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Counterrevolution in Turkey
By Etyen Mahcupyan – Today’s Zaman
A true democracy needs a counterrevolution
There is a cliché Kemalists have frequently voiced since the establishment of the republic. According to it, modern and “progressive” civilian and military bureaucrats are trying to educate and transform the people of Turkey, while “reactionary” groups acting under the influence of religion resist their efforts.
Since these reactionary groups are apt to adopt newer forms, all kinds of liberation help them make a public appearance on the political scene, and this results in the risk of losing strongholds conquered for the sake of modernization. Thus, according to this line of thought, the republic is a revolution bringing this nation to modernity. Those who oppose this change knowingly or unknowingly become tools of a counterrevolution which imparts the darkness of the “Middle Ages.” Accordingly the Turkish state’s struggle against counterrevolutionaries must continue until the last of these counterrevolutionaries is destroyed.
This perspective acquired political meaning after the multiparty regime was introduced because the emergence of political parties other than the one considered acceptable by the state implies that they entertain mentalities or ideologies different from the republican ideology. This, in turn, suggests that the political parties outside the Republican People’s Party (CHP) tradition serve more or less to the purposes of counterrevolution. On the other hand, it was quickly realized that the republic had failed to convince the majority of the people to give into an authoritarian secularism mentality and “right-wing” political parties categorically assumed government offices. For this reason the republic had to develop a system that would restrict political participation of “counterrevolutionaries” and limit the area of activity of right-wing political parties and restore the regime when things go out of control. The republic needed a reliable and dependable institution that would be ready for action at all times in order to ensure the custody of this system.
Naturally, the army was the only eligible candidate for such a task. During the late years of the Ottoman Empire, the army had been perceived as the bearer of modernity, and it produced the “savior” of this country. Thus, the military became the ideological reference of the republican era and institutionalized it. In a nutshell, the “republic” asserted itself as a “permanent revolution” that has to fight continuously against visible and invisible enemies. The system called democracy could only be allowed to the extent that it found a place within this tutelary regime and does not pose a threat to this regime.
Based on this background information, we can understand more readily why the National Security Policy Document is prepared by the military and why perceptions of internal threats are shaped by generals as well as why this document is kept secret from the legislative body. This is because the republic has always had fears about society, and its fears continue to exist today. What they call “internal threats” are nothing but the society itself and its choices and demands that the army does not like. These choices and demands have always implied greater freedoms; in response, the military opted to restrict freedoms. Their understanding of internal threats was largely guided by these concerns.
The National Security Policy Document was instrumental in keeping civilian politics, which is inclined to get along well with the military, under tightly controlled tutelage. However, they needed an autonomous power against those who refuse to accept this tutelage. This was achieved by Article 35 of the Internal Service Law of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK). According to this article, the army has the task of “protecting and watching out for” the regime. This article is the legal basis for all military coups in Turkey.
Still, all military coups need an infrastructure because military rule has to be reinforced both at a local level and within institutions as well as to destroy any potential resistance. Therefore, since 1960, the army dominated the social sphere with justifications of “public order” at every opportunity and institutionalized its presence in social life. This mechanism, systematized under the title of security and public order, reached its peak in 1997 with the Protocol on Cooperation for Security and Public Order (EMASYA). With this protocol, the military obtained the opportunity to collect intelligence and conduct operations at will and without control.
In short, the National Security Policy Document, the Internal Service Law and EMASYA served as tools to make the revolution permanent in this country. Unfortunately, this “revolution” tends to exclude social demands, fails to accept social change and perceives freedoms as threats. For this reason, given the Kemalist perception of democratic demands as “counterrevolution,” a true democracy needs a counterrevolution.
Accordingly, the government’s abolishment of EMASYA last week was a major step toward liberation. It is now time to do away with the National Security Policy Document and the Internal Service Law.
What Comes Next
Turkey and the Arabs are ending a century of mutual alienation
A strange calm prevails on the Middle Eastern surface. Occasionally a wave breaks through from beneath – the killing of an Iranian scientist, a bomb targetting Hamas’s representative to Lebanon (which instead kills three Hizbullah men), a failed attack on Israeli diplomats travelling through Jordan – and psychological warfare rages, as usual, between Israel and Hizbullah, but the high drama seems to have shifted for now to the east, to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Arab world (with the obvious exception of Yemen) appears to be holding its breath, waiting for what comes next.
Iraq’s civil war is over. The Shia majority, after grievous provocation from takfiri terrorists, and after its own leaderhip made grievous mistakes, decisively defeated the Sunni minority. Baghdad is no longer a mixed city but one with a large Shia majority and with no-go zones for all sects. In their defeat, a large section of the Sunni resistance started working for their American enemy. They did so for reasons of self-preservation and in order to remove Wahhabi-nihilists from the fortresses which Sunni mistakes had allowed them to build.
The collapse of the national resistance into sectarian civil war was a tragedy for the region, the Arabs and the entire Muslim world. The fact that it was partly engineered by the occupier does not excuse the Arabs. Imperialists will exploit any weaknesses they find. This is in the natural way of things. It is the task of the imperialised to rectify these weaknesses in order to be victorious.
The sectarian horror has taken the wind out of Iraqi resistance. Those who fought the Americans in the past and who choose not to collaborate now have gone quiet. Moqtada Sadr, for instance, having lost control of the more thuggish elements of his Jaish al-Mahdi and therefore much of his mass popularity, has disappeared into the Qom seminaries. He will emerge at some point with Ayatullah status. What he does then will depend on what comes next, which is not at all clear.
Will the monthly round of bomb attacks reignite civil war? Will resistance mount again as Iraqis move against the permanent US megabases on their land? Will there be a further American withdrawal? And if so, what happens then? Might Saudi Arabia be committed to preventing a Shia-majority government from functioning, at any price? Would it fund and arm an anti-Shia militia more fully than it has done in the past? Its attempts to defeat the Iraqi Shia would fail, but they could spark a new war in which the Saudis face Iran by proxy or even, by a chain of mismanagement, directly. This could satisfy perverse American and Israeli strategists as much as the Iraq-Iran conflict did in the 80s.
The Saudis and Iranians may already be fighting by proxy in Yemen. Saudi military involvement in its southern neighbour is a public fact (the kingdom is heroically bombarding poverty-stricken villagers with its expensive American bombs). Its enemy is the rebellious Houthi tribe, Shias. The president of collapsing Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, preposterously tells us that the Houthis are armed by both Iran and al-Qa’ida. Saudi media describes the enemy as ‘Shia’. Iranian media describes ‘Wahhabi’ massacres. Meanwhile, Iranian pilgrims have stopped visiting Mecca until such time as the Saudi authorities guarantee their protection from intolerable Wahhabi mistreatment.
In Palestine nothing is resolved and nothing is in sight of resolution. With the cleavage between Gaza and the West Bank successfully engineered, with Gaza walled, starved and bombed, with the West Bank warned that it will suffer Gaza’s fate if it removes its collaborator government, the Palestinian liberation project is in desperate straits. For now the West Bank enjoys a somewhat improved economy and freedom of movement, quietly realises the two state dream is over, and waits. For now Gaza does its best to survive, and waits. For now.
The Gaza model applies to Lebanon too. The general message is that a future Israel-Hizbullah conflict will be ‘a hundred times worse’ in its effects on Lebanese civilians than the atrocious 2006 assault. Hizbullah is careful and quiet, but by most accounts even better dug in than it was four years ago. Lebanon, meanwhile, is more stable than it has been since the assassination of Rafiq Hariri. After Hizbullah called the bluff of Hariri junior and his Saudi-US-backed militia, and with the mediation of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the US have retreated to their traditional positions of influence in Lebanon. Saad Hariri has visited Damascus.
Syria has regained its strength. The Obama administration will continue to back Zionist expansion, has kept Bush-era anti-Syrian sanctions in place, and only yesterday appointed an ambassador to Damascus, but ‘regime change’ is no longer an American fantasy and, as noted above, a natural, non-militarised Syrian influence in Lebanon has been accepted. Syria’s position is again what it was under the late president Hafez al-Asad: Syria can not change the region on its own, but nobody can change the region without it.
The good news, and perhaps the what-comes-next, is Turkey.
When I lived in Turkey in the early nineties the country was surrounded by enemies. Now all of its neighbours are friends. Internal relations between Turks and Kurds are also much better than they were a few years ago. Both developments stem from a long-overdue dilution of Kemalist national chauvinism brought about by new social forces. These are the upwardly mobile Anatolian Islamic-democrats represented by Prime Minister Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party. They aim to build an inclusive post-Ottoman society, and their economy is flourishing.
An intellectual associated with the Justice and Development Party told a friend of mine that the best things to happen to Middle Eastern Muslims in the 20th century had been Ataturk and Wahhabism, because both challenges – the militantly secularist and the sectarian literalist – had forced (and are forcing) Muslims to rethink their core values. Turkey’s Sufi-based Sunnism is an attractive model which could sap the appeal of Salafism in the ex-Ottoman Arab world. But the Turkish-led alliance that is emerging inludes the Shia world too. Turkey has defended Iran’s right to nuclear energy and, against American orders, is investing enthusiastically in the Iranian economy.
Turkey is engaging not only with Arabs but with Arab and Muslim interests too
Turkey and the Arabs are ending a century of mutual alienation. The late Ottoman state degenerated from a multicultural Muslim dominion into an empire on the European model in which nationalist Turks oppressed the Arab territories into stagnation. Arab nationalism flared in response. In what was a historical mistake – but perhaps a necessary one – in 1917 the Arabs accepted the help of the British to rid themselves of Turkish rule. The British promised an independent Arab state; what the Arabs got was the Sykes-Picot dismemberment of their homeland and the resulting irrevocably corrupt states system. Palestine was lost.
Ataturk defended the Turkish homeland from dismemberment and constructed a functioning European-style nation-state, but one run by the army. The governing ideology was fervently ethno-nationalist, precluding cooperation with non-Turks. Greeks fled to Greece while Greek Turks fled to Turkey. The Armenians had already been cleansed. Ataturk considered Turkey’s Arab and Persian neighbours to be degenerate oriental races. Official mythology taught that Turks had invented language and civilisation, that the ancient Sumerians were Turks, and that Turks had colonised India when the Indians lived in trees. Across the border in Syria, Baathist myths repeated these ideas in an Arab mirror.
The practical contention between the two countries was over Wilayat Iskenderoon, or Hatay in Turkish, which the French Mandate (mandated to guard Syria’s territorial unity) gave to Turkey in 1938 in return for a promise not to join Germany in a future war. Arab nationalists in Syria and elsewhere were outraged by the loss of ancient Antioch, of Iskenderoon, Syria’s major port, and of the green lands and markets around these cities. Syrian maps still show Wilayat Iskenderoon as part of Syria, although Syrians don’t resent the Turks like they resent the Israelis occupying the Golan. The Turks are old neighbours and they do not seek to drive out the Arabs. Now that the border is wide open, now that Syrians, Lebanese and Jordanians can enter Turkey without a visa, now that Turkish-Syrian trade is burgeoning, Iskenderoon does not even feel so lost any more.
Syria gave up the Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999, greatly reducing Turkish hostility. Syrian president Bashaar al-Asad and his wife Asma al-Akhras are popular figures in Turkey, and Turkish prime minister Erdogan is wildly popular in the Arab world, particularly after his public rebukes of Israel during the Gaza massacre.
The friendship with Syria shows that Turkey is engaging not only with Arabs but with Arab and Muslim interests too. Its hardening position in support of the Palestinians allows a voice of Muslim conscience to be heard in the international arena. This marks a change. The regional US-client regimes seem suddenly much less relevant, and the age of the ‘moderate camp’ versus ‘resistance front’ duality, which reigned a couple of years ago, has already passed.
Turkey has democratic stability on its side. Another military coup is highly unlikely, firstly because the miltary itself contains representatives of the new Turkish mood, and secondly because the army’s secularist hard-core would dash its hopes of moving further into the European Union’s embrace if it were to seize power. But it is Turkey’s slow realisation that the EU will never allow it to be a full member that has encouraged it to claim its place in Asia, where it belongs. In Asia it is admirably placed as the conduit of Iraqi, Iranian and Caspian Sea oil, as the bridge to Europe and Europe’s Muslims, and as a potential shield for the region against American attacks.
The Turkish-led alliance could prevent a fresh outbreak of war in Iraq. Turkey would make a sounder sponsor of Iraqi Sunni interests than Saudi Arabia, and could moderate Iranian influence in the country. An alliance is also essential for cross-border cooperation over water and fuel distribution as climate change and resource shortages loom across the region.
I have great hopes for the development of this alliance despite the potential weakness of Iran in the short to medium term (it is to be hoped that the Islamic Republic shows enough flexibility to adapt to some of the demands of its alienated portion), and despite the differences in the ruling ideologies – democratic-Islamist, theocratic, and Arabist – of its member states. In fact these differences are a good thing. They will discourage hasty leaps at union of the unthought type that Syria tried with Egypt in 1958.
What is necessary for the alliance’s growth is the long term stability of the relationship and an ongoing interchange of ideas along with people and goods. The alliance will represent Turks, Aryans and Arabs, and may eventually erase the imported nationalism which has so cursed us. It could be the first serious regional axis of the modern period, the first axis not organised by an imperial sponsor. Russia and China would be natural partners. A confident and informed power to ensure Middle Eastern rights and responsibilities would of course be in Europe’s interest too. Is it too much to hope that the emerging alliance will mark the end of Western dominance in the region? Could the alliance begin to fill the gaping hole left by the disappearance of the Caliphate?
Iran, Turkey Underline Further Expansion of Bilateral Ties
Gul called for an increase in the volume of trade exchanges between Tehran and Ankara
Iranian First Vice-President Mohammad Reza Rahimi in a meeting with Turkish President Abdullah Gul in Turkey stressed the necessity for consolidation of ties between the two neighboring countries.
“The two countries should use all the existing opportunities and potentials to further deepen and boost their relations in all fields,” Rahimi said during the meeting on the sidelines of a summit on Afghanistan on Tuesday.
Noting that the ground is ready for the promotion of ties between Iran and Turkey, he reiterated that the two countries can contribute unique roles in the region and the world by boosting their mutual and multilateral cooperation.
Gul, for his part, appreciated Iran’s participation in the conference, adding that Iran’s presence has brought more prestige and depth to the summit.
He also urged for the further development of ties with Iran in different fields, and said, “We should use all opportunities and potentials to promote the level of bilateral and regional relations.”
Gul called for an increase in the volume of trade exchanges between Tehran and Ankara, and stressed the necessity for the establishment of a secure rail link to connect Pakistan to Turkey via Iran.
Peace requires Ending Occupation and restoring rights; Turkey’s role is important
Establishing peace requires ending the occupation and restoring the rights, stressing the important role of Turkey
President Bashar al-Assad discussed on Wednesday with US Special Envoy for Middle East Peace George Mitchell bilateral relations, prospects of peace and the situations in the region.
Mitchell briefed President al-Assad on the US efforts to move the peace process, stressing that his country is seeking to move it on all tracks.
President al-Assad reiterated Syria’s principled stance which calls for achieving just and comprehensive peace, adding that a government that publicly announces its unwillingness to achieve peace cannot be considered a real partner in it.
His Excellency maintained that establishing peace requires ending the occupation and restoring the rights, stressing the important role of Turkey in the peace process.
Both sides affirmed that peace contributes to solving a lot of the thorny issues in the Middle East, and that delaying the resolution of these issues further complicates them.
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For his part, Mitchell stressed that his country is looking forward to the achievement of progress in Syrian-American relations and in the peace process.
The meeting was attended by foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem, Presidential Political and Media Advisor Bouthaina Shaaban, Deputy Foreign Minister Fayssal Mikdad and the delegation accompanying Mitchell.
In this regard, Foreign Minister al-Moallem held a meeting with Mitchell.
In a statement to reporters, Mitchell said he is looking forward to a positive relationship between the two countries in order to achieve tangible progress in the peace process and the bilateral relations between the US and Syria.
He pointed out that his talks with President al-Assad touched upon a wide spectrum of important issues related to the bilateral relations between the two countries, saying “President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton are committed to comprehensive peace in the Middle East on the Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese tracks.”
Mitchell also affirmed Syria’s important role in peace efforts, as do the U.S. and international community, noting that this issue was at the core of his talks with President al-Assad. He added he is looking forward to coming back to Damascus in the near future.
This is Mitchell’s third visit to Syria, with his latest visit in July 2009.
In this context, several US delegations from the Congress and the Department of State visited Damascus recently.
Egypt riled by Syria’s increasing role in the region
By Zvi Bar’el – Haaretz
Instead of Syria being isolated, Egypt may find itself pushed to the side
What happened to the reconciliation between Syria and Egypt supposedly in the works? There had been widespread speculation in the Arab media in anticipation of the Syrian-Saudi summit meeting last Wednesday, that the Egyptian president would go to Riyadh for the Syrian-Saudi summit meeting last Wednesday, to ease the four years of bad blood (starting from the Second Lebanon War) between the two.
The rift in relations between Syria and Saudi Arabia had lasted longer than that: five years. It began after the assassination of the Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005, and ended only last October when Saudi King Abdullah mended ties with Syrian President Bashar Assad and agreed to visit Damascus.
Since then, Abdullah has been trying to persuade Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to bury the hatchet with Assad, but has been unsuccessful thus far.
As the summit approached, it seemed as if the warring sides would shake hands in the Saudi capital, but then Mubarak learned that on the eve of his departure, Assad had held a telephone conversation with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran and explained to him that “Egypt would have no choice but to recognize that opposition (such as that espoused by Hamas and Hezbollah) is the only way to get things done.”
That was enough for Mubarak to cancel his trip to Riyadh.
Egypt can continue being annoyed with Syria but it cannot ignore the new role Damascus has recently taken on for itself in the region. One example of this is Assad’s proposal to the Saudis to mediate between them and Iran with the aim of reaching “regional reconciliation” and not merely “Arab reconciliation,” which is King Abdullah’s goal.
The Egyptians are scrutinizing Assad’s moves warily in other arenas as well. His close relations with Turkey, declarations about establishing an Iran-Syria-Iraq-Turkey axis, strengthening of ties between Syria and Europe, particularly France, Assad’s control of Hamas’ decisions about Palestinian reconciliation, and the “historic reconciliation” with Lebanon which removed the threat of an international commission of inquiry into the murder of Hariri have complicated matters in Mubarak’s eyes.
Instead of Syria being isolated, Egypt may find itself pushed to the side.
At the end of March, when the Arab League summit convenes in Tripoli, the heads of state will have to turn their attention to the issue of how to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Should the Arab initiative be left on the table, will they have the power to bring about Palestinian reconciliation.
Is the Arab summit even still relevant, or will certain states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt continue to lead pan-Arabic policies as they have in recent years?
When Syria becomes one of the states that serves as an anchor, then Egypt’s problems will become more complicated.
Egypt also returned empty handed from a recent trip to Washington. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, and the head of intelligence, Omar Suleiman, returned some two weeks ago from the American capital without succeeding in persuading the administration there to demand a total freeze of construction in the Israeli settlements.
The Egyptian emissaries were likewise not successful in getting agreements with regard to the guarantees the Arab states are asking of the Americans.
Egypt became involved in an embarrassing public argument over this issue with Qatar of all countries. While Aboul Gheit claimed he had no idea about an Arab decision demanding American guarantees that Israel would carry out its commitments, the Qatari foreign minister declared that “everyone knows that the Arab committee that is following up the political process demanded American guarantees as far back as September.”
A copy of this demand was given to every foreign minister and Qatar was “amazed” at Egypt’s response, he said.
Al-Jazeera under fire
Egypt has been peeved for some time now about broadcasts from al-Jazeera which portray it as collaborating with Israel in the blockade of Gaza. According to Saudi Arabia, which has meanwhile made peace with Qatar – whose ruling family controls the TV station – al-Jazeera is presenting Riyadh as if it is fighting a war in Yemen in which it should not be involved.
The attempts in 2008 by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, together with a number of other Arab states, to formulate a binding covenant of ethics to be adopted by satellite TV channels did not succeed.
The covenant was left to die when Qatar voiced its opposition. This week, Anas el-Fiqi, the Egyptian information minister, decided to launch another initiative. Known as the Satellite Stations Authority, the new plan is meant to censor broadcasts by stations considered to be inciting against the Arab interest or against states, or to be abetting terrorism.
Syria, Qatar and Lebanon have already announced that they oppose the initiative and that they believe no TV station should be under political censorship. The opposition on the part of these three states ensures that the discussion that is supposed to take place in Cairo on January 24 between all the information ministers of the Arab states will produce a lot of hot air but few decisions.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia base their initiative on the draft law that was passed in the U.S. House of Representatives but has not yet become law, according to which the owners of satellite stations, and not merely editors and reporters, will be prosecuted if their stations help spread terrorism.
It is not clear what the definition of “spreading terrorism” or anti-American incitement will be, but the draft law mentions several possible actions that could fall under the law.
The problem is that the United States can indeed impose sanctions on the owners of such stations, but what will the Arab states do? Impose sanctions on one another? Boycott Hezbollah, which owns the al-Manaar station, or ostracize Hamas, which owns the al-Aqsa station?
Turkey Slams Arab response to Gaza Plight
The governments have failed to display the reactions that the world's Muslims expected from them
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the leaders of the Arab states for their inadequate response to the Palestinian’s plight under the three-year Israeli blockade on Gaza.
Shortly before flying to the United Arab Emirates on Sunday, Erdogan denounced Arab leaders’ inadequate response to Palestinian suffering as “pitiful.”
“The governments have failed to display the reactions that the world’s Muslims expected from them. And this has been a pitiful aspect of the matter,” Erdogan said.
An outspoken critic of Israeli policies, Erdogan, left the country as Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak made a one-day visit to Ankara in an attempt to mend relations with Turkey, strained after a diplomatic row.
In a memorable outburst last year, Erdogan stormed out of a debate at the World Economic Forum, accusing Israel of “barbarian” acts and telling its President Shimon Peres, sitting next to him, that “you know well how to kill people.”
Barak’s trip was the highest-level bilateral visit since Israel’s December 2008-January 2009 war on the Gaza Strip prompted the criticism from Ankara.
Ankara, however, said relations with Tel Aviv will continue to suffer unless Israel ends “the humanitarian tragedy” in Gaza.
Tension between the two sides further escalated when Tel Aviv summoned Turkish Ambassador Ahmet Oguz Celikkol to reprimand him over a TV program that showed Israeli agents kidnapping children and shooting old men.
Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon reportedly ‘humiliated’ Ambassador Celikkol during the meeting prompting Ankara to call for an official apology from the Israeli side.
“Barak is an important figure in Israeli politics and both [Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet] Davutoglu and [Turkish Defense Minister Vecdi] Gonul will give the same message, ‘such kind of events should not happen again,’” a senior Turkish diplomat told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.
He said Ankara will continue to press for an end to Tel Aviv’s blockade of the Gaza Strip and resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians during Barak’s visit.
Why can’t Muslim Societies be more like a Globalised West?
By Alastair Crooke – Conflicts Forum
Islamism is not some irrational kick against modernity; it is accessible to reasoned understanding.
Many commentators on Islam make the same mistake: They instinctively assume that Muslim resistance to western globalisation reflects the inability of Muslims to accept the social and structural change that ‘modernity’ requires. Muslims, in this view, fail to rise above the ‘closed’ world of cultural traditions, and to embrace change. They shy away from, or react against the ‘choice’ offered by modernity.
The Philosopher, Henri Bergson, writing in 1932, suggested that one reason that some intellectual societies – for which he coined the term ‘closed’ societies – were unable to evolve into ‘open’ societies was that religion arises as a kind of mental habit that binds human intelligence to the instinctive drive for solidarity and continuity. Some societies were simply incapable of lifting themselves above these ‘cultural constraints’ to embrace dynamic society. Karl Popper in his ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’ further refined Bergson to imply that ‘closed’ societies were profoundly inimical to the idea of human freedom.
That Muslims would become the archetype of Bergson’s and Popper’s ‘closed’, static society in this western narrative was inevitable: The stage had already been set by the historicist view of the Ottoman Empire. The Empire was typecast by one historian as resembling a decaying, rambling old country house, inhabited by eccentric lodgers, living in a vacuum of initiative, or any will to restore its leaking fabric – waiting in vain and privation to be reorganised and digested by a new and dynamic owner.
This profoundly Eurocentric view of the Ottomans, now contested by contemporary historians, sat comfortably with the views of those such as Richard Cobden and Jean Baptiste Say, articulated in the mid-nineteenth century that new European and American thinking would usher in a millennial age of peace: Free trade would promote peace between nations. “The theory of markets will necessarily scatter the seeds of concord and peace”, and Cobden believed that the spread of market principles and free trade would create a peaceful order of free countries in Europe – and ultimately in the Middle East.
This latter prospect has remained an enduring western vision of utopia, despite it failing, over and over, to acknowledge the tragedies to which it gave birth in Muslim societies. The Ottoman ‘decaying estate’, of course, eventually got its new owners – The westernised ‘Young Turks’, and Kemal Ataturk.
The impact of these western ideas, and the drive to construct the powerful, ethnically unitary, centralised nation-states in their societies – that was necessary to enforce structural change – for Muslims was an absolute disaster: It was a tragedy that created millions of victims – as it had in Europe and the US.
But it also, unexpectedly, facilitated the emergence of a revived Islamism that had revisited its roots in order to find new solutions to its plights. From this crisis, and from insights drawn from its intellectual traditions, and from the Qur’an, Islam began a journey on a discovery to a new ‘Self’. A journey that it is far from ended; but which already has re-established Islam as a dynamic political, social and economic force. It is this event, which has been almost erased and swallowed up by deterministic explanations that reduce Islamism to a parody of the open/closed society template.
It is thirty years now since the Iranian Revolution, and fifty years since the first Islamist resistance movement was formed. Yet many in the West remain bemused: why is there an Islamist resistance at all: They cannot understand how Muslims can fail to see the inevitability of western-style technical modernity and its globalisation. ‘What are Muslims resisting against’, it is asked?
In Resistance: the Essence of the Islamist Revolution, I argued that Muslims are not opposed to globalisation,The Revolution is a refusal to accept an understandingof the Self, or of the world about us, dominated by contemporary western consciousness nor to science, nor to change, per se. On the contrary, they embrace all three. The Revolution, rather, is a ‘Refusal’ – A ‘grand refusal’ to accept an understanding of the Self, or of the world about us, dominated by contemporary western consciousness. Islamists sought to recuperate an alternative consciousness – one drawn from its own intellectual tradition that would stand in opposition to the western paradigm.
Islamism, in short, is not some irrational kick against modernity – It is no whimsy of divine caprice; it is accessible to reasoned understanding.
Western ‘modernity’ essentially has stood on two pillars: The first has been described by historians as the ‘Great Transformation’. It began in Europe in the eighteenth century, and was based on a moral philosophy that saw human welfare yoked to the efficient operation of markets, as indicted earlier. Humans, pursuing private desires and needs, would intersect with others, through the market mechanism, to maximise not just individual welfare; but community wellbeing too.
Closely associated with this was another idea, taken up by English Puritans that had its roots deep in Anglo-Saxon history: It saw the ‘invisible hand’ of Providence also at work in politics to bring about another ‘ideal’ outcome. This view held that the jostling and hurly-burly of political contention between the Anglo-Saxon tribes in the earliest society – had given rise to a spontaneous harmony and political order. From this political ‘market’, English Puritans believed that the Anglo-Saxon institutions representing the epitome of personal freedom and justice, had spontaneously emerged.
Such key ideas about politics and economics were transported to the Americas with the Pilgrim Fathers to become, for those such as Thomas Jefferson, the archetype for the US system of government. The concept of the nation-state, democracy and human rights all flowed from this Protestant current.
These powerful ideas have dominated western thinking for more than 300 years; but by the 1920s, they had brought Islam to the brink: Islam was in crisis – holding on by its fingernails.
Of course, the ‘Great Transformation’ in Europe came about neither naturally, nor spontaneously. It was the product of massive state intervention and a growing system of institutional control. Making markets ‘free’ and efficient was, and is, an artefact of state power.
Historians now describe the Transformation as an utopian project that would be incompatible with any contemporary form of democracy: the transformation had brought stresses that took nineteenth and twentieth century Europe to the brink of revolution – and beyond.
Its impact on Muslim societies was no less traumatic: In the century leading up to Islam’s crisis in the 1920s, the ‘Great Transformation’ had been exported to the Muslim world. There was a rush by the West to create ethnically unitary nation-states in the former western provinces of the Ottoman Empire: A powerful centralised nation-state was seen as the only structure with enough instrumental strength to force through the social changes required to impose market liberalisation on Muslim societies.
As in Europe earlier, the impact of ‘Transformation’ was truly horrific. Justin McCarthy has detailed how five million European Muslims were ‘cleansed’ from their homes between 1821 and 1922 – as the West leveraged Christian-majority nation-states in the former Ottoman western provinces.
The anti-religious Young Turk determination to emulate Europe’s secular liberal-market modernisation came at terrible cost: In the attempt to create an ethnically unitary and secular Turkey one million Armenians died, 250,000 Assyrians perished, and one quarter of a million Greek Orthodox Anatolians were expelled. Kurdish identity was suppressed, and finally Islam was demonised and suppressed by Ataturk. Islamic institutions were closed; and the 1400 year old Caliphate was abolished.
Islam was in crisis. These events were being repeated – albeit less bloodily, but no less disruptively throughout the region – Disorientated and demoralised, under siege from enforced secularism in Turkey, Iran and elsewhere, and with Marxism filtering away its younger members, Islamists embarked on a journey of discovery. In common with other peoples in crisis, Islam sought a solution to its problems by finding a new ‘Self’.
The Islamist revolution is much more than politics: it is an attempt to shape a new consciousness
Islamists returned to the Qur’an for insights. The Qur’an is not a blueprint for politics or a state: It is, as it states frequently, nothing new. The Qur’an is a ‘reminder’ of old truths, already known to us all. One of these ‘old truths’ is that for humans to live together successfully it must be in a society which practices compassion, justice and equity.
This is the insight which lies at the root of Political Islam.
It is a principle which represents a complete inversion of the ‘Great Transformation’. Instead of the pre-eminence of the market, to which other social and community objectives are subordinated, the making of a society based on compassion, equity and justice becomes the overriding objective – to which other objectives, including markets, are subordinated.
Islam is not therefore a form of social democracy. Social Democracy accepts the principle of market efficiency; but attempts to mitigate its effects on those who are its victims: Islamism, by contrast, seeks to invert the market paradigm completely by placing justice, equity and compassion as the objective to which end, markets and other political objectives are to be subordinated.
It is revolutionary in another aspect: Instead of the individual being the organisational principle around which politics, economics and society is shaped; the western paradigm again is inverted. It is the collective welfare of the community in terms of such principles – rather than the individual – that becomes the litmus of political achievement.
In short, Islamists are re-opening an ancient debate – one that lies at the heart of both western and Islamic philosophy: Originally posed by Plato – the latter questioned the ends and purpose of politics: Is politics no more than a race by politicians as to who can claim to satisfy human appetites, desires and wants more fully; or is there ‘telos’ – in other words, a ‘higher purpose’ to politics – such as justice, for example?
Of course, the answer that you give to this fundamental question may determine how you structure democracy to achieve whichever ‘end’ you select. Iranian thinkers were influenced by Plato’s answer; and consequently have been influenced by his ‘Republic’.
Some westerners are troubled that after two hundred years of settled opinion, their vision is being questioned anew. One American conservative commented to me that with René Descartes, the West had discovered ‘objective truth’ through science and technology. It had made the West rich and powerful and Muslims could not bear that, he believed: they knew that ultimately they would be forced to acquiesce to western ‘truth’. But what is taking place is very far from this simplistic vision, and of great significance.
The Cartesian methodology has indeed exercised unparalleled hegemony over the last few centuries. And, applied across the range of science, political and social thinking has made the Europeans – and the Anglo-Saxon world in particular – uniquely rich and powerful.
Descartes had separated between the material world of ‘real’ things – to be touched, tasted, felt or viewed – that were to be explained and classified through scientific rationality; and on the other side of this rigid frontier, lay ‘ideas’ associated with fantasy, superstition, magic and illusion. There was ‘reality’; and, separate to this, the make-believe and illusionary figments of human thinking unrestrained by reality.
This narrow duality formed the stepping-stone from which leaped-up the ‘western Self’, and individualism, in its many variants. The Cartesian methodology, taken further by others in a logical extension of his initial work, however, would prove to be irreconcilable with another process of thinking, another ‘consciousness’, which was much more deeply-rooted in the human psyche.
The Cartesian system – whatever its apparent virtues – not only removed the vital conceptual ‘space’ in which this other consciousness could operate, it also destroyed the very tools, the mechanisms, by which this ‘other consciousness’ impacted on, and transformed the human being. It emptied this other grand narrative of civilisation, Islam, of meaning; and of power.
Descartes’ twist to earlier thinking was indeed epoch making: He did away with – effectively abolished – the idea of any meaningful order that lay beyond, or outside of the ‘Self’ – Or, of ‘good’, or of truth, being embodied in that ordering; or found in the cipher of symbolic meaning in the world about us.
He destroyed any space that such a conception might have occupied, by dividing the world rigidly between the real and the unreal. Effectively it was the rejection of the substance of what F. Edward Cranz called ‘conjunctive knowledge’ – even if Descartes himself clung to the husk of religious sentiment: The ‘sacred’ could either become literal – and functional; – or be disparaged as superstition.
It is not possible to make sense of the Islamic resistance without understanding it as a philosophic and metaphysical event too
The Islamist revolution therefore is much more than politics: It is an attempt to shape a new consciousness – to escape from, and challenge, the most far-reaching pre-suppositions of our time. It draws on the intellectual tradition of Islam to offer a radically different understanding of the human being, and to escape from the hegemony and rigidity of the Cartesian literalism. It is a journey of recovery of insights from that ‘other history of Being’, as Henri Corbin the French philosopher, termed it, that is far from over.
It has many shortcomings and setbacks – as recent events in Iran have shown – but its intellectual insights offer Muslims (and westerners too) the potential to step beyond the shortcomings of western material consciousness. This is what excites and energises: As a Hesballah leader replied to me when asked what the Iranian Revolution had signified for him, he said unhesitatingly that Muslims felt themselves free to think; to think for themselves, once again.
It is not possible therefore to make sense of the Iranian or wider Islamic resistance without understanding it as a philosophic and metaphysical event too. It is the omission of this latter understanding that helps explain repeated western misreadings of Iran, its Revolution and also of events in the region.
Hesballah are using techniques that stand outside of the usual repertoire of western politics in order to transform Muslims. It is not because Hesballah provides better community services that its leader, Seyed Hassan Nasrallah, is revered throughout the Muslim world.
Hesballah is using myth, archetypal narrative and symbolism to explode the Cartesian severance between subject and object, and between objective reality, on the one hand, and fantasy, make-believe and superstition, on the other. Hesballah uses these means to re-ignite creative imagination. The opening of this intermediary layer in the Cartesian dualism allows people to begin imagining themselves in a new way; and by imagining themselves differently, to begin to act differently. As they begin to imagine themes differently and act differently, the way they see the world about them, changes also.
Of course there is another side to Islamism: Islam, like Christianity, has witnessed, from the outset, a struggle between a narrow, literalist and intolerant interpretation in opposition to the intellectual tradition grounded in philosophy, reasoning and in transforming knowledge.
Perversely, for the past fifty years, it is to the literalists, often called ‘Salafi’ that the West has looked to circumscribe perceived ‘threats to its interests’ arising from the upsurge of revolutionary spirit among Islamists – in a mirroring of Cold War containment thinking.
America and Europe turned to a more docile and apolitical variant of political Islam, which they believed would be more compliant. But in so using the literalist ‘puritan’ orientation, the West has misunderstood the mechanism by which some Salafist movements have migrated through schism and dissidence to become the dogmatic, hate-filled and often violent movements that really do threaten westerners, as well as their fellow Muslims too.
The Western backing of narrow literalism and dogma in an effort to contain the intellectual revolution within Islam, paradoxically has left the Middle East a less stable, more dangerous and violent place. Western policy has empowered a current of literal thinking in Islam that is indeed narrow, intolerant and anti-heterodoxical. These are the movements that are narrowly opposed to all western intrusions into their society.
But possibly of far greater significance than the inflation of the current ‘bubble’ of literalism to the global future, is the recovery within that other ‘grand narrative’, Islam, of an alternative consciousness – another process of thinking that carries the intimation of a possible escape from Cartesian hegemony. In the long run – as the prevalent western paradigm erodes in the wider world – this may assume huge importance.
