'Between about 1945 and 1965, Ahmad argues, most Muslim majority societies, from Indonesia to Algeria, were extremely hospitable to leftist, secular ideas. Any number of Muslim scholars, as we have noted already, have held that Islam and socialism (or even Marxism) are mutually compatible, and have doubted the Islamic basis of private property. In the 1950’s, the most massive political organization in Iraq was the Communist Party. Between the mid-1960’s and late 1970’s by contrast, in the wake of the coup in Indonesia, the destruction of Arab armies in the Arab-Israeli war, and the first stirrings of Afghan jihad, leftism and secularity in the Islamic world were pitched into severe crisis, as the competing fundamentalisms of Iran and Saudi Arabia grew increasingly powerful.
Nasserism, once the dominant secular-nationalist, authoritarian-socialist current in the Arab world, was effectively destroyed by the Western-backed 1967 Israeli victory over Egypt. The Islamist that arose in the wake of that defeat arraigned Nasser for his failure to lead the Arab forces to victory over Israel. The political balance within the Arab world shifted accordingly, away from a discredited Nasserism to the monarchical, pro-Western Wahhabi fundamentalists of Saudi Arabia. What a secular politics could apparently not accomplish, a fanatically religious one would achieve instead.
The West had thus helped to lay down the conditions that would unleash future assaults on its own power. After the Israeli massacres in Jordan in 1971, Islamist ideology amongst the Palestinians went from strength to strength. By 1990, with the advent of an Islamist state in Afghanistan under US tutelage, the resurgence of radical Islam was well under way. The world was now witness to a rabid form of religious fundamentalism – one which either made its piece with and was nurtured by the imperial West, as in Saudi Arabia, or continued the anti-imperialist struggle while establishing (or seeking to establish) theocratic, repressive, xenophobic, brutally patriarchal regimes at home. It is this militancy in which commentators like Martin Amis and many others in the West can see nothing but the actions of psychopaths, in woeful or wilful ignorance of what Ahmad calls the ‘malignant contexts within which all sorts of cancerous growths become possible.’ ‘The secular world’, he comments, ‘has to have enough justice in it for one not to have to constantly invoke God’s justice against the injustices of the profane.’ The solution to religious terror is secular justice.
None of this is to claim that there would be no fanatical Islamists without Western imperialism. There would indeed be, just as there would doubtless be fanatical Christian evangelicals. It is rather that, without the vast concentration camp known as the Gaza strip, it is not at all out of question that the Twin Towers would still be standing. Those who resent the ascription of even this much rationality to an Islamic radicalism which they prefer to see simply as psychotic, should have a word with those in the British secret service whose task it was some years ago to monitor the Irish Republican Army. Those professional antiterrorists knew well enough not to swallow a lot of cretinous tabloid hysteria about terrorists as monsters and mad beasts. They were well aware that the IRA’s behaviour, however sometimes murderous, was in a narrow sense of the word rational, and that, without acknowledging this fact, they would be unlikely to defeat them. The CIA, with its record of kidnapping, torturing, and murdering, its support for death squads and suborning of democracy, can certainly be said to qualify as a terrorist organization; yet this does not mean that its agents are irrational. Far from it. The other side of pathologizing one’s enemy is exculpating oneself. As long as we see faith as the polar opposite of reason, we shall continue to commit these errors.’
Whatever one thinks of Eagleton's Marxist analysis here, that last sentence is telling. It confirms for me what what David Hume once said about reason being 'the slave of the passions'. And it shows an awareness on Eagleton's part of something that others don't seem to have acknowledged, namely, that the world (apart from Western Europe) doesn't seem to be getting any more secular.
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