Brian M Downing
A review essay of Efraim Karsh’s Islamic Imperialism: A History. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006). Pp. x + 276; $30.00 (cloth).
I long for the vanished gardens of Cordoba. However, before the gardens must come the fighting.
Prince Feisal, in Lawrence of Arabia
How are we to understand Islamic politics today, especially the acts of terrorism of the last decade or so? Efraim Karsh, an Israeli professor at the University of London and former IDF officer, begins his answer by sketching two oft-heard answers. The first says it is Islam’s response to frustration from decline vis-à-vis the West; the second a response to the West’s, mainly America’s, policies in the region. Karsh dismisses them (regrettably, after only brief exposition) and argues that the key is a powerful cultural current in Islamic thought, present at its creation, that venerates military expansion and empire building.
A thesis so lacking in concern for today’s political sensitivities must be carefully advanced, for it will surely come up against forces in ways more fearsome and less merciful than those of Muhammad and Charlemagne. But Karsh is no dervish waving his sword about in orgiastic frenzy.
Islam began in the seventh century in the Arabian Peninsula, not far from the homelands of the great empires of Antiquity such as Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia, where ancient myths were part of local traditions and left impressions on new thought. Muhammad began his movement as a prophet appalled by the wickedness of pagan Mecca. His principal methods of spreading the faith were not inspiring parables or kind acts but armed warriors. The Prophet and his bands won many victories the shining aftermath of which endowed his creed with fearsome attraction. Victory also transformed his writings from the screeds of an angry prophet – a common enough sight in the region – into a compelling monotheism proclaiming itself the one true religion to which all of the world must bow.
Religious messianism was fused at its very inception with political-military might: Arabian warrior bands long accustomed to caravan raiding and tribal warfare. Islam’s universal nature made it incumbent upon them to conquer nearby pagan domains. The Prophet’s armies swiftly conquered adjacent tribes and towns then an immense empire from the Atlantic to Central Asia, bringing prestige and booty to the Prophet’s kith and kin. This fusion of religious messianism and political imperialism made for an especially aggressive and persistent form of imperialism.
Many readers will quickly rise to point out that many other religions, including Christianity, have had less than presentable early forms, which spread the faith to the unwilling through fire and sword and availed themselves of a little plunder along the way. Large portions of the Old Testament boast of the conquest of Canaan and extirpation of its inhabitants. And the darker side of Christian warfare has become a dominant discourse of sorts. One needn’t adhere to post-modernism to realize that the origins of many venerated institutions often reveal disagreement with the sentimental stories around them. But readers should not close Karsh’s book; the author is well prepared for this objection.
Karsh’s comparisons to Christendom are insightful though brief, and so I take the liberty of interpolation, which I hope will be used well. The West indeed had a similar fusion of religious messianism and political imperialism, but not for several centuries after the birth of Christianity. The fusion was not present at its inception, as with Islam. It was not until the eighth century, as Islam was crossing the Pyrenees, that the Church embraced Frankish kings in order to defend the realm, but without losing the power to counter temporal power, as many emperors and princes later learned. Over the many centuries, the blood of Christian soldiers was shed profusely, staining almost every corner of the world. In so doing, religious messianism and political imperialism expended themselves: the former after the many dynastic wars in the early modern period and the outset of the Enlightenment, the latter after numerous imperial quests leading to World War One. The zeal for expansion in the West was largely gone by the twentieth century, not so in Islam.
During Muhammad’s lifetime (570-632) and in the century after his death, Islam spread – erupted would be a better word – from the Arabian Peninsula and conquered a great empire. The warriors, Karsh insists, were not interested in spreading the faith. They didn’t even try. Conversions came only well after conquest and were driven from below not imposed from above, as the vanquished sought to avoid harsh taxation levied on non-believers. Conquest was driven by quest for booty, which was never far from the minds of Arabian tribesmen and which was considerably elevated in their minds once warfare within the brethren was prohibited.
Owing to its mainly warrior upper class, reliance on conquered Byzantine and Persian governmental structures, and inevitable elite conflicts, the empire, or caliphate, was never especially stable. Not long after the Prophet’s death it became necessary to speak of empires, at least three major ones and many small transient ones, stretching from Northwest Africa to Central Asia. Dynasties fought each other, parleyed with Christian powers, and fought each other more – each proclaiming its legitimate right to the empire. Karsh sees the Crusades in this context: not in simple terms of war between Islam and Christendom, but as a war within Islam as well. Islamic dynasts in Africa encouraged Christian armies to retake the Holy Land so as to weaken eastern rivals. The pattern continued. Throughout the Middle Ages and well into the nineteenth century, Islamic rulers fought to maintain and expand their imperial spheres at the expense of the others.
Internally, Arab and Turkoman dynasts were preoccupied well into modern times by revolts of oppressed peoples, secessions in outlying lands, and recurrent religious schisms, all of which made the idea of empire a veritable creed. The dream of restored vigor after decades of illness led the Ottoman Sick Man to offer his palsied support to younger and healthier European empires in the First World War. But the war was a disaster and the Sick Man passed away, intestate. The region became an expanse of former tribute-bearing regions with few political structures or continuities – save for the imperial vision. Newly created countries were brought into a world of nation-states for which they were ill prepared. Various leaders, most notably the leaders of the Hashemite tribe and Egypt’s Nasser, invoked the greatness of the imperial past as they sought to rally the masses and forge international ties among the brethren, but to no avail.
More recently, after passing from caliphs and sultans to presidents and generals with little lasting effect, the mantle of imperial hope has been eagerly picked up by populist groups. An important early one is the Muslim Brotherhood, which began in 1920s Egypt and has grown into a strong popular movement in the Middle East (Hamas is a branch) and among the Islamic populations in Europe. Of particular note, al Qaeda has adopted the imperial ideology, to rid the region of foreign influences, especially American ones, and restore greatness to the Islamic peoples.
Karsh’s tour of imperial ideology through fifteen centuries obviously contains far more than can be conveyed in a summary. Even after careful reading of his book, hard questions arise. He has ably traced a cultural current from Muhammad’s day to our own, but its breadth and depth at any time, especially our own, remain unclear. There may be considerable variation in its intensity within elites, who form the dramatis personae of Islamic Imperialism, and the Islamic masses, who are mentioned only in passing as victims of conquest, heavy taxation, and brutal oppression. The blood-caked pages of the past reveal more than a few populaces who, after years of costly and fruitless quests for glory, have become disillusioned with the heroic ideologies of opulent upper classes.
A related matter is the notable absence of substantive change in imperial ideology over an enormous stretch of time during which, say, Christian thought on war and American views on isolationism changed significantly. Islamic imperialism appears to have been uniformly embraced by various rulers and groups, in war and peace, victory and defeat, prosperity and dearth, ascendancy and decline; it underwent Hellenistic, Persian, and Indian influences and the searching thought of ibn Khaldun; yet it carried on essentially unchanged – a likely curiosity to students of any region’s intellectual history.
Other cultural currents, equally hostile to the West, may be more important than the imperial dream in Islamic political culture today. Among them: the influx of foreign cultural forms deemed immoral and corrosive; decadent and faithless leaders propped up by outside forces; senses of decline vis-à-vis the West and attendant anger; and the presence of US troops. The manifestoes and testaments of Islamist terrorists point to the presence of US troops in the Middle East as the most important reason for their actions. Iraqi insurgents profess the same. Reactions to the cartoons in Danish newspapers and the pope’s inopportune speech likely stem less from imperial ideology than from a sense of decline and inferiority. Karsh offers little guidance as to how the dream of empire fits in here.
Karsh presents us with a “usable past,” an historical narrative that seeks to nudge us toward certain political beliefs and agendas – a venerable though shopworn tradition in the academy. But engaged scholars are not always reliable ones and they are even less so in time of war when passions and uncertainties cloud judgment. His argument has many affinities with neoconservative exhortations that we are presently in World War Three. He is calling on the world, mainly the American public, to see the danger of imperialist Islam. We should, he feels, recognize our duty and march as to war. Hence his narrative is enlivened with Burtonesque vignettes of wily despots, sybaritic courts, exotic harems, and grisly massacres; Western diplomats (even Sykes and Picot) trying to treat justly with hopeful caliphs; and peaceable governments of Israel persistently searching for a modus vivendi with Arab leaders bedazzled by the prize of empire. There is at least the suggestion that the prevalence of imperialist ideology in the Middle East makes diplomatic efforts futile.
Is a new Islamic or Islamist empire a possibility? Karsh himself recounts the numerous failures of such entities since Muhammad’s death – and for reasons that have probably survived the centuries and bloodlettings in better shape than the imperial dream. Tribalism, sectarian animosities, and rival political centers tore apart the Umayyads, Abassids, Fatimids, Mongols, Seljuks, Ottomans, Muhammad Ali, Hashemites, Nasserites, and Ba’athists. Peoples of the Middle East can certainly form effective guerrilla movements as evidenced by Colonel Lawrence’s bands, Algerian anti-colonial forces, the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, Hisbollah, and various groups in Iraq. They can also execute deadly acts of terror, in and out of the region. But they are incapable of coalescing into a unified polity and building a modern army upon which an empire would depend, whether under the banners of the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, Iran, or whatever other movement should arise. There are indeed leaders in Islam who yearn for the gardens of Cordoba, but there may be too many antagonistic ones. And their sentimentalizations, heroic myths, and outright delusions will prevent them from assembling the means of ever ruling the old city again.
The ideological forces we face in the war on terror are more complicated than a dream of empire. Resentments stemming from decline and US policies cannot be dismissed as Karsh recommends in an early paragraph or two. If we are to form an effective strategy for the region, sources of hostility must be considered. Instead, our policies seem based on an odd combination of doltish sloganeering that no longer inspires and heavy firepower that no longer works. Our leaders would do well to recognize the complex reasons for Islam’s hostility and perhaps play off disparate groups and beliefs in a manner that obviates the need for blunt force of arms, which serves more to broaden and intensify hostility than assuage or destroy it. But perhaps this is a dream as elusive as that of Islamic empire, betraying a yearning for the vanished gardens of an older America in which the ensnaring strife of the world, when not deftly elided, was at least thoughtfully approached.
There is for all my reservations outlined here a great deal to recommend in Islamic Imperialism. The provocative thesis is one that followers of world events should familiarize themselves with, analyze along with their own views of history and present-day events, and come to an understanding of. Karsh’s presentation of the imperial dream today is almost certainly overstated, but as Richard Hofstadter famously remarked, a challenging thesis often needs to be.
Copyright 2006 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who has written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs.