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Islamic Imperialism: A History M.R. Brett‐Crowther Version of record first published: 26 Apr 2010
To cite this article: M.R. Brett‐Crowther (2010): Islamic Imperialism: A History, International Journal of Environmental Studies, 67:2, 282-286 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00207231003589043
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Book reviews
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Islamic Imperialism: A History, by Efraim Karsh, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2007, 284 pp. (ISBN 978-0-300-12263-3). If one were to see a book on Christian Imperialism, what would it mean? Probably, it would trace the origins of kingship in the Western world to Constantine the Great (St Constantine), examining caesaro-papism and testing whether there is not such an idea in the Orthodox East – the ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’. The study would have to consider the imperial idea in Western Europe and in Russia, the particular development of the British Empire, and matters such as constitutional government on the Westminster model, the intricately different American model, and so on. But although this would mean study of kings and kingdoms, empires and emperors, power in Islam is different. In Islam, power is religiously mediated, religiously accountable, if at all, and organised through institutions which are not those of representative government in the Western sense. The caliph remains the governing idea; the control of resources in his hand. But the ulema have an almost untrammelled authority. The fact that Islam has – like Hinduism – no central authority is true up to a point. That point is the individual assertion of authority recognised by a sufficient group. Institutions can accordingly be very shortlived, unstable, and arbitrary. Can be – need not be in the modern world. Thus, Islam today is a fruitful field for politics and equally decisions mediated by Islam can be profoundly effective. The environment in the sense of the physical and social environment is a determining factor. Not the only factor, but certainly a major factor. And everywhere in the Islamic world, there is a kind of pluralism. The globalised economy makes this inevitable. What does this mean in the analysis of Islamic Imperialism? Karsh does not allege that because Islam emerges from the desert it cannot develop institutions. After all, Islam is closely related to cities and to merchandising, as a matter of fact. Karsh instead studies the history of Islam in regard to many countries, but the focus is ‘the Arab world’ as well as the reaction of Iran to its modernising by the last shah. It is this reaction of which, in a sense, Osama bin Laden is a beneficiary; and it is the activity of the ideologues which is the reason for the study. The introduction argues that imperial tendencies are native to the heartlands of Islam. This is fair enough. But is it distinctive that tension between centre and periphery became ‘the hallmark of Islam’s imperial experience’ (p. 5)? This tension in Islam, Karsh says, resulted from difficulty of communication and control and the lack of a central capital. But this is not an experience confined to Islam! Where was the coherence of thought between Washington, DC and its invasion force in Iraq (2003) and pseudo-civilian administration thereafter? Where was the coherence of thought between Simla and the Indian Expeditionary Force in Mesopotamia (1915)? Or between Tokyo and the Japanese forces occupying Burma (1942–1944)? Nor is it distinctive that force of arms was used repeatedly in Islam to establish control of areas remote from the centre, although it is clear that the Ottoman Empire does ‘haunt Islamic and Middle Eastern politics to the present day’ (p. 6). One may also differ with Karsh that Christianity began differently and developed differently (p. 6f). If Islam asserts identity between temporal and religious powers, so did classical Byzantine thought, so did the Russian empire, so does the renewed Russia of Putin, and in many respects so do the governmental and ecclesiastical systems of the countries where Christian Orthodoxy is the majority culture. It is, however, true that this kind of thought had been formally abandoned except for the messianism (if that is the correct word!) of the Third Reich by the mid-twentieth century, whereas Islam retains its imperialist ambitions.
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The argument follows (pp. 6–9) that the European empires were maritime rather than landbased (Russia?, Austro-Hungarian?) and that nationalism replaced their collapse; whereas with the Ottoman Empire there was an absence of a caliph to govern a large number of groups who were separated from one another. Some may demur at the emphasis Karsh gives to the conversion and or extinction of the Jews (pp. 14–17), and it would be interesting to see how many Muslims could accept the account of ‘the warrior prophet’ (chapter 1) without wanting to qualify or alter this or that element. ‘The rise and fall of Islam’s first empire’ (chapter 2) argues (p. 24) that the early conquests were ‘a quintessential expansionist feat by a rising imperial power, in which Islam provided a moral sanction and a unifying battle cry rather than a driving force’. What is the distinction here? Is this different at all from Wolfe’s success at the Heights of Abraham, or Clive’s at Arcot or Plassey, or the noble catastrophes of Gallipoli or Dieppe? Can any ideology, carried forward to some kind of victory in battle, fail to be ‘a driving force’? Did Germans or French at Verdun have ‘a driving force’ or ‘a moral sanction and a unifying battle cry’? How is the ‘moral sanction and unifying battle cry’ of Hitler’s SS to be differentiated from ‘a driving force’? What is the distinction? It matters not that the Third Reich was devoted to hideous evil. Its fantasy that Hitler was a divinely inspired leader for the Germans was the pseudo-moral sanction, the battle cry, the driving force from the beginning in 1933 to the end in 1945. How did Saladin’s or Nasser’s or Saddam’s or King Hussein of Jordan’s adherence to or use of Islam not act as a moral sanction and unifying battle cry? How is the Israel Defence Force not manifesting a driving force, a moral sanction and a battle cry when the words are stated on Masada ‘Masada shall not fall again’? Similarly, when Karsh points to the assimilation factors (p. 29f) is there anything different from the case of India after Macaulay’s Minute on Education opened the way to the transformation of India by Indians? Note that this includes Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s foundation (1875) of the Muslim University of Aligarh, in recognition that India’s Muslims needed science and critical thought. Karsh seems to emphasise difference – not always substantial or unique – whereas if the present situation of the world is seen as interconnected, parallels and resemblances may be a more realistic, useful and indeed truthful account of matters. When (chapter 3) we read of the exclusive character of Islam (p. 43), by which non-Arabs were dissuaded from converting and kept in subjection, we cannot ignore the normal behaviour of all societies in which and in-group and an out-group idea exist; nor particular instances whether of classical Athens or Rome, or the colour bar in the former British Empire, or the plight of some Jews in Israel compared to many others. Another interesting lost opportunity is that Karsh discusses the period of the Umayyads and Abbasids with no reference to Islamic science and technology, except by inference from the comments (p. 46) on the origins of the Qur’an – whether created or eternal. True, he does notice science later, but in passing. This omission is serious. No good account of the rise of the British Empire can ignore the industrial revolution, nor of the German their overhauling of British productivity and innovation in the late nineteenth century, nor of the Russian their effective industrialisation under Witte. Is it fair to discuss the Umayyads in Spain (p. 61f) with no reference to street lighting in Cordoba, agriculture, and hydrology? So, why does Karsh omit this substantial component of Islam’s history? Put differently, the question is how the loss of the golden age of Islam can be explained. Just as Spain never had a reformation or renaissance, so Islam never had. But why? The answer would seem to be the emphasis on conformity, the exclusion of dissidents, the removal of thinking which was not religious. National choices result from individual choices.
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Many of the causes of decline stem from the luxurious habits of Ottoman sultans and Iranian shahs in the period before the twentieth century. The actual science and technology which had featured in the Islamic world was not taken forward, because there was no individual initiative to develop it. Other criteria, other objectives. Chapter 4 begins (p. 66) with the quotation which heads the Introduction: ‘I was ordered to fight all men until they say “There is no god but Allah.”’ To discuss the house of Islam and the house of war in the sense given by Ibn Khaldun may be less than beneficial to an understanding of Islam as it now stands in a pluralist world, but it is difficult to interpret the jihad principle in spiritual terms only or in the absence of its clear military meaning. But how can Karsh conclude that for the caliphs this was not a ‘clash of civilizations’? Is it probable that the Byzantine and Iranian empires were not seen as ‘the enemy’? How can jihad be interpreted otherwise? Since Karsh notes that ‘Allah’s Caliph’ was a title evoking ‘the universal claim to power made by the Byzantine emperors (and the Iranian shahs)’ and other resemblances – a designated royal air, maintenance of roads and milestones, coinage – it is likely that such copying was envious and intended to supersede the original (p. 67). It is no different from the establishment of the Kaiserliche Marine and its close resemblance to the Royal Navy, even to the design of an officer’s sword. Despite the Kaiser’s reference to ‘our two Teutonic nations’, no Englishman supposed that the Dreadnought race was a friendly contest. As Islam encroached upon Persia and Byzantium, did it not collide or clash with them? Is it to be suggested that there was no clash of civilisations when Great Britain stood alone in 1940 against the Third Reich, or when Japan began its aggressive war on the Far East? Is it not true that there was a clash of civilisations – deformed as each was – when the Third Reich invaded Soviet Russia? It is only now, at p. 67f, that Karsh dilates on science and the ‘absorption of the conquered civilizations’, but can there be a conquest which does not follow from a clash? Karsh names Indian medicine, mathematics and astronomy, and Hellenistic sciences, viz. medicine, pharmaceuticals, botany, zoology, mineralogy, meteorology, mathematics, mechanics, and astronomy. What would be desirable is a more integrated approach throughout the book, in which all these borrowings, absorptions, acquisitions, annexations were regularly included with the relationships being made explicit. Karsh changes his argument, somewhat, in discussing the Ottomans. He masterfully describes the Mongols and their Islamising (pp. 89–91) and then comes to the rise and decline of the Ottomans. There can be no doubt that this is a clash – though ‘civilisation’ is not the right word for eleventh-century nomads, as the Turks then were. The account of the Ottoman Empire is clever and accurate. After having read of the atrocities of 1856–1860, one feels sympathy for the Ottoman reformers: ‘Whatever course of action they chose, they were bound to antagonize some of their subjects’ (p. 97). Karsh points out that ‘the Eastern Question’ really refers to an extended period during which the Europeans tried to keep the Ottoman Empire alive, for example, the account of the Crimea War (p. 101f). Karsh on the First World War is also instructive (pp. 106–108). This should be related by the reader to his repudiation of Robert Kaplan and Edward Said on the alleged merits of Ottoman rule (p. 109); and when Karsh moves on to the Greek war of independence (p. 110f) and the massacre of Armenians in 1895–1896, he opens the way to the question of the genocide of 1915, which he answers in a manner that educated Turks of today should be able to accept (p. 115–118). But it is surprising that in tracing the decline of the Ottomans, Karsh ignores the lack of education, the failure to accept modern science and technology with thought about their
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implications, and the inability of the clerics to comprehend their texts with a critical faculty. Nor does this kind of issue arise in the next chapter, 7, on Iran, although Karsh quotes Sir Cecil Spring-Rice on the national and religious elements combining to influence events in Persia in the early twentieth century (p. 130f). Nor is there any reference to the lack of education, science and technology in chapter 8, which examines pan-Arabism from the Desert Revolt to the creation of Israel. One can only hope that Turks, Iranians, Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf, and Egyptians find this book and study it. Chapters 9 and 10 – where Sadat and Arafat, King Fahd, Saddam, Mubarak and Assad also feature – are another gift to the Middle East; for example, Nasser’s words (p. 150f). In the West it is possible to read British Cabinet papers, though the papers of de Gaulle remain unavailable because of his son’s zeal for the house. It should be possible for the Middle East to see what can be seen in the records of its leaders and governments as well. Only a direct confrontation of the present with the past can generate credible arguments about the past and about the future. In today’s world, everywhere, there is reluctance to accept principles, but if principles are untrustworthy they should not be accepted, and if historical explanations are mythical they should also be rejected. Karsh does well to show how Egypt’s peace with Israel does not prevent Egypt from allowing virulent propaganda against Israel (p. 188f). Chapter 11, ‘The Tail That Wags the Dog’, makes clear that imperialism as Karsh defines it at the outset has continued in the Middle East, and that the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait marked ‘the limits of American, and for that matter great-power, influence in the “New World Order”’ (p. 211). But Karsh does not make the point that Kuwait was an issue because of oil, and that oil was the explanation for the toppling of Saddam. Chapter 12, ‘Renewing the Quest for Allah’s Empire’, begins with the shrewd point that for monarchs religion was only legitimisation (p. 212), but that for ideologues, who arose after the Ottoman Empire fell, the goal was the reshaping of the world. This is, actually, a bit harsh on King Faisal of Iraq who is recorded as being pious (Gerald de Gaury, Three Kings in Baghdad, 1961, p. 63). It is well worth considering that the founder of the Islamic Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, does not appear to have had any concern with environmental reality. So, if Nasser in due course was to ignore overpopulation, bilharzia, the adverse effects of the Aswan Dam and much besides, he could manipulate the apparent principles of al-Banna and his own professed pan-Arabism with the certainty that most Egyptians would be admirers. Interestingly, al-Banna seems to have been an admirer of Hitler and Mussolini (p. 214), though the remarks attributed to Banna are not provided with a reference. Whether this admiration was veritable or not, the world of extreme religion and terrorism which the Brotherhood provided was of interest to both Saddam during his time in Egypt and Arafat, and influential on Osama bin Laden, because Ayman al-Zawahiri was a devotee, and Zawahiri is Osama’s deputy. Al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood now constitutes the Egyptian parliamentary opposition: an interesting prospect. Khomeini in Iran was another ideologue, and his interest in environmental or social or economic problems was almost nil. He demanded a pure Islam such as he himself defined. The White Revolution (p. 220), which was Reza Shah Pahlavi’s attempt to take forward the modernising efforts of his father – on the pattern of Mustafa Kemal’s modernisation of Turkey – was of no value to Khomeini. Those who look for an easy resolution of Iran’s current imbroglio may ponder the words of Rafsanjani: ‘We should fully equip ourselves both in the offensive and defensive use of chemical, bacteriological, and radiological weapons’ (p. 223).
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Chapter 13 is ‘Bin Laden’s Holy War’. There is nothing new in these pages, and any of the details of the life of this man can be ascertained from numerous sources. But there are two clear points; the relentless hatred is pathological, and the lack of constructive thought is omnipresent. In the epilogue, Karsh, strangely, regards the talk of jihad and the evident purpose behind it as follows:
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This imperialist vision should not be misconstrued for a civilizational struggle between the worlds of Islam and Christendom. World history has rarely, if ever, seen a mighty clash of civilizations. (p. 238) This extraordinary view does not square with my understanding; nor perhaps the understanding of bin Laden’s adherents. And certainly not that of Mawdudi, whose long-term influence from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia has been detrimental on many within both countries, as well as Iran. Mawdudi has influenced many Pakistanis ever since the foundation of the country. The changes which de Gauray records (p. 179f) in Iraq between 1921 and 1958 can be paralleled across the Muslim world. They reflect choices for modernity and it is these which the ideologues resist and hate. We may hesitate to regard ‘American civilisation’ as more than Hollywood and the free market, but it pervades the globalised economy which creates some environmental problems and can also solve others. There is also a British and French civilisation. But what is important for Muslims and for all others, Christians of all sorts, and nonChristians, is that the environmental problems should yield to science and technology through the perspective of values which are more than economic and less than fashionable. In this, as the work of many Muslims published in this journal has demonstrated, faith can make fact change: can help find solutions to problems of man’s place in nature. But facts must be taken to be real, before faith can be mediated in any useful way. And for modern people, faith must be reasoned. This is the challenge to us all. © M.R. Brett-Crowther, 2010
