- Karsh, Efraim.
Islamic Imperialism.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
ISBN 0-300-10603-3.
-
A great deal of conflict and tragedy might have been avoided
in recent years had only this 2006 book been published a few
years earlier and read by those contemplating ambitious
adventures to remake the political landscape of the Near East
and Central Asia. The author, a professor of history at
King's College, University of London, traces the repeated
attempts, beginning with Muhammad and his immediate
successors, to establish a unified civilisation under the
principles of Islam, in which the Koranic proscription of
conflict among Muslims would guarantee permanent
peace.
In the century following the Prophet's death in the year 632,
Arab armies exploded out of the birthplace of Islam and
conquered a vast territory from present-day Iran
to Spain, including the entire north African coast. This was the
first of a succession of great Islamic empires, which would last
until the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath
of World War I. But, as this book thoroughly documents, over
this entire period, the emphasis was on the word “empire”
and not “Islamic”. While the leaders identified
themselves as Muslims and exhorted their armies to holy
war, the actual empires were very much motivated by a quest
for temporal wealth and power, and behaved much as the
previous despotisms they supplanted. Since
the Arabs had no experience in administering an empire nor
a cadre of people trained in those arts, they ended up assimilating
the bureaucratic structure and personnel of the Persian empire
after conquering it, and much the same happened in the West after
the fall of the Byzantine empire.
While soldiers might have seen themselves as spreading the word
of Islam by the sword, in fact the conquests were mostly about
the traditional rationale for empire: booty and tribute. (The
Prophet's injunction against raiding other Muslims does appear
to have been one motivation for outward-directed conquest, especially in
the early years.) Not only was there relatively little aggressive
proselytising of Islam, on a number of occasions conversion to
Islam by members of dhimmi populations was discouraged or
prohibited outright because the imperial treasury depended heavily
on the special taxes non-Muslims were required to pay. Nor did these
empires resemble the tranquil Dar al-Islam envisaged by
the Prophet—in fact, only 24 years would elapse after his
death before the Caliph Uthman was assassinated by his rivals,
and that would be first of many murders, revolutions, plots, and
conflicts between Muslim factions within the empires to come.
Nor were the Crusades, seen through contemporary eyes, the
cataclysmic clash of civilisations they are frequently described as
today. The kingdoms established by the crusaders rapidly became seen
as regional powers like any other, and often found themselves in
alliance with Muslims against Muslims. Pan-Arabists in modern times
who identify their movement with opposition to the hated crusader
often fail to note that there was never any unified Arab campaign
against the crusaders; when they were finally ejected, it was by the
Turks, and their great hero Saladin was, himself, a Kurd.
The latter half of the book recounts the modern history of the Near
East, from Churchill's invention of Iraq, through Nasser, Khomeini, and
the emergence of Islamism and terror networks directed against Israel
and the West. What is simultaneously striking and depressing about
this long and detailed history of strife, subversion, oppression, and
conflict is that you can open it up to almost any page and apart from
a few details, it sounds like present-day news reports from the
region. Thirteen centuries of history with little or no evidence for
indigenous development of individual liberty, self-rule, the rule of
law, and religious tolerance does not bode well for idealistic
neo-Jacobin schemes to “implant democracy” at the point of
a bayonet. (Modern Turkey can be seen as a counter-example, but it is
worth observing that Mustafa Kemal explicitly equated modernisation with
the importation and adoption of Western values, and simultaneously
renounced imperial ambitions. In this, he was alone in the region.)
Perhaps the lesson one should draw from this long and tragic narrative
is that this unfortunate region of the world, which was a
fiercely-contested arena of human conflict thousands of years before
Muhammad, has resisted every attempt by every actor, the Prophet
included, to pacify it over those long millennia. Rather than commit
lives and fortune to yet another foredoomed attempt to “fix the
problem”, one might more wisely and modestly seek ways to keep
it contained and not aggravate the situation.
October 2006 