Of Danish Cartoons, Muslim Rage and the Bedouin State of Mind

The underlying causes in understanding the controversy surrounding Danish cartoons, or
Rushdie affair, are more complex than explaining the proximate cause, since Muslim rage is symptomatic of a terrible malady within Islam. It reflects the irreparable breakdown of the civilization’s centre that held together its constituent parts which at one time in history was coequal, if not briefly superior, to Christendom. The question why did Islam, once dynamic and creative, stall, retreat, and then collapse from the pressures brought about by an expansive and far more creative West, has fascinated for sometime historians and philosophers both Muslims and non-Muslims alike. A recent speculation is to be found in Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong ? Among Muslim thinkers there have been many of as diverse background as Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938) born in India, Malik Bennabi (1903-73) from Algeria, or Fatima Mernissi (b. 1940) from Morocco, who have reflected upon the causes of Islam’s decline. But there is none among Muslims who meditated about the apparent cycle of civilization’s rise and fall as did Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406). He wrote with a keen sense of Islam’s disintegration as Arab-Muslim power around the Mediterranean crumbled and Christendom in Europe, seen from the perspective of its advance in Spain at the expense of Arabs, began to edge ahead of Islam. In his book Al-Muqaddimah he proposed a pattern might be discerned from the study of history revealing the character of a people and the nature of society they construct or bring to ruin.

Islam before its decline began possessed plasticity to adapt what it borrowed from others – Persians, Hindus, Jews, Chinese, Greeks and Romans – and innovate as it improved upon the borrowings before transmitting them to others. By the time Napoleon made his entrance into the Middle East arriving in Egypt in 1798, or some decades earlier Robert Clive set in motion the conquest of India by defeating the massed army of Nawab Siraj-ud-Dowla of Bengal at the battle of Plassey in 1757, Islam’s plasticity had hardened and Muslims as a people were ready to be colonized and ruled by Europeans. Ibn Khaldun had seen the beginning phase of Islam’s cycle of decay, and he understood, as Yeats would under somewhat similar circumstances several centuries later, that the decline of civilization meant the caged beast would be let loosed unless held in check by the power of the rising new civilization. And, indeed, this is what occurred.

As Europe’s star rose in civilization’s firmament, European power expanded into Asia and Africa and kept the beast caged within Islam’s boundaries. But when Europe reached its peak as civilizing order in the early decade of the last century exporting its enlightenment values and new political arrangements based on ideas of nationalism and democracy, the cycle of decline set in. Europe emasculated itself in two world wars, and with the civilization’s ebb tide gaining momentum it began to retreat from Asia and Africa, more particularly from the lands of Islam, with unseemly haste. The post-colonial order Europe left behind among Muslims in the second-half of the twentieth century was mostly a pathetic caricature of European culture. Nowhere this caricature was more evident than in the post-Ottoman Turkey of Mustafa Kemal. Ottoman rulers of Islam once terrified Europeans, then when decay set their realm was dismissively referred to as the “sick man of Europe.” Following the defeat of 1918 a truncated country of Turks emerged on the Anatolian peninsula with a tiny grasp of Europe remaining in its fist, and it has displayed ever since a divided identity of being neither any more Ottoman nor sufficiently European to be recognized by other Muslims as a model of a reformed and democratic Muslim country.

Elsewhere the beast within Islam grew bolder and more invigorated as the artificial façade of a mongrel European order resting on decrepit foundations of pre-modern culture began to peel off. The effort to keep the beast in Islam caged, as I noted from Ibn Khaldun’s writings, is part of a long history of civil war among Muslims. This civil war remained mostly unknown and distant to non-Muslims ; occasionally Europeans, and then Americans, heard far away rumblings of battles that made little sense to them. In more recent times news about hanging of an elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan, or the tumultuous revolt of a people overthrowing a monarch, Mohammed Shah Pahlavi of Iran, or the public assassination of a military-president, Anwar Sadat of Egypt, raised concerns in the West and intellectuals or worldly-wise journalists got together to make sense of such events in London, Paris, and New York. But still these events and the civil war within Islam, despite infrequent attention, remained remote to the Western public. The West during these years was preoccupied with the Cold War against its Bolshevik-Communist nemesis in the Soviet Union. When reversals as in Vietnam or the shock of oil-price quadrupling resulting from the Middle East conflict occurred, these were
explained away as peripheral costs of the Cold War. Then the Cold War ended luckily without a nuclear Armageddon, and the West, particularly the United States with the restoration of Democrats in the White House, took holiday from history after the mighty Cold War exertions of the previous four decades. As Bill Clinton and his party-goers, like the French Bourbons of whom was said they never learned much nor forgot much, indulged themselves during the final decade of the last century in frivolous escapades, the beast within Islam smashed through its retaining walls and went on rampage beyond Islam’s domain. The attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 brought the long simmering Islam’s civil war into America’s heartland, and into Europe. This civil war whose primary victims have been Muslims is no longer merely a matter of local or regional interest for it is the first global war – some might call it the first post-modern war, whatever that means – of the 21st century.
The origin of the civil war in Islam is located in the conflicting claims over authority in the immediate years following the demise of the prophet in the year 632. Usurped power, and the demand placed on religion with acquiescing religious leaders in the service of power, shaped the characteristics of Islam as civilization. Bedouin disposition of raging against civilization was also instrumental in the shaping of Islam. The modern faces of this disposition, or the beast set loose, are those of Osama Bin Laden and his coterie of terrorists in the al Qaeda network ; the mob in the streets of the Muslim world serves the beast as retainers ; and Muslim intellectuals and religious leaders such as Tariq Ramadan and Sheikh al-Qaradawi serve the beast as apologists and propagandists.

Ibn Khaldun did not indulge in romanticism, unlike Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s depiction of
the savage as noble, when describing Bedouins and their culture as anti-civilization. Bedouins are crafty as they must be to survive in the hostile environment of the desert. In modern times the founding ruler of the Saudi dynasty, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud (1880-1953), displayed amply the craftiness of Bedouin chiefs to acquire and maintain power in Arabia that is constantly prone to challenge by competing Bedouin tribes. The intriguing aspect of modern-day Bedouins, exemplified by the House of Saud, has been their capacity to straddle the increasing tension between the modern world of science and democracy and their own disposition against modernity which defines contemporary civilization.
Osama Bin Laden being true to his Bedouin heritage has over-ridden this tension by seizing products of the modern world and turning them into his weapons against civilization.

But the al Qaeda chief could have been captured or slain, as the Ottoman rulers did with the marauding bands of Bedouins, if the rulers of the Muslim world were committed in destroying the beast that has brought ruin to Islam. The bewildering fact is, however, that so many of Muslim rulers and their people sympathize with the beast and share its rage against the modern world and its dominant powers, particularly the United States. In delving into this rage for explanation the curious fact surfaces – in retrospect not surprising – the extent to which Muslim sympathy for the beast draws support from the internal opposition within the West to secularliberal democracy and the West’s economic success in terms of capitalism.

This mood is infectious, addictive and, ultimately, provides a crutch for a people unable and unwilling to be creative and taking responsibility for their history instead of blaming others. In a long list of intellectuals and writers who fed this mood, even as the beast roamed and plotted among sympathetic crowds, there were two Palestinian-Americans, Edward Said (1935-2003) and Ismail Raji al-Faruqi (1921-1986) who proved to be specially gifted in packaging the politics of resentment.