I didn't know which thread to put this in. But it seemed to be worth posting. It's from Terry Eagleton's 'Reason, Faith and Revolution'. It's an analysis that pre-dates the rise of ISIS but neatly summarises the backdrop to recent events. I'll post it in two parts:
'It is striking how avatars of liberal Enlightenment like Hitchens, Dawkins, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan have much less to say about the evils of global capitalism as opposed to the evils of radical Islam. Indeed, most of them hardly mention the word 'capitalism' at all, however they may protest from time to time against this or that excess of it. One has not noticed all that many of them speaking out against, say, the appalling American-backed regimes in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.
It is a familiar fact (though not, apparently, all that familiar to the US media) that, thirty years to the day before the attack on the Twin Towers, the United States government violently overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile, installing in its place an odious puppet autocrat who went on to massacre far more people than died in the World Trade Center. The United States also supported for many years, a regime in Indonesia that probably exterminated more people than Saddam Hussein did. Those who wrap themselves in the Stars and Stripes as a protest against Islamist atrocities should perhaps keep those facts steadily in mind.
There is good reason to believe that the outrageous violence of Islamic terrorism is among other causes a reaction to this imperialist history. As Ajiz Ahmad has argued, extreme Islamists are those in whose overheated puritanical imaginations the West is nothing but a sink of corruption and debauchery, and who, having migrated into what they see as a hostile Western environment, 'imagine for themselves a permanent, shared past that never was.' It is a delusion they share with many other emigrant communities, notably the American Irish.
Even so, Ahmad goes on to point out, all these potential recruits to Al-Qaeda stem from countries that have long, discreditable histories of European domination or colonial occupation. In the Arab world, these dissidents have seen their rulers ‘mortgaging their national resources to the West; squandering their rentier wealth on luxury for themselves and their ilk; and building armies that may fight each other but never the invader and the occupier.’
Finding no credible armies to join themselves, they proceed to fashion one of their own: secret, stateless, devoted to the propaganda of the deed. ‘They have seen so many countless civilians getting killed by the Americans and the Israeli, Ahmad adds, ‘that they do not deem their own killing of civilians as terrorism, or even comparable to what their own people have suffered. If anything, they would consider themselves counter-terrorists.’
Those who might suspect such statements of Islamist propaganda should note that their author compares the violence of such groups to that of revolutionary terrorists in tsarist Russia, while likening the ‘horrendously punitive and arcane regime’ of the Taliban to Cambodia’s Pol Pot. With an equipoise rare in such debates, however, Ahmad also reminds us that ‘Taliban rule was hideous but it was the only time in post-communist Afghanistan where no women were raped by the ruling elite, no rulers took bribes, no poppy was grown or heroin manufactured.’ The relevant contrast is with the previous, US armed rule of the warlord mujahideen. If the Taliban turned the whole of the country into one vast prison for women, in conditions of mass starvation and destitution, the reign of the mujahideen meant vast orgies of rape, cesspools of corruption, and mutual annihilation.
In the past half-century or so, Ahmad points out, the great majority of politically active Islamists have begun as pro-Western, and have then been driven into the anti-Western camp largely by the aggressiveness of Western policies. Among the Shia, the Khomenist doctrine that civil government should fall under the sway of religion, and that armed insurrection was a legitimate means for achieving this end, was a stunning innovation in an Islamic tradition that had for the most part viewed political change in electoral terms. Those who sought to impose Islam through the gun constituted a very small minority. The Islamic faith forbids both suicide and the killing of civilians.
What brought this violent doctrine to birth in Ahmad’s view was a combination of factors. There was the suppression of the leftist and secular anti-imperialist forces in Iran by the CIA-sponsored coup of 1953, which restored the monarchy, eliminated the communists and social democrats, and created a bloodthirsty internal security force. The extreme autocracy of the Shah’s regime, along with its intimate ties to the United States, were later to trigger a radical religious backlash in the shape of the Islamist revolution of 1978. With the assistance of the CIA, Iran had travelled from a nation which included secular leftists and liberal democrats, to a hard line Islamic state.
In Indonesia, a nation with the largest Muslim population in the world but also one with the largest nongoverning Communist Party as well, the secularist anticolonial government of Sukarno was overthrown in 1965 by a US supported coup, involving the single biggest bloodbath of communists in post-Second World War history, half a million or more dead, and the installation of the Suharto dictatorship. In Afghanistan, it was the United States which fostered and unleashed Islamic jihad against both the native communists and the Soviets, thus laying the basis for the warlord Islamist government of the mujahideen. In Algeria, a state threatened by a democratically elected Islamist party poised to form a government called off the electoral process to loud applause from the United States and Europe. One outcome of this suppression was to lend power to the elbow of the jihadist elements within the Islamist movement. In Egypt, the US backed regime of Mubarak repressed the parliamentary party of the Muslim Brotherhood, jailed its leaders, and rigged elections. In the subjugated Palestinian territories, the mass of the populated voted overwhelmingly for Hamas, but the election of this legitimate government triggered a Western economic stranglehold which continues to squeeze the lifeblood out of the Palestinian people.
None of this, in Ahmad’s opinion or my own, provides the slightest legitimation for the use of terror. Nor is it to suggest that the West is responsible for suicide bombing. Suicide bombers are responsible for suicide bombing. It is rather to point out that the West has had an important hand in creating the conditions in which such crimes seem worth committing. Ahmad is surely right to claim that it is a ‘combination of domestic, anti-left and mostly autocratic right-wing (Muslim) regimes on the one hand and, on the other, determined imperialist-Zionist policies (by the West) which is creating the objective conditions within which ‘moderate’, democratic, Islam is itself giving way, in so many places, to the extremist, millenarian variety.’
It was the West which helped radical Islam to flourish by recruiting it as a force against so-called communism – a label used to describe any country which dared to espouse economic nationalism against Western corporate capitalism. It was the West, too, which by ensuring the overthrow of those secular governments in the Muslim world that either tolerated communists or refused to align with the West (Sukarno in Indonesia, Nasser in Egypt), or which preached even a mild form of economic nationalism (Mossdegh in Iran), narrowed the space for secular politics in such societies and thus assisted the emergence of Islamist ideology.
Moreover, when Islamism grew into a powerful tendency in many of these countries, the West handed them ‘anti-imperialist’ credentials on a plate by sponsoring autocratic leaders like Mubarak and the dictatorial Saudi dynasty against them, while organizing holy war against Soviet rule in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Israel continued to flout international law in its occupation of Palestine. Islamist insurrectionists are for the most part rabidly bigoted anti-Semites, thoroughly ignorant of their own religious faith, monstrously repressive and medievalist, and ready to murder without the faintest qualm. All the same, it is hardly surprising that, as Ahmad remarks, ‘Islamicists just don’t believe that the Western law…will ever give them justice.’ When Dickens Artful Dodger, dragged into the dock at the Old Bailey, loudly protests that ‘this aint the shop for justice’, he is engaging in a self-pitying piece of grandstanding. He is also, as the novel perceives, perfectly correct.
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