Unlike other parts of the world, where the demise of empire during the twentieth century has invariably led to the acceptance of the reality of the modern nation-state, the contemporary Middle Eastern state system has been under sustained assault since its formation in the wake of World War I. Aside from Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who extricated Turkey from its Islamic imperial legacy and re-established it as a modern nation-state by abolishing the sultanate and caliphate and effecting a separation of state and church, Middle Eastern leaders and Islamist ideologues have remained under the spell of the imperial dream.

 Colonel Reza Khan, who in February 1921 seized power in Iran in a military coup and four years later deposed the ruling shah, chose to establish his own royal dynasty rather than transform his country into a republic in an attempt to revive Iran's imperial glory. The Hashemites, who envisaged the substitution of their own empire for that of the Ottomans, acted similarly, as did subsequent generations of pan-Arabists who denounced the new Middle Eastern system as an artificial creation of Western imperialism and urged its replacement by a unified regional state, or rather empire. This created a deep dissonance between the reality of state nationalism and the dream of an empire packaged as a unified Arab nation: It failed, however, to bring about the creation of such an empire for the simple reason that there is not, and never has been, an Arab nation: its invocation has largely represented a clever ploy to rally popular support behind individual quests for regional mastery.

There had been no sense of "Arabism" among the Arabic-speaking popula­tions of the Middle East prior to the 1920s and 1930s, when Arabs began to be inculcated with the notion that they constituted one nation. They viewed themselves as subjects of the Ottoman sultan-caliph, in his capacity as the reli­gious and temporal head of the worldwide Muslim community, ignored the nationalistic message of the tiny secret Arab societies, and fought to the bitter end for their suzerain during World War I.

Such behavior is not difficult to understand. As the millenarian linchpin of the Middle East's imperial order, Islam would not be easily supplanted by the schizophrenic construct of pan-Arabism, which spoke the new and alien European language of nationalism while pursuing the age-old goal of imperial aggrandizement. For thirteen hundred years Muslims had been conditioned to view themselves as distinct from, and superior to, all other subjects of the House of Islam, and they were not going to give up this privileged status just because they happened to speak the same imperial language (i.e., Arabic) as their non-Muslim neighbors.

There was, of course, a time when Arabism and Islam were fully synony­mous, but these days have long since ended. Islam has traveled far from its Arabian origins to become a thriving universal religion boasting a worldwide community of believers of whom Arabs are but a small minority. The last great Muslim empire may have been destroyed and the caliphate left vacant, but the Islamic imperial dream of world domination has remained very much alive in the hearts and minds of many Muslims, as evidenced by the proliferation (in the face of persistent repression by the authorities) of numerous religious groups and organizations throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world. So much so that the avowedly secularist Ba'th Party introduced religious provisions into the Syrian and Iraqi constitutions, notably that the head of state should be a Muslim. For their part the Ba'thist Syrian and Iraqi presidents, HafizAssad (1970-2000) and Saddam Hussein (1979-2003), went out of their way to brandish their religious credentials, among other things by inscribing the battle cry of Islam ''Allahu Akbar" on the Iraqi flag.

Neither have all Muslims reconciled themselves to the loss of Islam's colonies beyond the Middle East. At a 1980s meeting in Pakistan with representatives of the seven Afghan resistance parties, a group of American officers and diplomats were surprised to see a huge map on which large parts of what was then Soviet Central Asia and China's Xinjiang Province were labeled "Temporarily Occupied Muslim Territory." Chatting with English-speaking mujahidun after the meeting, an American diplomat asked about this labeling and was told, in perfect seriousness: "Yes, Inshallah (God willing), the region will soon be won back for Islam one day!”

This yearning for lost imperial dominions has by no means been confined to Asia. To this day many Arabs and Muslims unabashedly pine for the restoration of Spain and consider their 1492 expulsion from the country a grave historical injustice, as if they were Spain's rightful owners and not former colonial occupiers of a remote foreign land, thousands of miles from their ancestral homeland. Edward Said applauded Andalusia's colonialist legacy as "the ideal that should be moving our efforts now;' while Osama bin Laden noted "the tragedy of Andalusia" after the 9/11 attacks, and the perpetrators of the March 2004 Madrid bombings, in which hundreds of people were murdered, mentioned revenge for the loss of Spain as one of the atrocity's root causes.

Even countries that have never been under Islam's imperial rule have become legitimate targets for Islamic domination. As Europe's Muslim popu­lation grew rapidly in the late twentieth century through immigration, higher rates of child birth, and conversion (in France one in ten people is a Muslim and a reported fifty thousand Christians convert to Islam every year; in Brussels Muhammad has been the most popular name for male babies for some years; in Britain attendance at mosques is higher than in the Church of England), prophecies of Islam's eventual triumph over the West have become commonplace. Since the late 1980s various Islamist movements in France, notably the Union de Organizations Islamiques des France (UOIF), have begun to view the growing number of French Muslims as a sign that the country has become a part of the House of Islam. This message has been echoed by the creation of an extensive European network of mosques, schools, and Islamic charities by the Muslim Brothers over the past fifty years.

In Germany, which extended a warm welcome to the scores of Islamists fleeing persecution in their home countries, the Muslim Brothers have successfully established themselves, with ample Saudi financing, as the effec­tive voice of the three million-strong Muslim community. Since the early 1990s, in parallel to the European Union's growing integration, the Brothers have invested considerable efforts to integrate their various proxies across the continent via a string of pan-European organizations, such as the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe. In September 1996 they launched the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organizations (FEMYSO), with its headquarters in Brussels, the home of the EU's own headquarters, which quickly evolved into the de facto voice of Muslim youth in Europe. It is regularly consulted on issues pertaining to European Muslims and has devel­oped extensive contacts with such key international institutions as the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, and the United Nations, as well as numerous Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) at the European level.

In the autumn of 2003, the German public was shocked to learn of the racist and anti-Western messages inculcated in young Muslim children inside Saudi-funded mosques and schools when a journalist infiltrated the King Fahd Academy in Bonn and videotaped classroom teaching. Americans were similarly taken aback by a series of exposes of the supremacist teachings of Islamic schools across the United States, which, among other things, dispar­aged Christianity and Judaism and alienated children from Western society and culture. In fact, one needs to look no further than the Muslim Brothers' English-language intern et homepage, which notes the restoration of the caliph ate and the "mastering [of] the world with Islam" as the organization's primary goals.

Even such moderate Islamic scholars as Dr. Zaki Badawi, longtime director of the Islamic Cultural Center in London, a hub of interfaith dialogue, were not deterred from acknowledging the persistence of Islam's imperial dream, albeit in far more tempered language. "Islam endeavors to expand in Britain;' he said. "Islam is a universal religion. It aims to bring its message to all corners of the earth. It hopes that one day the whole of humanity will be one Muslim community.”

Dr. Yusuf Qaradawi, a spiritual guide of the Muslim Brothers and one of today's most influential Islamic thinkers, whose views are promulgated to millions of Muslims worldwide through the media and the internet, gave this sweeping vision theological grounding. "The Prophet Muhammad was asked: 'What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya?'" he wrote on December 2, 2002, citing a well-known hadith:

He answered: "The city of Hirqil [Emperor Hercalius, that is, Constantinople] will be conquered first" Romiyya is the city called today Rome, the capital of Italy. The city of Hirqil was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman [sultan] Muhammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the Conqueror, in 1453 [C.E.]. The other city, Romiyya, remains, and we hope and believe [that it too will be conquered]. This means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice-once from the South, from Andalusia, and a second time from the East, when it knocked several times on the door of Athens. (Translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, "Special Dispatch Series, No. 447; Dec. 6, 2002.) For a more recent example see also.

This goal need not necessarily be pursued by the sword; it can be achieved through demographic growth and steady conversion of the local populations by an army of preachers and teachers who will present Islam in all languages and in all dialects. But should peaceful means prove insufficient, physical force can readily be brought to bear.

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. Conflicts and wars among members of the same civilization have been far more common, and far more intense, than those between members of rival civilizations. Even in Islam, where Muhammad specifically and categorically forbade fighting among the believers, it took a mere twenty-four years after the Prophet's death for the head of the universal Islamic community, the caliph Uthman, to be murdered by political rivals. This opened the floodgates to incessant infighting within the House of Islam, which has not ceased to date and has exacted far more numerous casualties than conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Indeed, more often, empires across the civilizational divide have pragmatically cooperated with their counterparts. East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet; Rudyard Kipling, the quintessential champion of nineteenth-century European imperialism, famously rhapsodized. But in fact they have met and mingled continuously, from ancient times. Iran was an early link between civilizations, especially for the exchange of religious ideas. Alexander the Great dreamed of establishing a genuinely cosmopolitan world order, and tried to fuse the cultures of Greece and Iran.

This goal was largely achieved by early Islam, which amalgamated the cultural and scientific riches of these two nations with Arabian traditions to create its own distinct Islamic civilization. Even the millenarian confrontation between the worlds of Islam and Christianity has essentially been a "clash of imperialisms" rather than a "clash of civilizations." This was manifested in the crystallization of a symbiotic relationship between East and West, comprising extensive trade and pragmatic political cooperation. Even during the age of the crusades, the supposed height of civilizational antagonism, all Christian and Muslim rulers freely collaborated across the religious divide, often finding themselves aligned with members of the rival religion against their co­religionists. The legendary Saladin himself spent far more time fighting Muslim rivals than the infidel crusaders; while he was busy eradicating the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem he was closely aligned with the Byzantine Empire, the foremost representative of Christendom's claim to universalism.

This pattern of pragmatic cooperation reached its peak during the nine­teenth century, when the Ottoman Empire relied on Western support for imperial survival. It has also become a regular feature of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Middle Eastern politics. For all their vibrant anti­-Western rhetoric, Muslim and Arab rulers have always, in all their wars and intrigues against fellow Arabs and Muslims, sought the support and protec­tion of the "infidel" powers they so vilify, whenever they have deemed it in their interest to do so. Just as the Iranian shahs used the great European powers for personal self-enrichment, so Sharif Hussein fought alongside the British "infidels" against his Muslim suzerain to promote his imperial ambi­tions, and his great-grandson, King Hussein of Jordan, repeatedly relied on British, American, and Israeli support to prop up his throne.

Just as the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had built his reputation on standing up to "Western imperialism;' introduced large numbers of Soviet troops into Egypt when the War of Attrition he launched against Israel (1969-70) went sour, so Ayatollah Khomeini, the high priest of Islamic imperialism, bought weapons from even the "Great Satan," the United States, in his effort to subvert the Middle Eastern political order and to establish a universal "Empire of Allah." Saddam Hussein used Western support to survive his eight-year war against Iran (1980-88), while Osama bin Laden cooperated with the United States against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and sought asylum in Britain following his expulsion from Sudan in the mid-1990s. (The Times, London, Sept. 29, 2005.)

Political cooperation, however, has not meant accepting Western doctrines or values, as the events of September 11, 2001, amply demonstrate. Contrary to widespread assumptions, these attacks, and for that matter Arab and Muslim anti-Americanism, have little to do with US international behavior or its Middle Eastern policy. America's position as the pre-eminent world power blocks Arab and Islamic imperialist aspirations. As such, it is a natural target for aggression. Osama bin Laden and other Islamists's war is not against America per se, but is rather the most recent manifestation of the millenarian jihad for a universal Islamic empire (or umma). This is a vision by no means confined to an extremist fringe of Islam, as illustrated by the overwhelming support for the 9/11 attacks throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds. Something we showed extensively in our future world jihad study placed on-line during the second half of 2005.

In the historical imagination of many Muslims and Arabs, bin Laden repre­sents nothing short of the new incarnation of Saladin. The House of Islam's war for world mastery is a traditional, indeed venerable, quest that is far from over. Only when the political elites of the Middle East and the Muslim world reconcile themselves to the reality of state nationalism, forswear pan - Arab and pan-Islamic imperialist dreams, and make Islam a matter of private faith rather than a tool of political ambition will the inhabitants of these regions at last be able to look forward to a better future free of would-be Saladins.

Not so, argues a vast cohort of academics, journalists, writers, and retired diplomats. The attacks were a misguided, if not wholly inexplicable, response to America's arrogant and self-serving foreign policy by a fringe extremist group, whose violent interpretation of Islam has little to do with the actual Syrian Desert, where it had client kingdoms, to Yemen, where its Ethiopian allies had ruled until they were expelled by the Iranians.

  This pervasive penetration led a prominent scholar of Islam to insist that any examination of the rise of this religion and the sources of its spectacular success must depart from the impact of Byzantium and Iran on Arabia. One possible way to do so would be to view nascent Islam as a nativist movement, or in other words as a primitive reaction to alien domination of the same types as those which the Arab conquerors were themselves to provoke in North Africa and Iran, and which European colonists were later to provoke throughout the Third World  the object of the movement being the expulsion of the foreigners in question. As a seventh-century Muslim leader explained regarding the contemporary Islamic conquests: "Other men trampled us beneath their feet while we trampled no one. Then God sent a prophet from among us  and one of his promises was that we should conquer and overcome these lands."( Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, 1987, pp. 247, 249, 250.)  Crone uses the term "primitive" to denote nativist movements that lack political organization: "Either they are members of societies that never had much political organization, as is true of Muhammad's Arabia, or they are drawn from these strata of society that lack this organization, as is true of the villagers who provided the syncretic prophets of Iran. They invariably take a religious form."

This thesis is true as far as it goes, yet it overlooks the imperialist impetus behind those early Islamic conquests. Expelling occupiers from one's patri­mony is an act of self-liberation. Conquering foreign lands and subjugating their populations is pure imperialism. Neither North African Berbers fighting their Islamic conquerors nor twentieth-century Third World movements resisting European colonialism aspired to conquer the homeland of their imperial masters. Yet as the above quotation makes clear, this is precisely what Muhammad asked of his followers once he had fled from his hometown of Mecca (in 622) to the town of Medina to become a political and military leader rather than a private preacher: not to rid themselves of foreign occupation but to strive for a new universal order in which the whole of humanity would embrace Islam or live under its domination.

Styling himself the "Seal of the Prophets:' sent by God to pass his ultimate message to humankind, Muhammad expanded Islam from a purely Arab creed to a universal religion that knew no territorial or national boundaries. He also established the community of believers, or the umma, as the political framework for the practice of this religion in all territories it conquered; and he devised the concept of jihad, "exertion in the path of Allah:' as he called his god, as the primary vehicle for the spread of Islam. Muhammad introduced this concept shortly after his migration to Medina as a means to entice his local followers into raiding the Meccan caravans, developing and amplifying it with the expansion of his political ambitions until it became a rallying call for world domination. As he told his followers in his farewell address: "I was ordered to fight all men until they say 'There is no god but Allah:"

In doing so Muhammad at once tapped into the Middle East's millenarian legacy and ensured its perpetuation for many centuries to come. From the first Arab-Islamic empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the story of Islam has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of imperialist dreams. Politics during this lengthy period was characterized by a constant struggle for regional, if not world, mastery in which the dominant power sought to subdue, and preferably to eliminate, all potential challengers. Such imperialist ambitions often remained largely unsatisfied, for the determined pursuit of absolutism was matched both by the equally formidable forces of fragmentation and degeneration and by powerful external rivals. This wide gap between delusions of grandeur and the centrifugal forces of parochialism and local nationalisms gained rapid momentum during the last phases of the Ottoman Empire, culminating in its disastrous decision to enter World War I on the losing side, as well as in the creation of an imperialist dream that would survive the Ottoman era to haunt Islamic and Middle Eastern politics to the present day.

It is true that this pattern of historical development is not uniquely Middle Eastern or Islamic. Other parts of the world, Europe in particular, have had their share of imperial powers and imperialist expansion, while Christianity's universal vision is no less sweeping than that of Islam. The worlds of Christianity and Islam, however, have developed differently in one fundamental respect. The Christian faith won over an existing empire in an extremely slow and painful process and its universalism was originally conceived in purely spiritual terms that made a clear distinction between God and Caesar. By the time it was embraced by the Byzantine emperors as a tool for buttressing their imperial claims, three centuries after its foundation, Christianity had in place a countervailing ecclesiastical institution with an abiding authority over the wills and actions of all believers. The birth of Islam, by contrast, was inextricably linked with the creation of a world empire and its universalism was inherently imperialist. It did not distinguish between temporal and religious powers, which were combined in the person of Muhammad, who derived his authority directly from Allah and acted at one and the same time as head of the state and head of the church. This allowed the prophet to cloak his political ambitions with a religious aura and to channel Islam's energies into its instrument of aggressive expansion, there being no internal organism of equal force to counterbalance it.

Whereas Jesus is said in the ‘Gospels’ to have spoken of the Kingdom of God, Muhammad used God's name to build an earthly kingdom. He spent the last ten years of his life fighting to unify Arabia under his reign. Had it not been for his sudden death on June 8, 632, he would have most probably expanded his rule well beyond the penin­sula. Even so, within a decade of Muhammad's death a vast empire, stretching from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to northern Syria, had come into being under the banner of Islam in one of the most remarkable examples of empire ­building in world history. Long after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the caliphate in the wake of World War I, the link between religion, politics, and society remains very much alive in the Muslim and Arab worlds.

If Christendom was slower than Islam in marrying religious universalism with political imperialism, it was faster in shedding both notions. By the eighteenth century the West had lost its religious messianism. Apart from in the Third Reich, it had lost its imperial ambitions by the mid-twentieth century. Islam has retained its imperialist ambition to this day. The eminent Dutch historian Johannes Kramers (d. 1951) once commented that in medieval Islam there were never real states but only empires more or less extensive, and that the only political unity was the ideological but powerful concept of the House of Islam (Dar aI-Islam), the common "home­land" of all Muslims. (Hamilton A. R. Gibb, Studies on the Civilization of Islam, 1962, p. 22.)

This observation can also be applied to the post-World War I era, where the two contending doctrines of pan-Islamism and pan-­Arabism have sought to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire by advocating the substitution of a unified regional order for the contemporary Middle Eastern system based on territorial states. Yet while pan-Islamism views this development as a prelude to the creation of a Muslim-dominated world order, pan-Arabists content themselves with a more "modest" empire comprising the entire Middle East or most of it. (The associated ideology of Greater Syria, or Surya al-Kubra, for example, stresses the territorial and historical indivisibility of most of the Fertile Crescent.)

The empires of the European powers of old were by and large overseas entities that drew a clear dividing line between master and subject. The Islamic empires, by contrast, were land-based systems in which the distinction between the ruling and the ruled classes became increasingly blurred through extensive colonization and assimilation. With the demise of the European empires, there was a clear break with the past. Formerly subject peoples devel­oped their distinct brands of state nationalism, whether Indian, Pakistani, Nigerian, Argentinean, and so on. Conversely, the Arabic-speaking popula­tions of the Middle East were indoctrinated for most of the twentieth century to consider themselves members of "One Arab Nation" or a universal "Islamic umma" rather than patriots of their specific nation-states.

If a nation is a group of people sharing such attributes as common descent, language, culture, tradition, and history, then nationalism is the desire of such a group for self-determination in a specific territory that it considers to be its patrimony. The only common denominators among the widely diverse Arabic-speaking populations of the Middle East-the broad sharing of language and religion-are consequences of the early Islamic imperial epoch.

Never before presented in the form of an extensive overview, it is time to do just that. Initially this was part of our ‘History of Globalization” research project, but next, parallel to our research for Future World Jihad, we re-wrote and expanded on it.

 

For updates click homepage here