22 years later friendly relations have still not been restored.

The United States does not seem to have learned anything from the debacle. For the last 20 years it has been a major supporter of an oligarchic Egyptian government. This is partly because Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, partly because it is a friend of the West, and partly for the general purpose of promoting peace and stability. That is all very fine, but this is another government that does little to promote the prosperity of its ordinary citizens. The majority of the people still live in poverty. Many Egyptians have now begun to blame the United States for their poverty and lack of economic opportunity.

American policy makers are very proud of their special relationship with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We support the monarchy, and they sell us oil. That’s great, but anyone with the money can buy oil from Saudi Arabia, and the price is the same for everyone. Now the ordinary Saudi citizens have started to blame us for their lack of a political voice. Of the 19 airplane hijackers in the recent terrorist attack, 15 of them were from Saudi Arabia. What kind of special relationship is that?

The United States is not an Islamic Arab country in the middle of a revolutionary experience. Yet it seems to think that it knows what kind of government these countries should have. This is nonsense.

An example of the vast difference in thinking between Americans and Arabs is Saddam Hussein and the government of Iraq. In 1958 the revolutionary Baathist Party in Iraq assassinated an especially corrupt monarch and seized control of the government. A decade latter Saddam Hussein took power. He solidified his popularity by bringing electricity to the rural villages, and building up the military. He then launched an unsuccessful war against Iran to recover Arab territory that had been lost in previous centuries. He tried to recover from this failure by conquering the principality of Kuwait and making it part of Iraq.

The United States had no problem with his attack on Iran, which was its enemy, but his conquest of the friendly state of Kuwait was a different matter. The American government and media demonized Saddam as an evil dictator by publicizing everything bad that he had done while ignoring his efforts to improve the lives of the common people among his core constituency of Sunni Arabs. The Americans portrayed Saddam as a mad beast who was trying to conquer most of the world’s oil, and went to war to restore the independence of Kuwait.

The Arabic people saw things very differently. All of Saddam’s actions had been calculated to increase his popularity in the Arab world. Kuwait was generally disliked because it had provided a key opening to the British. Back in the 18th century when the English first tried to penetrate the Persian Gulf, they had run into universal hostility and were on the verge of being expelled from the region. Then, they made an alliance with the city-state of Kuwait. This gave the British an important base from which they could expand. The two allies prospered together. In the 1920s when the British Empire controlled the entire region, they greatly increased the size of Kuwait and gave it a large part of the Iraqi coast.

Most of today’s large nation-states achieved their present size by annexing smaller aristocratic and tribal states on their borders. Most Arabs saw no reason why Iraq should not do the same. They highly approved of the idea of Iraq becoming a rich and powerful country that could champion the Arab cause against Israel. When the Americans destroyed the Iraqi army and reversed its conquest, they saw it as just one more example of the United States trying to keep the Arabs weak and impotent.

This is an example of two different societies looking at the same historical event and seeing completely different things. The Americans saw a horrible, evil, war-crazed dictator who was a threat to his neighbors and the world. Many Arabs, who are his neighbors, saw a great champion of the Arabic cause. This problem of different interpretations is common in history, and it often causes trouble.

The United States likes to go stomping around the world, beating its chest, and loudly proclaiming: we destroyed communism; we are the only super power; we safeguard the world against the aggression of evil dictators. Many Arabs have come to believe that America controls the world. It allows them to blame the United States for their poverty, weakness, and corrupt oligarchic governments.

This is a false impression. The Arabic people have few economic and political opportunities because they are still in the early stage of oligarchic society. The United States has been interfering in the region, and it has been less helpful than it thinks, but it has not been deliberately holding them back. The United States does not understand the revolution that the entire world is engaged in, and it is essentially powerless to help the Arab people through their revolutionary transition. The modern revolution is something that every nation must accomplish primarily on its own.

Many people in the Middle East have become disgusted with their oligarchic governments. This is a common feature for countries in the middle of their revolutionary experience. Socialism, communism, and fascism were all developed in a desperate attempt to find some alternative to oligarchic society. Many Arab countries flirted with various kinds of socialism in the 1950s and 60s, but it was not able to provide a successful solution to the problem of how to organize a modern state.

In recent years many people in the Middle East have turned to Islamic fundamentalism for a solution. This is not as strange as it seems to most Westerners. Christian fundamentalism, in the form of the Protestant Reformation. was the beginning of the modern revolution in Europe. In the English Civil War of the 1640s, Puritan fundamentalists under Oliver Cromwell overthrew the aristocratic establishment, executed the king, and began the modern transformation in England. The Puritan government only lasted for about ten years. Religious fundamentalists are much better at leading a revolution than they are at governing a nation.

The American media delights in ridiculing Islamic fundamentalism as a step backward into the medieval world. In this country just 140 years ago, the people in the southern states saw the oligarchic society that was taking shape in the north. They wanted nothing to do with this new kind of society that featured capitalist industry and an exploited working class. They much preferred to keep their agrarian society even though it required slavery in order to maintain an educated elite. They seceded from the union and started the Civil War in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid the modern progression of oligarchic society. Which is more medieval, Islamic fundamentalism or the institution of slavery?

It is true that Islamic fundamentalism and anti-American terrorism have developed together in the Middle East, but they are not cause and effect. Islamic fundamentalism is a reaction against oligarchic society. In Afghanistan it was a response to the extreme level of anarchy and lawlessness that has been endemic in the region. Anti-American, Arab terrorism is a reaction against U.S. support for Israel and American intervention in the revolutionary transformation of society in the Arab world. It is also influenced by the mistaken belief that the United States is responsible for the widespread poverty and lack of political opportunity. In reality these problems are a normal and natural part of every countries’ oligarchic experience. The terrorists are much more interested in politics than they are in religion, even though some of them use religion as a cover for their activities.