The West and Islam: A Return to War?

M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University, Boston. His most recent book is Poverty from the Wealth of Nations: Integration and Polarization in the Global Economy since 1760 (Palgrave, 2000).

Once again, after being reduced to impotence for close to two hundred years, the Islamic spectre is stirring abroad. After 11 September 2001, when Islamic hijackers attacked two prominent American icons, there are growing fears that this spectre may haunt the West yet again if it is not quickly put back in place.

 

In recent decades, American scholarship on the Islamic resurgence has divided into two camps. I shall call them “diplomats” and “warriors”. (Fawaz Gerges calls them “accommodationists” and “confrontationists”.)¹ The diplomats take the view that Islamic societies are diverse, and that each contains tendencies—religious, cultural and political—that pull in different directions. Most importantly, they see the Islamic resurgence as operating at two levels: at the individual level it expresses itself as a return to personal piety; and, collectively, it functions as a new social and political activism inspired by religion. Deep down, say the diplomats, Islamist movements do not reject modernity: they are attempts to indigenise modernity, to give it a local habitation and name.

 

Over time, however, as the Islamic resurgence has been repressed by domestic regimes backed by United States, it has assumed a growing anti-American edge. It is this dialectic that explains the appeal of Osama bin Laden among some segments of Islamic societies. In the absence of any political space that tolerates political opposition, the Islamic extremists who engage in egregious acts of violence are increasingly seen by Muslims as the only political actors still battling the corrupt regimes in their own countries and still trying to breach the West’s tightening siege over their own societies. Thus, it is by default that bin Laden has become a symbol of resistance to US policies towards Islamic countries; this should not, say the diplomats, be confused with Islamic opposition to freedom and democracy.

Engagement v. Confrontation

The scholars in the diplomatic camp—whose leaders include John Esposito, Bruce Lawrence and Richard Bulliet—make an important distinction between the mainstream of Islamist movements and their extremist wings. They call upon the United States to engage the mainstream Islamists, to win them over by developing a more balanced approach to the Israeli‑Palestinian dispute, by withdrawing troops from Saudi Arabia and by lifting the sanctions on Iraq. Some of them urge the United States to use its leverage to create democratic openings in the Arab dictatorships and monarchies. They argue that once in office, mainstream Islamists will moderate their rhetoric and opt for a pragmatic relationship with United States.

 

Among the leading warriors are Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer. The warriors hold reductionist, ahistorical views about Islam and Islamic societies. They maintain that Islam is fundamentally at odds with the core values of the West, defined as freedom, human rights, secularism, democracy and progress. Driven by this antipathy, political Islam seeks to establish obscurantist, repressive and misogynist regimes across the Islamic world, prefers violence over democratic process, and seeks to wage total war against the West. Daniel Pipes, one of the warrior camp’s more virulent spokesmen, describes the Islamic resurgence as a “militant, atavistic force driven by hatred of Western political thought, harking back to age-old grievances against Christendom”.² Another warrior writes of battle lines being drawn between “Muslim forces that have set their faces against modernity, democracy, advancement of women, and economic progress”, and all other nations that espouse “these essentially American principles and ideals”.³ As one might expect, the warriors urge the United States to confront the Islamic menace and contain it militarily before it threatens the West. They oppose democratisation in the Islamic world since, in most cases, this would weaken pro-Western regimes.

 

It is worth noting that, in the world of scholarship, the warriors represent a minority view. They acknowledged their isolation from the scholarly community when in March 1994 two of their leading lights, Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, started their own publication, the Middle East Quarterly, in order to showcase warrior thinking. The Quarterly’s website (www.allenpress.com/mieq/) announces: “At last … a journal with the real story on the Middle East.” However, it is the warriors, aided by the neo-conservatives, who have enjoyed considerably greater political and media clout than the diplomats. This clout had increased greatly after the end of the Cold War, and now, after 11 September, President George W. Bush appears to be embracing their objective of waging pre-emptive wars against the Islamic world.

 

I will proceed to review some of the charges levelled against Islamic societies by the warriors, charges often believed by the American public: that Islamic societies have lagged behind economically, that they face a democracy deficit and have “bloody borders”, that is, are customarily at war with their non-Islamic neighbours.⁴ I will examine whether these charges are supported by the evidence and, more importantly, when true, whether blame for them can be placed at the door of Islam.

Is Islam That Different?

The Islamic world does face any number of serious problems; it would be foolish to deny this. What we need to determine is whether Islamic countries have done worse, or even much worse, than others with a comparable history in pursuing economic development, promoting equality between the sexes, developing free institutions and keeping the peace with their neighbours.

 

First, consider the question of economic development. Judging from their living standards in 1999—as measured by per capita income in internationally comparable dollars—it does not appear that Muslims have done too badly. In several paired comparisons of per capita income, Iran holds its own with Venezuela, Malaysia is well ahead of Thailand, Egypt is modestly ahead of Ukraine, Turkey is only slightly behind Russia, Pakistan is a little behind (and Indonesia somewhat ahead) of India, Bangladesh is somewhat behind Vietnam, Tunisia is well ahead of Georgia and Armenia, and Jordan is significantly ahead of Nicaragua. It may be noted that in nearly all these comparisons the historical advantage is conceded to the non-Islamic member of the pair: it was either never colonised, or gained its independence before its Islamic opposite.⁵

 

The results do not change if the comparisons are based on the human development index, a composite of life expectancy, adult literacy, educational enrolment rates and per capita income. In a ranking of 162 countries in 1999, twenty-two Islamic countries, out of a total of forty-three in the data set, occupy ranks between thirty-two and one hundred. Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sudan rank lower down the scale, but still ahead of several non-Islamic countries in Africa. Notably, the Arab oil-rich countries are the leaders of the Islamic pack, indicating sensible use of their oil wealth in some respects, at least. Incredibly, Saudi Arabia, the bastion of conservative Islam, spends 7.5 per cent of its national income on public education. This places it in the same class as Norway and Finland.

 

Nearly half the Islamic countries show evidence of a “gender bias” in their development indices. A comparison of the human development index with the gender-related development index—this modifies the former to reflect gender inequalities—shows that seventeen out of thirty-six Islamic countries suffer a loss of rank as we move from the general index to the gender-related index. These losses are highest for Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Sudan and Lebanon. Only Turkey improves its rank significantly, by four places.⁶

 

The cultural determinism of the warriors extends to demographics. Observing the rising share of Islamic countries in world population, they attribute this to a cultural resistance to birth control. Demographers have a better understanding of these matters. They know that while religion may be a factor affecting fertility rates, these depend mostly on living standards, income distribution and female education. Once again, an examination of the evidence quickly dispels the presumption that Islamic cultural practices are incompatible with limitations of family size. Between 1970 and 1975, and 1995 and 2000, nearly every Islamic country experienced a decline in the total fertility rate, the number of childbirths per woman over her lifetime. In several Islamic countries, the decline was quite marked.

 

Comparisons with non-Islamic countries are also revealing. The fertility rates for 1995–2000 were 1.9 in Azerbaijan, 2.3 in Tunisia, 2.6 in Indonesia, 3.2 in Iran, 3.3 in Malaysia and Algeria and 3.4 in Morocco and Egypt, as compared to 3.3 in India, 3.6 in the Philippines, 4.4 in Bolivia, 4.9 in Guatemala and 3.1 in South Africa.⁷ These low rates for the Islamic countries are the more remarkable in that they were achieved over fairly short periods of time.

‘Bloody Borders’

We now turn to the question of Islam’s alleged propensity for war. Samuel Huntington claims that “Muslim bellicosity and violence are late-twentieth-century facts which neither Muslims nor non-Muslims can deny”.⁸ In support of this thesis, he offers a list of major inter-civilisational conflicts on Islam’s borders in the 1990s, citing the wars in Sudan, the Horn of Africa, Nigeria, Chad, Palestine, Bosnia, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kosovo, Kashmir, Mindanao (the Philippines) and Burma. He also provides some quantitative evidence purporting to show that Muslims had a disproportionate share in inter-civilisational conflicts during 1993–4.⁹

 

A more careful examination of the data that looks specifically for a rising trend in inter-civilisational conflicts during the 1990s tells a different story. In his survey of ethnic conflicts, Jonathan Fox found that Islam was involved in 23.2 per cent of all inter-civilisational conflicts between 1945 and 1989, and in 24.7 per cent of such conflicts between 1990 and 1998.¹⁰ This is not too far above Islam’s share in world population; nor do we observe any dramatic rise in this share since the end of the Cold War. It would appear that Huntington’s “facts” about “Muslim bellicosity” in the late-twentieth century do not merit that description.

 

Ironically, even as Huntington speaks of Muslim bellicosity, he thinks this is largely fuelled by demography: Islamic countries, from the 1970s onwards, experienced rapid population growth and a rising youth bulge (a higher-than-usual proportion of youths in the population). Oddly enough, Huntington supports his thesis by setting off Islamic demographics against those in Europe, the United States and the Russian Federation.¹¹ This is hardly the relevant comparison. Between 1965 and 1980, the Latin American population grew annually at 2.5 per cent without creating a Catholic resurgence. Nor have we seen an African resurgence, although the African population has been growing even faster.¹² Why should the youth bulge mutate into a problem of bloody borders only in Islamic countries?

 

In any case, one must be careful when talking about bloody borders. A hard look at geography soon reveals that the length of civilisational borders varies strikingly, and that Islam’s share of such borders is disproportionately large. On the one hand, Islam stretches from Senegal, Morocco and Bosnia in the West to Sinjiang, Indonesia and Mindanao in the East. This geographic sweep across the Afro-Eurasian landmass brings Islam into contact—both close and extensive—with the African, Western, Orthodox, Hindu and Buddhist civilisations. Also to be counted are the internal borders between often large pockets of Muslim minorities inside non-Islamic countries and vice versa. It is my impression that if all of these borders were added up, Islam’s share of them might well exceed the combined share of all other civilisations. A recognition of these facts might help to place observations about Islam’s bloody borders in a less prejudicial perspective.

Islam and Democracy

Finally, there is the charge of a “democracy deficit” in the Islamic world, attributed by cultural aficionados such as Samuel Huntington and Elie Kedourie to Islamic traditions that are allegedly hostile to democratic values. As proof, they will hold up the latest global rankings on freedom and democracy provided by the experts at the right-wing think tank, Freedom House: as if such complex matters could be ascertained by examining snapshots of countries at any one point in time. There is a further problem with these rankings: they are subjectively determined, especially those relating to the extent of freedom. Concerned about the biases of subjective assessments, the United Nations Development Programme quickly discontinued their use in the annual Human Development Reports after citing them once.

 

The cultural determinism of Freedom House is also on proud display in its most recent report. The twentieth-century record reveals two global waves of democratisation, the first during the 1950s, the second during the 1990s. Powerful international forces regulated these movements. The first wave accompanied the post-war dismantling of colonies, swiftly reversed by gravitational forces and the pressures of the Cold War; the second wave followed the end of the Cold War. If some countries, or bloc of countries, did not participate in these waves of democratisation, or pseudo-democratisation for the most part, this is attributed to cultural flaws. Thus, the latest Freedom House report declares that “the roots of freedom and democracy are weakest” in the Middle East.¹³

 

If we look behind the numbers provided by Freedom House, they tell a more complex story. Its data for 2001 show that only twenty-three per cent of Islamic countries are electoral democracies. The comparable figure for Africa is 38 per cent, for Asia 62 per cent, for post-communist Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States 70 per cent, and for the Americas 91 per cent. But there are some revealing patterns within the group of forty-seven Islamic countries. Of the sixteen Arab countries and six Central Asian Republics, not one is democratic. When we exclude these two groups from the Islamic countries—and they make up not much more than a fifth of the world’s Islamic population—the proportion of democracies in the remaining Islamic countries rises to 47 per cent. Moreover, in some cases the Freedom House classifications look palpably wrong. If we classify Iran and Malaysia as electoral democracies, the figure for the Islamic world rises to 59 per cent, quite comparable to that for Asian countries.

 

Is there any rationale for excluding the Arab and Central Asian countries from the Islamic count? It turns out there are several. Since the end of the Cold War, Western donors and multilateral institutions have used their financial leverage to encourage democratisation across the world. However, there is one significant exception to this rule: such pressures are not applied to Islamic countries, mostly in the Arab world, where democratisation is likely to bring Islamists to power. Indeed, the Arab despotisms, with the exception of the “rogue states”, have received political, moral and intelligence support from Western powers in the repression of their mainly Islamist oppositions.

Israel and Oil

There are other factors stacking the odds against democracy in the Arab world. Not the least of them is Israel, a colonial–settler state created by the British during their occupation of Palestine and supported since its foundation by American money and military technology. The insertion of Israel into the Islamic heartland created a disequilibrium which has led to large-scale ethnic cleansing, several wars, the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and Golan Heights, attacks on Iraq and Tunisia, and the occupation of southern Lebanon for twenty-two years. The power asymmetry between Israel, seen by the Arabs as the military fist of the United States in a Zionist glove, and the Arabs has seriously warped the political and economic dynamics of the whole region. Most importantly, it has intensified the security imperative of the front-line Arab states, driving them to build single-party dictatorships dominated by the military and intolerant of civil society and all forms of political dissent.

 

Oil is another factor that has weakened the power of civil society in the Arab world. Of the sixteen Arab countries, nine are oil-rich, and all but three of these oil-rich countries have quite small populations. Their oil wealth and small populations have allowed most of these countries to exempt their citizens from paying taxes; the oil revenues sufficed to finance state expenditures, with billions left over for opulent palaces and transfers to foreign accounts. That is one more strike against democracy in the Arab world. A citizenry that pays no taxes lacks the moral authority to demand representation.

 

In addition, eight Arab countries are monarchies, and all but two of these monarchies are oil-rich. These oil monarchies were either created by the British or, in the case of Saudi Arabia and Oman, were supported and shored up by them. More recently, they have been maintained as American proxies ensuring that Arab oil remains in trusted hands. America’s commitment to the survival of these monarchies has never been in doubt. It was forcefully demonstrated during the 1991 Gulf War when Iraq crossed the lines drawn in the sand by the British.

 

As for the six Central Asian countries, we find that all are former members of the defunct Soviet Union. Since their independence, they have been run by former communist bosses backed by Moscow. Russia maintains a military presence in these countries, or has strong ties to their militaries, with the intent of sealing its southern borders against Islamist influence from Iran and Afghanistan. Thus, Russia is now playing the same role in this region—opposing democratisation—that the United States has played in the Arab world.

Why Is Islam a Problem?

If Islam is not all that different from other civilisations, why is it perceived to be a threat to the West, a threat that became all too real on 11 September?

 

I will argue that it is the West’s success in fragmenting Islam, and more recently in obstructing its recovery, that has contributed to making Islam a problem and a threat to the West. Ironically, the West’s success was due, at least in part, to Islam’s earlier success in stretching itself from one end of the Afro-Eurasian landmass to the other—thus stretching itself too thinly over this vast geography. In contrast, the territories occupied by the Orthodox, Hindu and Sinic civilisations were more compact and had well-defined boundaries.

 

As recently as 1750, Islamic polities extended from Mauritania and the Balkans in the West to Sinjiang and Mindanao in the East. Islam originated in the Arabian deserts, and in its march eastward and westward it expanded into mostly arid lands with thin populations. The exceptions were India, the Balkans and the Indonesian archipelago, which were densely populated; but conversions were slow in the first two instances. As a result, the power of Islam lacked an adequate social base. In 1800 the Arab population in the Middle East was quite small. Elsewhere, in the Balkans and India, the Islamic empires ruled over mostly non-Muslim populations. The early collapse of Muslim power in India and the end of Ottoman rule in Europe had much to do with these demographic drawbacks.

 

The Ottomans, the Maghreb and Egypt faced another handicap: they were only a few days’ sail from Europe. This made them tempting targets for European capital and cupidity, mixed with some of the old zeal for eradicating Islam. This mission was taken up successively by France, Britain and Italy. Between them, they carved up the Arab world, displacing its indigenous commercial elites and, in the Maghreb, introducing settlers to take over the richest agricultural lands.

 

Under the visionary leadership of Mohammad Ali, Egypt initiated a determined effort to industrialise in 1810, earlier than in most European countries. But this was scuppered by the British and French in 1840. Renewed Egyptian mobilisation in the 1870s led to the colonisation of the country in 1882. Britain, France and Israel mounted another invasion of Egypt as recently as 1956.

 

This suggests some sobering reflections for those who would blame the present troubles of Islam on its alleged antipathy to modernity. Imagine if the Egyptian bid to industrialise had not been undone by imperialist Britain and France; it is likely that an industrialised Egypt would then have eventually led the entire region to industrial growth, prosperity and power. This thought experiment explains why Egypt’s industrial drive had to be aborted. An industrialised Middle East might have renewed the old threat of Islam to Europe.

 

As previously indicated, the disarray of the Arabs in the post-colonial period goes back to two additional factors: Zionism and oil. The Zionist movement was founded on a confluence of Jewish and Western interests in the Middle East. This led to Britain’s support in 1917 for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, to the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire in 1919, to the vivisection of the former Ottoman territories in the Levant, to the British mandate over Palestine, and to the creation of Israel in 1948. The Islamic Crescent had been splintered, and part of it occupied by a Jewish colonial–settler state.

 

Meanwhile, the United States and Britain were making arrangements in the Persian Gulf to ensure Western control over the richest oil reserves in the world. They decided to place the region under archaic, absolutist monarchies whose survival, against the rising tide of nationalism, would depend on the United States. As part of this plan, when the Shah fled Iran in the face of popular opposition in 1953, the United States and Britain instigated a coup and re-instated him. In 1967, with the decisive defeat of Egypt, Syria and Jordan—leading to the occupation of the Sinai, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza Strip—Israel cut short the career of secular Arab nationalism. The Middle East straitjacket was now securely in place.

A New Cold War

The Iranian revolution of 1979 did not loosen this straitjacket. On the contrary, by raising the spectre of Islamist power, it paved the way for an “Arab” war against Iran, with the blessing of the United States. In time, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this led the corrupt Arab regimes to form a grand alliance—under the aegis of the United States and Israel—to control and repress their Islamist movements. When foolhardy Iraq dared to challenge this grand alliance, it was bombed back into the Stone Age and crippled with comprehensive economic sanctions.

 

A new cold war descended on the Islamic world in the 1990s. Its rules were clear. The United States would support Islamic despots—of whatever stripe—so long as they kept the lid on political Islam. If any country dared to depart from the terms of this contract, it faced economic and political sanctions. If these did not work, they would be followed by swift and devastating military reprisals. Iraq showed the Islamic world the price it would pay if it challenged this new contract. Similarly, Algeria stands as an example of what happens when the democratic process threatens to empower Islamists.

 

An explanation of why the “democratisation” of the 1990s bypassed the Islamic world might be found in this new cold war. Most Western commentators think otherwise, choosing to blame Islam instead. Their method is classic: damnation by accusation. If Islam is obscurantist, anti-rational, fanatical and misogynist, then it must also be opposed to democracy. The Orientalist has spoken: the case is closed.

 

Those who believe that Islam is anti-democratic need a short lesson in the modern history of constitutional movements in the Islamic world. Mohammad Ali of Egypt appointed his first advisory council in 1824, consisting mainly of elected members. In 1881, the Egyptian nationalist movement succeeded in convening an elected parliament, but this was aborted only a year later when the British occupied Egypt. Tunisia promulgated a constitution in 1860, setting up a Supreme Council purporting to limit the powers of the monarchy, but this was suspended in 1864 when the French discovered that it interfered with their ambitions. Turkey elected its first parliament in 1877, though this was dissolved a year later by the Caliph; a second parliament was convened in 1908. Iran’s progress was more dramatic. It started with protests against a British tobacco monopoly in the 1890s and quickly led to an elected parliament in 1906, with powers to confirm the cabinet. A year later, however, the British and Russians carved up Iran into their spheres of influence, a development that would lead to the dissolution of the parliament in 1910. Nevertheless, the constitutional movement persisted until it was suppressed in 1931 by a new dynasty brought to power by the British.

 

Compare these developments with the history of constitutional movements elsewhere—not excluding Europe—during the nineteenth century, and the world of Islam does not suffer from the comparison. Incredible as this may appear to minds blinded by Eurocentric prejudice, Tunisia, Egypt and Iran were taking the lead in making the transition to constitutional monarchy. Even today, the “resistance to democracy” in the Arab world does not come from its own populations. Quite the opposite: it comes from neo-colonial surrogates—brutal military dictatorships and absolutist monarchies—imposed by a United States determined to safeguard its oil and Israel.

The Colonial Contract

The US-imposed straitjacket has deepened the contradictions of global capitalism in the Islamic world, a development that is pregnant with consequences which threaten to spin out of control.

 

During the Cold War, elite factions in many Third World countries—especially military elites—competed to win the US contract to repress their populist movements. As long as they did their job, they received foreign loans and enjoyed a degree of autonomy in managing their economies. A few such countries in East Asia, the most favoured, became showcases of capitalist success. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, this contract was terminated. It was replaced by the “Washington Consensus”, enforced by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organisation. Elites in the periphery would now compete to open up their economies for penetration by multinational corporations.

 

There are two versions of this new colonial contract. Countries in the non-Islamic periphery are generally encouraged to compete for the contract through the ballot box. In countries that have strong Islamist movements, this option is not available; they are allowed to keep their pro-Western dictators and monarchs. The excuse for this two-track policy is flimsy. It is charged that Islamist parties oppose democracy, that they will use ballots to shut down the ballot. The real reason is Western nervousness over the Islamists’ twin goals: introducing an Islamic social order, and reversing the fragmentation of Islam.

 

This siege of the Islamic world is unlikely to produce the desired results. On the contrary, it has engendered contradictions that will only deepen over time. After the rout of the Arab armies in 1967, the failure of secular, nationalist movements to reverse Arab marginalisation was transparent. In 1978, with appropriate offers of American “aid”, Egypt made a separate peace with Israel. In abdicating its leadership of the Arab world, Egypt wrote the obituary of Arab nationalism. From then on, the historic task of liberating the Arab world would be assumed by the Islamists.

 

Although defeated, the corrupt Arab regimes have clung on to power. They owe their survival to the new colonial contract, which has allowed them to revamp their repressive machinery provided they use it to suppress their own people. The turnaround was quick, moving through capitulations at Camp David and Oslo, normalisation of ties with Israel, and surrender to the Washington Consensus. Quickly, the war against Islam intensified. Islamist parties were banned, rooted out of professional associations and trade unions, their leaders eventually jailed, executed, or hounded out of the country.

 

This repression of Islamists has produced two results. Nearly everywhere, it immobilised mainstream Islamists who wished to work through the institutions of civil society—political parties, professional associations, the media, the courts and charities. The focus now shifted to extremists willing to engage in violence to gain their ends. But they, too, had little crawl space under the repressive Arab regimes. Those who survived were driven underground, or went into exile in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or the West.

 

At this point, some Islamists decided to change their strategy. They would target their problems at the source and inflict damage on United States. They decided to sting the United States into lifting its siege of Islamic countries. Alternatively, they hoped to start wars, like that in Afghanistan, on the chance that this would spark rebellions against the US surrogates in the Islamic world.

A Ring of Steel

Whatever the intentions of the suicide hijackers, the attacks of 11 September have already unleashed forces which are deepening the contradictions in the Islamic world.

 

The United States has now enunciated a new doctrine—you are either with us or we are against you—under which it has given itself the licence to wage war against any country that opposes its interests. This doctrine has already led to one war, successfully executed (against Afghanistan), but many more are planned, nearly all against Islamic targets, ranging from Mindanao to Sudan. Other major powers, too—Israel, India, Russia and China—have joined the US “war against terrorism”, and they are using the same logic to intensify their own repression of Islamic minorities.

 

In addition, the United States has now completed its steel ring—to use a term borrowed from the eminent Islamist, Marshall Hodgson—around the Islamic heartland, a ring stretching from the Nile to the Oxus. The Israeli segment of this ring was the first to be put in place, in 1948. This was followed, at the end of the Cold War, by the deployment of American forces in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain. Now, at the conclusion of the war in Afghanistan, the United States is consolidating bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. India forms the eastern segment of this steel ring, grating against Pakistan’s eastern border.

 

I tend to think that in creating this steel ring around the Islamic heartland, the United States may have walked into the trap set for it by the Islamic extremists. There are several ways in which this steel ring might work to increase support for the latter. It will deepen the sense of siege in the general population, and certainly in those countries, Iran, Syria and Iraq, that are at odds with the United States. Islamic countries that have accepted American bases will increasingly be seen as supporting and harbouring “infidel” armies. It is also likely that, with a direct military presence, the United States will be tempted to interfere more openly in the economic and social policies of these countries, making it harder for their governments to shake off the accusation that they take orders from Washington. The proliferation of American bases multiplies the targets for Islamic extremists and brings these targets nearer to the extremists’ home ground. It is also conceivable that China, Iran and even Russia, nervous at the American presence in their backyards, might covertly encourage Islamists to attack the American bases.

 

If and when such attacks begin, it is unlikely that the United States will be looking for the nearest exits. Over time, the steel ring is likely to become, both in perception and reality, the girding that supports the entire structure of American hegemony in the Islamic heartland. This structure will not be abandoned lightly. The United States cannot lose control over the oil and gas resources in West Asia, or those in Central Asia now within its grasp. More importantly, the loss of direct Western control over the Islamic heartland would be perceived as a serious body blow to the prestige of Western civilisation. The future of Israel, too, hangs in balance. The consequences of such a confrontation are too horrible to contemplate, not least for the Islamic peoples. But if this scenario is at all plausible, then it would appear that, despite its victory in Afghanistan, the United States may have given the Islamic extremists what they wanted: an apocalyptic war between Islam and the United States.

 

Endnotes

1. See Fawaz A. Gerges, America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

 

2. See Paul A. Winters, ed., Islam: Opposing Viewpoints (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1995), p. 192.

 

3. John Hughes, “The World’s New Divide”, Christian Science Monitor, 30 January 2002.

 

4. The phrase “bloody borders” was first coined by Samuel Huntington in his essay, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs (summer 1993), pp. 23–49. His argument was later expanded in book form as The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

 

5. World Bank, World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 274–5.

 

6. The data on human development indices are from the United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2001 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 141–4, 212–3.

 

7. Ibid., pp. 154–5.

 

8. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, p. 258.

 

9. Ibid., pp. 256–8.

 

10. Jonathan Fox, “Two Civilizations and Ethnic Conflict: Islam and the West”, Journal of Peace Research 38, no. 4 (2000), pp. 459–72.

 

11. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, p. 118.

 

12. World Bank, World Development Report 1991 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 254–5.

 

13. Freedom in the World 2002: The Democracy Gap [www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2002/essay2002.pdf].