The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (21 page)

In the central lands of the Middle East, religious militancy was less in evidence. It played some part, in different forms, in Abdi lhamid's officially sponsored version of pan-Islamism, in the Egyptian national movement, and in the Persian constitutional revolution. It was not, however, a major factor in any of them and, in the political program of the radical elites of the time, was overshadowed by liberal and patriotic ideologies. Religious hostility to the West, and still more to Westernizing reformers, smoldered on, however, and burst into flames in the anti-Young Turk mutiny that broke out in Istanbul on 12 April 1909. Some days previously, on 5 April, a meeting was held in the Santa Sophia mosque, at which a body named the Muhammadan Union was formed. A journal, Volkan, was launched to propagate its ideas. These, described as a "revolutionary Islamic internationalism," consisted of a combination of extreme Muslim traditionalism, militant pan-Islamism, and hostility to the Young Turks and all they represented. The leader of the group and the editor of its journal was a Bektashi dervish from Cyprus called Vahdeti. The men of the Muhammadan Union did not confine themselves to meetings and journalism but played some part in the counterrevolutionary mutiny of the First Army Corps. The program of the mutineers and their supporters was simple: "The sharia [holy law] is in danger; we want the shag a!" They did not, they said, want college-trained officers (mektepli zabit).

The mutiny was suppressed, and its leaders were put to death. The question of religion, however, remained in the forefront of Turkish concerns and played an important part in both the intellectual controversies and the political conflicts of the Young Turk period. The journals and magazines of that time, which combined a large measure of freedom with a high level of scholarship, contain what are probably the best-informed and best-argued discussions that have yet occurred between conservatives and modernists and between the different groups within each camp. The militant reaction, for the most part, remained under cover, occasionally breaking out, as in the unsuccessful conspiracy of 1910, led by the gendarmerie officer Ali Kemal, for the overthrow of the godless Young Turks and the restoration of the shag a.

The First World War, with its secondary conflict between the German-made Ottoman jihad and the British-made Arab revolt, brought some confusion in the sentiments and loyalties of Muslims, who were in any case overawed by the immense military power of the two groups of European belligerents. A change began to occur toward the end of the war, and it developed rapidly in the immediate postwar period. It was to some extent prepared by the revolutions in Russia, which seemed to portend the collapse of capitalist European civilization. It was much helped by the disillusionment of the leaders of the Arab Revolt, even to the point of secret approaches to their Ottoman masters, now enemies-yet co-religionists. The German general Liman von Sanders mentions in his memoirs that in late August 1918 the sherif Faysal sent a secret message to Jemal Pasha warning him of the impending British offensive and offering to go over to the Turks in return for certain guarantees for the formation of an Arab state.9 It is ironic that this proposal was rejected in the quite mistaken belief that it was a British-inspired ruse.

In the days of despair and anger that followed the Ottoman surrender, Islamic loyalties were very strong, and it was to these loyalties that the first calls to resistance were addressed. In their attempt to win support in Muslim lands, even the Communists found it expedient to appeal to Islamic rather than to class or national solidarity, and they cooperated, uneasily and uncertainly, with the exponents of pan-Islam, whom they tried to use for their own pur poses. Despite their secularism and nationalism, the Young Turks had not disdained to play the pan-Islamic card when it suited them, and Enver Pasha had in 1918 launched the grandiosely named Army of Islam for the liberation of the Muslims of the Russian Empire. After the defeat of the Central Powers, some Young Turk leaders settled in Moscow, now the main center of opposition to Western imperialism, and they busied themselves with plans for a Muslim international revolutionary movement. In 1921 a Congress of the Union of Islamic Revolutionary Societies, presided over by Enver Pasha, was held in Berlin and Rome. Its Communist inspiration was clear.

The alliance between Communism and pan-Islamism, always uneasy, was of brief duration. Enver Pasha, sent to Central Asia to further the cause of the Soviets, joined their nationalist opponents and was killed in 1922 fighting the Red Army. Sultan Galiev, the Tatar schoolmaster who worked with Stalin at the Commissariat of Nationalities in 1918 and conceived the idea of a revolutionary international of colonial peoples independent of the Comintern, was arrested in 1923 for "nationalist deviations" and disappeared in a later purge.

The most important and only successful movement of resistance to the conquering and victorious West was in Anatolia, where a group of rebels, led by Mustafa Kemal, defied the Allies, the Greeks, and the subservient Ottoman government. The later secularism and patriotism of the Kemalists have obscured the strongly Islamic character of the movement in its earlier stages, when its declared purposes were to free "Islamic lands" and "Islamic populations"-to liberate the sultan-caliph and eject the infidel invader. Muslim religious leaders, from both the ulema and the dervish brotherhoods, were prominent among the founders and early supporters of the movement.

There were three of them among the nine sponsors of the famous Society for the Defense of the Rights of Eastern Anatolia, founded in Erzurum in the summer of 1919; one of them was a sheikh of the Naqshbandi order. When the first Grand National Assembly met in Ankara in 1920, 73 of its 361 members were professional men of religion, including 14 muftis and 8 leaders of dervish orders. In February 1921, the sheikh of the Sanusi order in Libya, who had joined the Kemalists three months previously, presided over a pan-Islamic congress in Sivas, at which many Arab delegates were present. In March 1921, the Grand National Assembly adopted as a national anthem the first two stanzas of a deeply religious poem by Mehmet Akif, the antinationalist "poet of Islam," who had gone to Anatolia to join the resistance. In April 1921, in occupied Istanbul, a religious service was held in honor of the martyrs who had fallen in the holy war in Anatolia, and a young, Westernized Turkish intellectual, under the strain of great emotion, was moved to reflect that the true home of his people was not "the national club, the cultural lecture, the political meeting," but the mosque and congregation, "the house, home, and fatherland" of this nation. This is strikingly reminiscent of the remark of the grand vizier and Islamic revivalist Mehmed Said Halim Pasha a few years previously, in 1917, that "the fatherland of a Muslim is wherever the shari a prevails."'O

The mood changed, however. The sultan-caliph in Istanbul refused to be liberated, and he and his ulema hurled anathema at the rebels in Anatolia. Islam, for the moment, became identified with social reaction and political acquiescence. The Kemalists turned from religious to nationalist appeals and went far on the road to secularization.

Their secularism was, so to speak, sanctified by success. Alone among the defeated powers of the First World War, the Turks had succeeded in defying the victors and obtaining a negotiated peace on their own terms. Alone among the crushed peoples of Asia, the Turks had been able to drive out the invader and restore full national sovereignty. The impact of their successes was comparable with that of the Japanese victory over Russia a generation earlier. The Japanese had taught the lessons of modernism and liberalism; the Kemalist Turks demonstrated the merits of secular nationalism, and a new generation of leaders in the Arab lands and elsewhere was encouraged to defy the West and follow their example. None were able to repeat their success.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the prevailing forms of expression of political loyalties, opinions, aspirations, and interests were Western-mostly secular political parties that issued programs and procured votes. The most important religious movement was still the Salafiyya, the leadership of which had passed from Muhammad `Abduh to his disciple Rashid Rida (1865-1935), a Syrian settled in Egypt. His very considerable theological achievements and intellectual influence were for long without direct political consequences. At the same time, the attempt in 1925 of Sheikh `Ali `Abd al-Raziq, probably under the influence of Turkish secularism, to separate religion from politics failed utterly against the entrenched opposition of Al-Azhar.

The beginnings of a more active and general concern with re ligion can already be seen in the 1930s, in the wave of popular literary works extolling Muhammad and the early heroes of Islam. Notable among these was the biography of the Prophet by Muhammad Husayn Haykal, which was published in 1935 and at once won immense popularity. The lives of the Prophet and the caliphs were also celebrated in a widely read series of romantic works by the famous author and man of letters Taha Husayn.

During this period, a number of religious leagues, clubs, and organizations were founded, with Islamic programs ranging from a vague, generalized expression of piety to a more or less direct formulation of Salafiyya doctrines. One of these, the Association of Algerian Ulema, formed in Algeria in 1931, acquired considerable influence and importance. In the Middle East, their role was, until about 1945, minor and insignificant, being confined to social and cultural activities without political content or direction.

The ending of the war and the resulting relaxation of Western pressures in 1945 were followed by a sudden and tremendous upsurge of religious movements, expressing a messianic radicalism of a kind familiar and recurrent in the Islamic world from the days of the medieval Carmathians and Assassins to those of Shamil of Daghistan and the Mahdi of the Sudan. During the war years, great armies had camped and fought in the lands of the Middle East, involving its peoples in the provision of their needs and the pursuit of their struggles, enriching some and disrupting the lives of others. While the great armies were still there, the expression of the resulting strains and stresses was necessarily muted. As the armies began to withdraw, accumulating resentments and hostilities sought and found new outlets.

Within a very short time, the secular, political nationalist and patriotic movements had outdated and discredited themselves by their very successes. In achieving their classical objectives of political sovereignty and constitutional government, they had shown how hollow and inadequate these were. By really winning the support of the nation-and not merely of a dominant but unrepresentative minority-they had revealed the gap between their own Europeanized political style and ideologies and the deeper feelings and desires of the people they claimed to represent. Before long, in one country after another, they were swept aside by new movements, of a new kind.

In the 1930s and early 1940s, fascism and Nazism had, to many, offered a seductive alternative to Western liberalism, an ideology that combined the merits of being opposed to the Western way of life, to the Western group of powers, and of being supported by an immensely strong anti-Western military bloc. In 1945, however, fascism was discredited by military defeat; the more or less fascist groups and associations of the Middle East broke up or changed their tune, and their leaders looked for other ways, or at least for other names.

Russia, still reeling from its mighty struggle with the Wehrmacht, was not yet able to provide them. For a while, the Labour government in postwar Britain seemed to provide a socialist and an anti-imperialist inspiration. When this proved disappointing, a resurgent Russia, then challenging the West in the Cold War, appeared to offer both an alternative way of life and a champion against Western domination. As hostility to Western power and Western ways became ever stronger among Middle Eastern populations, Marxist Communists and Islamic fundamentalists competed with radical nationalists in the attempt to mobilize and direct the anger and frustration of the Muslim masses.

For the past 150 years, Europe had provided both the objects of resentment and the ideological means of expressing it. Even now, there were some who began to look to the Western doctrine of socialism as the ideological inspiration of the next phase of antiWestern struggle. But far more significant, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, were the religious leagues, whose passionate reassertion of Islamic beliefs, values, and standards responded far more closely to the feelings of the suppressed lower classes, in revolt against their own Westernized masters and exploiters as much as against the West itself.

The most active and most successful of these leagues was the Muslim Brotherhood-al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun-a widespread, semisecret association with a cellular organization, paramilitary youth groups, and an extensive network of educational and even economic activities and enterprises. Founded in the 1920s by an Egyptian secondary-school teacher called Sheikh Hasan al-Banna' (1906-1949), who was known as the Supreme Guide (al-Murshid al- `Amm), the movement grew rapidly during the 1930s and turned to direct political action in the 1940s.

The Muslim Brotherhood was soon able to play an important and stormy role in Egyptian politics, especially in the crucial period between the end of the war and the consolidation of the military regime. For a while, it operated almost as a new political party, enjoying the support of King Faruq against the Wafd. In 1948 its volunteer groups fought in the Palestine War; on their return to Egypt they are said to have plotted a march on Cairo and a coup d'etat in order to overthrow both the government and the monarchy and replace them by a theocratic republic. The prime minister, Nugrashi Pasha, struck first. In a series of moves beginning on 8 December 1948, he disbanded the Brotherhood, dissolved its branches, impounded its assets, and arrested many of its members. Three weeks later, on 28 December, he fell to the bullet of an assassin who was certainly a member of the Brotherhood, though perhaps not acting under orders. On 12 February 1949, Sheikh Hasan alBanna' himself was murdered, in circumstances that have never been fully explained.