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US teeters on explosive line in the
sand
By Yevgeny Bendersky
Modern-day maps of the Middle
East, North Africa and South Asia reflect a
pattern and a principle ingrained in the foreign
policies of major European, and now American,
powers - the existence of numerous sovereign
Muslim countries. While wars and invasions against
Muslim states by outside powers have taken place
in the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century,
none of such major military and political moves in
the last several decades sought to redraw
boundaries or radically change the 
modern map of the Islamic
world.
Today's Muslim states - countries
where Islam is a majority religion adhered to by
the overwhelming percentage of the population -
emerged on the ruins of the last major Muslim
power - Ottoman Turkey, and as a result of the
dissolution of British India. After the end of
World War I and, later on, in 1947, young
nation-states emerged in place of the
centuries-old established order and principles.
For many decades, Western European powers, the
United States and the Soviet Union all promoted
the emergence of these states onto the world
arena, and supported them based on their own
political, military or economic interests.
Assistance to these states as separate political
units drove the diverse foreign policies of the
major powers after both world wars, during the
Cold War, and in the current unipolar environment.
Muslim states: Past and present
Taking a look at the modern map of the Islamic
world reveals a rather strange picture. In North
Africa, and the Middle East, actual boundaries of
states hardly correspond to the historical,
cultural and ethnic make-ups of these regions. The
prevalence of straight lines on the map that cut
the Sahara or Arabian Desert into independent
states is just that - lines in the sand. They
divide tribes, clans, families and their
corresponding histories and aspirations in an
arbitrary manner.
In
some cases, all that is
required to cross from one North African or Arabian
state to the next is to walk over a sand dune.
In a region where natural boundaries such as mountains,
rivers, valleys or seas are largely absent,
the new "borders" came to represent independent
Libya, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan. People
living on the border areas of these states are
hardly aware of the fact that they live across another
country. Likewise, in South Asia, Pakistan and
India are divided by hastily designed borders
that have been the source of conflict between
these two states for the past five decades.
The powers that divided the Islamic world
into modern states sought to preserve their own
influence. British, French and Italian colonial
holdings had to be clearly defined in the newly
acquired territories of the Middle East, Africa
and South Asia. The easiest way to do this was to
create clearly defined boundaries on the world
map. The results are straight lines running across
the deserts of Arabia and the Sahara. These lines,
however, did not - and still do not - reflect the
realities on the ground, where people were used to
moving around with ease, unobstructed by any
border checkpoints and patrols.
The Muslim
concept of ummah, or one's belonging to the
worldwide Islamic community, is one of the chief
principles of Islam. According to the Koran, every
practicing Muslim's loyalty should be to his
religion first, and to any other state or
political entity second. Furthermore, a true
believer of Islam should not follow the rules and
customs of other governments, but instead must
obey Islamic principles, as millions of fellow
Muslims do every day.
Thus the actual
reading of certain Islamic teachings would
indicate that Muslims living across the globe
belong to the worldwide Islamic "nation" and not
to any particular state on the map. Today's
headlines are full of statements by some Muslim
groups or individuals all over the world who
refuse to obey the secular laws of various
countries, preferring instead to establish Islamic
rule in those very states. Many countries today
grapple with this principle, and the state
responses to such Islamic claims vary
considerably.
Until the end
of World War I, most Islamic nations were part
of great Muslim empires. After the demise of the
Mongol and Persian empires, the last such
empire, Ottoman Turkey, comprised what are now nearly 12
independent states of the Middle East and North
Africa. It was once a regional hegemon and a
superpower, threatening both Europe and Russia.
The Ottoman Empire held sway over Islam by
controlling two of the religion's holiest cities -
Mecca and Medina - in present-day Saudi Arabia.
While internally weak, and
under constant attacks from within and without
starting with the dawn of the 18th century, the
Ottoman Empire represented strength and hope to
millions of Muslims around the world. As World War
I drew to a close and the dissolution of this
once-great power was imminent, a powerful movement
was born in British India, home to the majority of
the world's Muslims at that time. The movement,
called the Khilafat - after the Islamic notion
that a Muslim state unifying all the world's
Muslims should exist, governed by a
religious-political head, the khalif
, or caliph - sought to preserve Turkey's
role as the leader of the Islamic world.
While many Muslims living under the
decaying Ottoman rule did not support such a
movement, and fought against it alongside European
powers, the concept itself was a powerful force to
millions of Muslims in British India. It
eventually died once Turkey became a republic and
embarked on the road to modernization in the early
1920s. Nonetheless, Western foreign policies since
that time have been directed at preserving the
political disunity of the Muslim world, fostering
various political developments with the eventual
aim of avoiding the resurgence of a powerful
Islamic state that would unify hundreds of
millions of Muslims into one political, economic
and military entity.
That process was
greatly assisted by the start of the Cold War and
the US-Soviet rivalry. As the newly created
Islamic states ended their domination by the
British, French and Italian colonial powers in the
1950s, they actively sought to protect their newly
acquired independence from the repeat of colonial
encroachment. Both the West and the Soviet Union
were happy to oblige their new clients, supporting
each one independently from the other. Pan-Arab
nationalism of the 1950s and 1960s was a perfect
example of such a policy, as the USSR supported
Egypt's nationalism, while the West invested
resources to support the states of the Arabian
Peninsula.
Elsewhere, in North
Africa, such states as Morocco and Algeria were seen as a
counterweight to strong claims by Egypt for the
leadership of the Arab world. Supporting each
state separately, giving it incentives to act
independently of others in the region, made it
possible for the Western and Soviet world to deal
with each Muslim state on its own. Pan-Arab
national aims replaced religious Islam as a
rallying cry for unity - a cry that was followed
by various indigenous attempts to modernize the
Muslim world and bring it closer to Western
economic and political standards.
While
the Soviet Union actively supported secular
nationalistic Egypt, Syria and Libya, the United
States supported secular Iran and Pakistan, as
well as Israel and monarchic Arabian kingdoms.
Conflicting political and economic programs by the
Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian
states replaced relative Muslim unity and cohesion
that might have existed in the 19th and early 20th
centuries. Moreover, these countries were drawn
into economic interdependence with the West
through the exploration and trade of oil, the
chief source of fuel for the rapidly growing
Western and Asian economies.
Modern
challenges to the West
The Iranian
revolution of 1979 delivered the first shock to
the established principles of splitting the Muslim
world into separate political entities. While the
coming to power of a theocratic government was not
by itself shocking - most oil-producing states of
the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula were
monarchic theocracies supported by the Western
world - the message and policies of the new
Iranian government were alarming. The new rulers
of Tehran sought to export their religious
revolution to other Muslim countries and to
overthrow the regimes that were either leaning
toward, or were supported by, the secular,
non-religious US, Soviet Union and Western Europe.
Their motives met with relative success
with the Iranian-style revolution in Sudan in the
early 1980s, and the creation of the Lebanese
Hezbollah movement. In effect, the Iranian
theocratic government assumed the leadership of
the movement to unify the Islamic world, hoping to
rid it of any non-Islamic influence, or at least
to unify Shi'ite Muslims living in the Persian
Gulf region and the Middle East. This has been Iran's
consistent policy and while it has varied its
statements and policies since 1979, the overall
message is the same. What makes Iran more powerful
in this scenario is the fact that it is one of the
world's largest oil producers, and its aims are
directed at the main oil-producing region of the
world that is of immense strategic and economic
importance to practically every industrialized
country.
The second challenge to the
non-Islamic governments of the West was Iraq's
invasion of Kuwait in 1990. This time, the US and
its worldwide coalition responded with a powerful
military operation against the Iraqi regime that
became known as the Gulf War. Iraq's aims at that
time were twofold - to achieve military hegemony
in the Persian Gulf and to conquer a major
oil-producing state in the region. Throughout the
Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Saddam Hussein, Iraq's
leader, espoused claims to the leadership of the
Arab world, acting as the protector of Arab Sunni
countries against a recalcitrant Iranian Shi'ite
regime.
At that time,
many Muslim states supported Iraq as the bulwark
against Iran. Once Iraq invaded Kuwait, the regional
powers and the West saw the possible emergence of Iraq
as a major power in control of the
world's oil supplies. Prior to the US-led military
action, the Iraqi regime stood within striking
distance of Saudi Arabia and its massive oilfields,
a territory that would not have been able
to protect itself adequately without outside
assistance. A military attack on Iraqi forces became
a necessary option for Western interests to
prevent the emergence of a powerful Muslim state
with the capacity to act as a possible unifying
force in the Muslim world because of its growing military and
economic strength.
The third challenge
came in the face of al-Qaeda, a powerful worldwide
militant organization that calls for the unity of
the ummah against the US and the West; the
overthrow of secular, military, political or
monarchic regimes associated with the West; and
the establishment of an Islamic khilafat, or
caliphate. Al-Qaeda has been linked to various
Muslim militant groups operating all around the
world with similar goals.
Recently, it has
been suspected of cooperating with the
Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant organization, as
well as other non-Arab groups and movements. This
particular cooperation is significant because it
marks the first known operational linkage across
religious and ethnic lines - al-Qaeda is an
ultra-conservative movement adhering to the Sunni
branch of Islam, while Hezbollah and Iran follow
Shi'ite Islamic teachings. The worldwide
cooperation of this network marks a serious
development that is already unsettling the entire
Muslim world. While al-Qaeda has been temporarily
crippled by the US-led assault after the September
11, 2001, terrorist attacks, there is no indication that
it is letting up its efforts in the Middle East,
Southeast Asia or even Europe - in fact, its
popularity is growing among the world's Muslims.
The Western response to Iranian, Iraqi and
al-Qaeda threats include the support and
cooperation with several key Muslim states, such
as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. All
of them receive varying degrees of military,
logistical, economic and political support.
After the defeat of the Iraqi regime in 2003,
the US made public its desire to contain Iran and
to destroy al-Qaeda. The harder that both al-Qaeda
and Iran try to create a Muslim movement capable
of challenging the outside world, the harder the
US and its partners push back in preserving and
supporting regimes as different from each other as
the military dictatorship in Pakistan, the Saudi
monarchy or the quasi-military government of
Egypt.
From a
geopolitical standpoint, it is easier to deal with a
relatively small state than with a large and powerful
country. When Egypt sought to create the United Arab
Republic in the 1960s by attempting to unify
Egypt, Syria, Yemen and potentially other states in
the Middle East, the US supported
Israel's successful military moves and counter-moves that
eventually ended the Egyptian initiative. The
US invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003
did not seek to change these countries radically
- rather, they sought to install friendly governments within the
existing borders.
The US current
administration's drive to spread democracy in the
Middle East does not envisage the melting away of
boundaries and decades-long political sovereignty
- rather, Washington seeks to preserve the
existing states as they are by bringing democratically
oriented governments to power. This
policy is driven by a premise that democratic
states would not pose a danger to one another,
would respect one another's sovereignty within the
existing borders and would not easily launch war
on their neighbors for a religious, political or
ethnic purpose. The collection of pacific but
independent Muslim states would allow for
unobstructed access to the world's oil resources
and would preclude the emergence of a regional
hegemon capable of upsetting the existing balance
of power.
That is
precisely what Iran and al-Qaeda want to avoid.
The melting away of artificial Middle
Eastern and North African boundaries that were
imposed by now-defunct governments of Western Europe
would create a massive state with the
majority-Muslim population in the hundreds of millions and in control
of the crucial oil and natural-gas reserves. Such
an outcome would in effect create another
superpower in the world arena. There are
indications that Muslim states are seeking to move
closer to such a reality.
The creation
of the Organization of the Petroleum
Exporting Countries, a supranational organization
comprising major oil exporters from North Africa, the
Middle East and the Persian Gulf, was a major
development in the Muslim world. It has already
demonstrated its power by causing an oil crisis in
the US in the 1970s, and it could still be a
powerful force affecting world governments that
grow more dependent on oil imports. The
Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) is
another powerful organization that unifies Muslim
states around the world.
The OIC
has a major influence in world affairs,
since even Russia is seriously contemplating joining
it to foster greater religious freedom for
its millions of Muslim citizens. Other
organizations exist that seek to speak with a
unified Arabic, North African or Islamic voice.
While at present these organizations are not
powerful or unified enough to stop US political
and military developments, their clout is steadily
increasing as the powers of the European Union and
China - both entities with a heavy reliance on oil
- grows on the world arena.
Conclusion
Given the
historical progression that at one time saw
powerful Islamic states play a major role in world
developments, followed by their internal
dissolution, later subjugation and colonization by
outside powers, and the eventual emergence as many
distinct entities with varying degrees of
religious, political and military governance,
today's Islamic world presents a fragmented
picture within artificial political boundaries. If
the world's current dependence on oil continues to
grow - as recent reports about China's oil
consumption seem to indicate - many Muslim states
will assume greater clout in world affairs, making
it harder to treat each of them separately as
distinct "identities" vis-a-vis other states.
The latest developments
in the "war on terrorism" point to
unifying movements in the Islamic world, either with
Iran's help or under the banner of al-Qaeda and its
allies - a more coordinated attack
on Western principles and Western interests in the
Muslim world that cut across the religious and
ethnic divides. While US efforts in Iraq have
faltered since 2003, this Sunday's Iraqi election after a relatively
successful election in Afghanistan will prove to
be one of the turning points in the development of
the Islamic world, which will either accept and
foster the Western model and emerge as a
collection of distinct and friendly states, or
will finally break under the pressure of Iran and
al-Qaeda and begin to emerge as a unified
religious, political and military entity,
heralding a new chapter in world history.
Published with permission of the Power and Interest News
Report, an analysis-based
publication that seeks to provide insight into
various conflicts, regions and points of interest
around the globe. All comments should be directed
to content@pinr.com. |
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