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May 9, 2002
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From Ground Zero to the Bronx
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A Travesty of Justice
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High and Dry in the Mojave
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Sharon
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New United States of Israel
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Extreme
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Dispatch
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A Journey to Beit Jalla
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Before There Was Terrorism
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Israeli Soldiers Resisting
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May 1, 2002
Badiou,
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Prisoners of the Infinite
April 30, 2002
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The FBI and the Music
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May
10, 2002
Fettered Histories
by Vijay Prashad
Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central
Asia
by Ahmed Rashid; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads
and Modernity by Tariq Ali;
London: Verso, 2002.
We might say that the problem began when oil gushed
from beneath the desert floor to build, what Saudi Arabia's most
distinguished, but exiled, novelist Abdelrahman Munif called
the "cities of salt". Or, we might say that it began
when President Dwight Eisenhower and the Saudi monarch signed
a treaty in January 1957 that made the peninsula's defence a
part of the national security interest of the United States.
Whatever the origin of the crisis in what is so cavalierly called
the Middle East, or West Asia, the role of Saudi Arabia as a
central actor in it is hard to deny. The Eisenhower Doctrine
acknowledges that the Saudis constitute a fundamental pillar
of U.S. imperialism; Osama bin Laden's dissident activity across
the world since 1990-91 is related to the rule of the Saudi family
over the sacred sites of Islam; furthermore, the growth of militant,
Wahhabite Islam across the oil lands and elsewhere is a result
of the Saudi attempt to export its form of social conservatism
to decimate Nasserite (or radical nationalist) and Communist
opposition. The "tolerance of Arabia" is a vital part
of our current malady.
When Gamel Abdul Nasser's Free Officers
took power in Egypt in 1952, they sent a message across the oil
lands that "Arab Oil is for the Arab People", or as
the Communist opposition put it without ethnic chauvinism, oil
should be used in the people's interest. This could not be allowed,
neither by the current rulers of the oil nor by their imperial
overlords. Before the British Empire withdrew from active duty
in West Asia, it erected a series of monarchies created from
loyal Saudi nobles - such as the Ibn Saud clan (at the time only
Sultan of the Nejd) to the helm of Saudi Arabia (1915), and then
the sons of the Hashimite Emir Hussein, keeper
of the holy sites in Arabia, to the thrones of Jordan (Abdullah,
in 1921) and Iraq (Faisal, in 1921), not to mention the cultivation
of friendship with the Pehlavi family in Iran (Colonel Reza Khan
of the Persian Cossack Brigade created the Pehlavi dynasty after
a 1925 coup). These petro-Sheikhs, keen to continue in power,
sold their secular legitimacy to imperialism as long as their
thrones remained inviolate. This oily alliance cultivated and
financed militant right-wing Islamic currents to undercut radical
nationalism and Communism from Egypt to Iran and beyond. The
first major test of this strategy came during the Central Intelligence
Agency-Pehlavi overthrow of the left-leaning Iranian leader Mossadeq
(1953): it worked, and it continued to work in Afghanistan (1979
onwards) and elsewhere.
So our current predicament, after the
suicide attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001
(or 9/11), is one that is forged by the alliance of U.S. imperialism,
the petro-Sheikhs and the virulent currents of militant Islam.
This troika brings untold grief to the world's people, and it
promises, in its so-called clash against one another, to undermine
the importance of a genuine people's struggle against the cannibalisation
of the world in the interest of capital.
DRIVEN by the desire to publish topical
books, publishers offer a slew of texts on 9/11 and its aftermath.
Writers who cover the general area have produced some wonderful
accounts of this history and its current shape, and of these
writers two Pakistani nationals are especially notable: Ahmed
Rashid and Tariq Ali. Between 9/11 and the start of the Fifth
Afghan War (October 7, 2001), Rashid's Taliban: Oil and Fundamentalism
in Central Asia (2000) topped The New York Times bestsellers
list. The most accessible study of the former rulers of Afghanistan,
Rashid's book allowed many people within the U.S. to understand
those who would soon become their foe. In many ways, Rashid's
new book, Jihad, continues the work.
Going north from Afghanistan, Rashid
takes us along the retreat routes of the Taliban and Al Qaeda
- to meet the militant Islamic organisations of Central Asia,
from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) to the Tajikistan-based
Islamic  Renaissance Party (IRP). Most people
know little of this region, a zone of lore and legend, but since
1991 it has become a hive of disputation between the mullahs
and the nomenklatura, between different social theories for rule
and rebellion. This conflict speaks to the question of Asian
instability, and Rashid is right to encourage us to know about
the present history of the region rather than go misty-eyed about
the Silk Road.
From Tariq Ali, meanwhile, comes an extraordinary
book, perhaps his best. The Clash of Fundamentalisms contains
a sweeping secular history of Islam, a witty biography of Ali
and his important family, and an astute analysis of the political
destiny of a region that stretches from the Arab lands to South
Asia. This is the book that would have been written by that other
great Pakistani thinker, Eqbal Ahmad, had he not died just a
few years ago. From Ali, we get a sense of the mutual constitution
of terror by the unholy troika of U.S. imperialism, the oligarchies
of oil and the jihadi dissidents.
Tariq Ali's book begins with a memorable
line ("I never really believed in God") and then launches
into a careful discussion of his relationship with Islam. Although
his parents rejected God for the Revolution, he did grow up in
a milieu where Islam played an important role. Born just before
the Partition of the subcontinent, Ali lived in a country designed
to be for Muslims and so even his atheistic bend could not avoid
the world of Islam.
But, as he notes, it was not until the
Gulf war (what he calls the Third Oil War, although this neglects
the so-called Drug Wars in South America that are also about
oil) that he took an interest in Islam. Frustrated with the deep
hold the confessional elites held over Muslims, Ali asked himself
a question that frames his approach to faith in his book: "Why
had Islam not undergone a Reformation?" (page 23). His studies
show us that for the first 700 years of its existence, Islam
was a vibrant tradition - with a "distinctly Jacobin feel"
in its early years (p. 24), Islam "prospered through contact
with other traditions" (p. 38). The contact came not only
from Judaism and Christianity, but also from the work of philosophers
from the old schools of Alexandria, from Neoplatonists (especially
into Sufism), from an elaboration of the work of the ancient
Greeks, and all this from the complex social world of Arab Spain
and Arab Sicily.
We get a wonderful overview of the world
of the Persian scholar Ibn Sina, of the Cordoban philosopher
Ibn Rusd, of the Arab psychologist Ibn Sirin - the book is worth
it just for these cameos. We might add to this list, the vibrant
contact between Islam and the philosophical traditions of the
subcontinent, notably found in the enlightened text of Akbar's
reign, Ain-i-Akbari (1596).
That Ali does not directly answer the
question he sets for himself may appear as a weakness of the
first part of the book. I, however, tend to think that the answer
is this: that Islam did have a reformation in spaces such as
Cordoba, but the vicissitudes of history (namely, the Reconquista
or the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from Muslim control
by the newly united Spanish Catholic principalities of Aragon
and Castile) weakened the progressive side of Islam and strengthened
its conservatives (to be represented by Wahhabism 300 years later).
Part 2 of Ali's book ("One Hundred
Years of Servitude") provides the key to the growth of militant
Islam, and thereby the loss of the progressive dynamic within
the tradition. In the 18th century, Ibn Saud of Nejd and Ibn
Wahhab signed a mithaq, a binding agreement to eternity to harvest
Ibn Wahhab's spiritual fervour in the service of Ibn Saud's political
ambition. "Thus was laid the basis for a political and confessional
intimacy that would shape the politics of the peninsula. This
combination of religious fanaticism, military ruthlessness, political
villainy and the press-ganging of women to cement alliances was
the foundation stone of the dynasty that rules Saudi Arabia today"
(p. 75).
Drawing from the novelist Munif and the
poet Qabbani, Ali offers a panoramic view of the devastation
of the last century - from the consolidation of the Saudis (that
"kingdom of corruption") to the wreckage of Saddam
Hussein's Iraq. The chapters are well-written and analytically
sound, but one misses the presence of the troika (imperialism,
the petro-Sheikhs, the dissident jihadis). They are of course
to be found here and there as actors and not as bearers of the
structural devastation of West Asia and north Africa. In the
section on Iraq, Ali argues that imperialist action is not antithetical
to the "hegemon of Iraq", or the "sword of Islam"
in a pre-1990 poem of a Kuwaiti princess (p. 138), indeed that
the punishing bombardment of Iraq "does not reduce but breeds
criminality, by those who wield it. The Gulf and Balkan wars
are copybook examples of the moral blank cheque of a selective
vigilantism" (p. 150), and again, "the combination
of anger and despair will lead to more and more young people
in the Arab world and elsewhere feeling that the only response
to state terror is individual terror" (p. 153). The bulk
of the 19 men on 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia, armed not only
with Wahhabism, but mainly with a deep antipathy to U.S. imperialism
(often transferred into hatred for Americans) - since the Saudi
regime does not allow any expression of this animosity, the tactical
means adopted by these powerless men was to be grotesque.
The last section of the book takes Ali
back home to the subcontinent. Here he offers an analysis of
the links between Pakistan and the U.S., and their effects on
Pakistani society, Afghanistan and on Kashmir. As the Left took
Afghanistan (before the Soviet Army intervened), "the Cold
War had reached the Pamirs. The temptation to provoke, isolate
and defeat Moscow proved too strong. A squalid military dictator
[Zia] became the instrument through which this campaign would
be conducted. Everything else was subordinated to this single
aim. In order to defeat the Soviet Union, two countries - Pakistan
and Afghanistan - were totally wrecked. Fundamentalist Islam
and heroin production grew apace" (pp. 189-190). The dynamic
of Afghan modernity, unleashed by the Daud coup of 1973, and
of Pakistani modernity, set in motion by the students' and workers'
rebellion that overthrew the Ayub dictatorship in 1968, stalled
in the interest of U.S. imperialism.
NORTH of the Amu Darya and of the Pamir
Mountains, if Tariq Ali followed the footsteps of his fellow
Pakistani, Ahmed Rashid, he may have been able to take his analysis
further. Central Asia, then part of the Soviet Union, became
part of this story once more - the tale of U.S. imperialism,
the petro-Sheikhs and the dissident jihadis. Insulated from the
world of the Saudis because of its place within the Soviet Union,
Central Asia became tied economically and politically to the
federation rather than to its neighbours to the south and elsewhere.
Ahmed Rashid makes much of the Soviet attack on religion in the
region, as well as of Stalin's attempt to divide the peoples
of the region into non-homogenous ethnic republics. Nevertheless,
even he admits, "For all the repression they brought, the
Soviets also carried out progressive reforms, in the availability
of mass education and health care, the growth of industry, the
development of mechanised methods of farming and irrigation,
and the creation of a communications infrastructure that was
fully integrated with Russia" (p. 37). At the Baku Congress
in 1920, Comrade Narbutabekov laid out a path for the Communists
in Turkestan: "Let me tell you, comrades, our Turkestani
masses have to fight on two fronts: against the reactionary mullahs
in our midst, and against the narrow nationalist inclinations
of the local Europeans. Neither Comrade Zinoviev, nor Comrade
Lenin, nor Comrade Trotsky knows the real situation, what has
been going on in Turkestan these last three years. We must speak
frankly and paint a true picture of the state of affairs in Turkestan."
Not two decades later Narbutabekov fell
victim to the purges, but in his important speech he laid out
the potential for Russian chauvinism. Indeed, two years after
Baku, Lenin warned: "The 'freedom to secede from the union'
by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper,
unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that
really Russian man, the Great Russian chauvinist - in substance
a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat
is." Rashid does not go into these details of the contradictions
of Soviet policy, so that it appears as if the problems in Central
Asia are now a gift of the Soviet past.
Indeed, one of Rashid's central points
is that the suppression of Islam and the state control of the
economy produces militant Islamist movements such as the three
that he studies: the IMU, the IRP and the Hizb ut-Tahir (HT).
Sharif Himmatzoda, a former IRP military commander during the
IRP-led war against the state from 1992 to 1999 and now member
of the ruling government, told Rashid: "The peace process
in Tajikistan can be a model for Central Asia if all parties
are willing to build peace just as we were. But governments in
the region have to change their attitudes towards Islamic movements
to give them a legal, constitutional way to express themselves
and play a role in state building. If they don't do so, people
will join the extremists" (p. 109).
Drawing for this sort of political assessment,
Rashid argues: "The rise of the IMU, the most powerful Islamic
militant group operating in Central Asia today which carries
out yearly incursions in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan,
and elsewhere in the Ferghana Valley, can be directly linked
to [Uzbekistan's President Islam] Karimov's refusal to allow
Muslims to practise their religion and his extreme attitude to
all religious expression or political dissent" (p. 85).
Certainly religious intolerance provides
extremists with fodder, but Rashid does not analyse adequately
the different valence between the right to worship and the entry
of religious parties into state governance. If we set aside the
challenge to secularism such a policy might entail, the three
jihadi groups analysed in the book fail to offer anything constructive.
"The new jihadi groups have no economic manifesto, no plan
for better governance and the building of political institutions,
and no blueprint for creating democratic participation in the
decision-making process in their future Islamic states"
(p. 3), and further, "[The HT] address international problems
of the Islamic world such as the Israel-Palestinian conflict
or the so-called 'Zionist conspiracy against Islam' rather than
the concerns of the people of Central Asia: rising prices, unemployment,
and the lack of educational facilities" (p. 123). From the
world of "traditional Islam" we get no sense of a political
agenda either, and the only examples we have are from those such
as Himmatzoda who was once a jihadi himself. There is, therefore,
no reason for the regimes to vouchsafe permission for religious
groups to enter the world of governance. That they must allow
freedom of expression is, of course, a necessity.
If the jihadis do not pay too much heed
to the concrete problems of Central Asia, they do, as Ahmed Rashid
documents, promote the Wahhabite agenda of Saudi jihadis. Indeed,
diasporic Palestinians founded HT in Saudi Arabia and Jordan
in 1953 to promote an Islamic renaissance akin to that of Wahhabism.
While the two streams worked together for decades, they separated
on tactical questions: while the Wahhabites call for guerilla
warfare, the HT is committed to peaceful transformation (p. 118).
Even in Central Asia, where HT has many adherents, they are unable
to keep track with their two other Islamic rivals, the IRP (once
a guerilla force) and the Wahhabite IMU. Tohir Yuldeshev, the
leader of the IMU, conducted campaigns against Uzbekistan from
guerilla war-torn Tajikistan, then (after the accords in that
country), moved to Afghanistan, and finally into the shadows
of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Saudi, Iranian
and Turkish money poured into the IMU via the ISI as young IMU
fighters trained at the madrassas in northern Pakistan. "Yuldeshev
began to receive large donations from this Saudi-Uzbek trade
and business community through an influential businessman who
had close contacts to some of the Saudi princes, including the
head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal" (p.
141). Juma Namangani, the military head of the IMU, "had
money from the Saudis" (p. 142), and, Rashid alleges, may
have received clandestine assistance from a Russian government
eager to foment troubles in Central Asia so as to assert its
role as the protector (p. 178).
FOR Rashid, the solution to the malady
in Central Asia is threefold: more democracy in the republics,
with an accommodation for moderate Islamic parties; intervention
by the U.S. and the United Nations to create some form of stability;
finally, International Monetary Fund-World Bank loans and programmes
to facilitate social development. It would take too much space
to go into the intricacies of each country, so let me just take
Uzbekistan as an example to show the limitations of Rashid's
framework. Without doubt, Islam Karimov has devastated the opposition
and erected what amounts to a one-party state (although he has
not elevated himself to an icon like President Niyazov of Turkmenistan).
In April 2001, as in 1995, the IMF did close its office in Tashkent,
but not on account of the human rights situation. As Rashid notes,
the agency left "harshly criticising the regime's lack of
reforms" (p. 81). What Rashid does not report is that even
as Uzbekistan's population is in distress (with 80 per cent unemployment
in the Ferghana Valley), a small cottage industry among IMF economists
studies the "Uzbek Growth Puzzle" (a good summary can
be found in Jeromin Zetterlmeyer's essay in the September-December
1999 issue of the IMF Staff Papers). Strong state control by
Karimov has ensured growth, even as this has failed to provide
equity for the population. IMF representative Christoph Rosenberg
said, in April, that his agency departed because Uzbekistan's
"is not a business climate conducive to foreign investment"
(p. 179), or, in other words, to the wiles of European and U.S.
firms. When the interests of imperialism shifted after 9/11,
the IMF and the World Bank returned to the country regardless
of whether there was any change in the democratic situation.
So the IMF-World Bank are not viable agents of regeneration.
In the case of Uzbekistan, Rashid accepts
that the U.S. is not an impartial actor: "The United States,
initially a sharp critic of Karimov's abysmal human-rights record,
has all but ignored the issue since 1996 and increased investments
in the region owing to concerns about Afghanistan, a desire to
isolate Iran, and fears about the growing Russian influence in
Central Asia" (p. 82). In 1995, just as the IMF withdrew
from Uzbekistan, the US military signed an agreement with the
Uzbek military to conduct joint exercises in the Ferghana Valley,
a perfect place to have trained for the Fifth Afghan War (Rashid
is wrong to say that these exercises only began in 1998, p. 83,
because the first round took place in 1996 after the December
13, 1995 treaty), just as Uzbekistan joined the North Atlantic
Treaty Organisation's Partnership for Peace. <U.S.-Uzbekistan>
trade increased as well, from $50 million in 1996 to $420 million
in 1997. After 9/11, on October 5, 2001, U.S. Secretary of Defence
Donald Rumsfeld arrived in Tashkent and secured permission for
U.S. troops to use Uzbek bases; two days later the parties signed
a pact that established "a qualitatively new relationship
based on a long-term commitment to advance security and regional
stability" (p. 184). In other words, U.S. imperialism has,
for the first time, a permanent military home and the ability
to leverage this military force into political capital in the
region. All talk of the Shanghai Five (Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,
Kyrgyzstan, China and Russia) or of other regional approaches
to solve problems are now shelved in favour of U.S. intervention
as the so-called "mediator". Furthermore, Rashid's
own account of the "New Great Game" (both in this book
and in his earlier Taliban) stress the economic interests of
U.S. imperialism, both for the oil reserves and for the natural
gas fields (those in Turkmenistan alone are said to be the seventh
largest in the world). Interests of this nature colour the intervention
of the U.S. government in conflicts in Central Asia.
Rashid's framework occludes U.S. pressures
that exacerbate crises. From him, we are left with the very best
of liberalism, with a sense that economic reforms of the IMF
variety and democratic reforms of the U.S. brand will undermine
the basis of the militant rebels. Rashid's wonderful material
is lessened by a framework that is unable to show us how U.S.
imperialism, for instance, is part and parcel of the problem
and that its institutions (such as the IMF) will not help solve
the Central Asian imbroglio.
If only Tariq Ali had looked over the
manuscript of Jihad before it went to press. Here is his assessment
of our problem: "[The] abdication of its traditional role
by a corrupt and decaying state [he writes of Pakistan, but it
could be any of those in the region] combined with the fundamentalist
neo-liberal economic prescriptions handed down by the ayatollahs
of the IMF and World Bank helped to unlock political Islam"
(p. 195).
The IMF, the World Bank and U.S. imperialism
are no allies in the war against intolerance. The clash of fundamentalisms
tends to deafen the wisdom of people around the world. The task
now is to unlock that wisdom and reject both fundamentalisms.
Vijay Prashad is Associate Professor
and Director, International Studies Programme, Trinity College,
Hartford, United States. This review originally appeared in Frontline, the fortnightly
magazine published in India.
Prashad can be reached at: Vijay.Prashad@trincoll.edu
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