What Created Politica Islam?

What Created Political Islam?  by Pervez Hoodbhoy.

  Political Islam does not owe to one single reason. Certainly, there was a time when it did not exist. Looking back to the mid-20th century, one cannot see a single Muslim nationalist leader who was a fundamentalist. Turkey’s Kemal Atatürk, Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Pakistan’s Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Iran’s Mohammed Mosaddeq – all sought to organize their societies on the basis of secular values. They were part of the larger anticolonial nationalist current across the Third World. With Muslims and Arabs included, a nascent nationalism sought to control and use national resources for domestic beneft. The confict with the West’s greed was inevitable. The imperial interests of Britain, and later that of the United States, feared independent nationalism. Anyone willing to collaborate was preferred, even the ultraconservative Islamic regime of Saudi Arabia. In time, as the Cold War pressed in, nationalism became intolerable. In 1953, Mosaddeq of Iran was overthrown in a CIA coup, replaced by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Britain Why Couldn’t Pakistan Become an Islamic State? 301 targeted Abdel Nasser. Sukarno was replaced by Suharto after a bloody coup that left more than half a million dead. The failure of the nationalist regimes was not solely because of imperial machinations. Many secular rulers had inherited the mantle from their former colonial masters. Adopting shallow Westernized ways, they failed massively to fulfll the expectations of populations just released from the yoke of colonial rule. Corruption, cronyism, disconnection with the masses, denial of social justice, and extreme income inequalities led to unstable political systems in many countries. Faced with internal failure, manifest decline from a peak of greatness many centuries ago, aficted by cultural dislocation in the age of globalisation, and the defeat of nationalist forces, many Muslim societies started to turn inwards. Failure after failure left a vacuum that Islamic religious movements quickly flled. These spread from Algeria to Indonesia with the Jamaat-e-Islami (Indian subcontinent), Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen (Egypt), and Hamas (Gaza) being examples. But they achieved limited traction in an environment that preferred modernity to tradition, progress to history. It was the simultaneous coupling of internal failure and imperial interests that gave birth to political Islam. Had the U.S. not cultivated Islamists as allies against communism during the Cold War, history could have been very diferent. But things came to a head with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The American strategy for defeating the ‘Evil Empire’ required marshalling the forces of Islam from every part of the world.With General Zia-ul-Haq as America’s foremost ally, and Saudi Arabia as the principal source of funds, the CIA openly recruited Islamic holy warriors from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Algeria. Radical Islam went into overdrive as its superpower ally and mentor funnelled support to the mujahideen. It worked. In 1988, Soviet troops withdrew unconditionally, and the U.S.– Pakistan–Saudi–Egypt alliance emerged victorious. A chapter of history seemed complete, and hubris defned U.S. policy for another two decades. But the true costs of this victory did not take long to become known. Even in the mid-1990s – long before the 9/11 attack on the U.S. – it was clear that the victorious alliance had unwittingly created a genie suddenly beyond its control.