Download Resistance, Reform, and Revolution in the Islamic World

READING 2
Candice Goucher, Charles LeGuin, and Linda Walton, “Resistance,
Revolution, and New Global Order/Disorder,” in In the Balance: Themes in
Global History (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 869–72.
Abstract: This essay explores the ways that peoples of the Islamic world
responded to growing European influence. One response was to reform along
Western lines—to try to reconcile Islamic beliefs with notions of European
science, administration, and ideology. Another was to turn away from
Western ideas towards traditional Islamic principles about the necessity of
joining religion to the state. This essay looks at both responses, as well as the
lasting tensions and divisions they have created.
Resistance, Reform, and Revolution in the Islamic World
Two responses to nineteenth-century Western domination in the Islamic
world had been reform and revolution. By the early twentieth century, world
power had passed into European hands, and the last of the great Muslim
empires, the Ottoman, was no more. The shrinking of territory and influence
ushered in a period of readjustment and reconciliation between Western
science and technology, European imperialism, and Islamic cultural identity.
The impact of modernist reform was experienced from North Africa to
Central and Southeast Asia.
Decolonization and Arab Nationalism
Throughout West Asia and North Africa, the processes of decolonization led
to attacks on traditional polities supported by European powers. An army
coup in 1952 overthrew the Egyptian monarchy that had ruled Egypt since
formal independence from Britain in 1922. British influence had continued,
despite formal independence, because of the strategic importance of the Suez
Canal, which Britain still administered. Egyptian groups agitating for
removal of British authority over the Canal joined together with the only
grass roots political movement, the Wafd. Gamel Abdel Nasser, who came to
power in the 1952 coup and assumed the presidency in 1954, negotiated the
evacuation of the British. When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956,
Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt. They were forced to withdraw by
both the United States and the Soviet Union. Nasser, who had been proWestern, turned increasingly to the Soviet Union, which helped to finance the
Aswan Dam.
In 1958 Nasser engineered the union of Egypt and Syria in the United Arab
Republic, the beginning of his dream of Pan-Arabism. But within three years
this union disintegrated, and Syria declared its independence. The 1960s saw
the growth not only of Arab nationalism but also of Arab socialism under
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Nasser. The promotion of socialism lost the support of conservative Arab
states. In 1967 Egypt lost the Sinai Peninsula to Israel in the Six Day War, and
Egypt began to shift from reliance on the Soviet Union to reliance on the
United States.
The PLO and Israel
Arab resistance to the state of Israel, formed in the aftermath of World War II,
was organized and led by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO),
founded in 1964 and headed by Yasir Arafat (b. 1929) since 1968. The Arab
League, founded in Cairo in 1945, finally recognized the PLO as the sole
representative of the Palestinian Arabs in 1974, and since that time Arafat has
worked to gain international recognition for the PLO. In 1988 he proclaimed
an independent Palestinian state, but at the same time recognized Israel’s
right to exist.
Islamism
The Ikhwan al Muslimin (Muslim Brotherhood) was the leading Islamist
force in West Asia and North Africa. Sometimes referred to as
“fundamentalist,” the movement was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hasan alBanna (1906–1949). It disagreed with traditional orthodoxy about
modernization and called for a revivalist Islam as a means of resisting the
economic and political injustices of secular states. Between 1948 and 1981 the
Brotherhood was banned and suppressed by the successive colonial and
postindependence governments of Egypt. Syria, the Sudan, and Pakistan also
struggled with Islamic forces. By the late 1970s all Muslim societies came to
contain at least an Islamist wing that resisted the contamination of their
communities by Westernization.
Divisions in the Arab World
Divisions within the Arab world were more pronounced than ever after the
1970s. When Nasser died in 1971, he was replaced by a close associate, Anwar
Al-Sadat, who presided over the Yom Kippur War with Israel in 1973. The
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) placed an embargo
on shipments of oil to countries that supported Israel, producing a world
crisis because of the dependence of the West (and Japan) an oil. By the late
1970s Sadat began to work toward peace with Israel, signing the Camp David
accords in 1978 and finally a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Egypt was
expelled from the Arab League for this action in 1979, and two years later
Sadat was assassinated by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood for having
supported peace with Israel. In the 1980s, however, other Arab states such as
Jordan began to follow Egypt’s lead, and in 1989 Egypt was readmitted to the
Arab League.
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Iran and Iraq
Western influence had grown during the interwar years, beginning with the
expansion of German political and economic interests in Iran. The ruler of the
Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Shah, like the Young Turks in Turkey, saw Germany as
an important power that had no imperial designs. In 1941, after World War II
had begun, Britain and the Soviet Union demanded the expulsion of all
Germans from Iran. They were concerned about the flow of oil and the ability
of the Allies to provide war material to the Soviet Union, then under attack by
Germany. Reza Shah refused and on August 25, 1941, British and Soviet
forces invaded Iran. The shah abdicated and was succeeded by his son,
Muhammad Reza, who ruled Iran until 1979 when he was overthrown in a
popular Islamic revolution under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, a Shi’ite cleric who had been in exile in France since 1963.
Rejection of modernization based on Western models and resistance to the
continuation of monarchical rule was at the heart of the Islamic
fundamentalist movement that unseated the shah, a Westernized monarch
whose policies favored the Western model of the state and rejected the
Islamic ideal of the “community of true believers.”
In the same year as the Iranian revolution (1979), Saddam Hussein (b. 1937)
became head of Iraq. A member of the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party since 1957,
Hussein launched a far-reaching suppression of political opposition and put
down a Kurdish rebellion. He also led Iraq in a costly war against Iran in the
1980s and invaded the neighboring oil-rich kingdom of Kuwait in 1990. That
invasion led to the Persian Gulf War, which brought a coalition of forces led
by the United States to the region and eventually forced Iraq to withdraw
from Kuwait.
Religion and New States
A broad spectrum of resistance movements and their interaction with new
states formed by the overthrow of traditional monarchies characterized
postwar developments in West Asia and North Africa. Islamic
fundamentalism provided a key ideological source of resistance to
Westernized authoritarian or one-party states, as Muslims rejected the
Western notion of the social contract in favor of the Islamic belief in the
“community of true believers” as the model for the nation state. Religion and
state were to be a unified whole, and religious law was joined to state law. A
similar issue has dogged Israeli politics since the creation of the state of Israel
in 1948 as a homeland for the Jewish people: Should the religious laws of
Judaism also be the law of the state?
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