Daily Times

Professor Aijaz Ahmad, a renowned Pakistani-Indian literary theorist, Marxist, and avid commentator on politics passed away recently leaving behind a very rich body of work. In this article today, we are going to use some insights from his famous work on “Islam, Islamisms, and the West” to reflect on how the West reengineered Muslim countries away from secular/liberal orientations towards extremism.

Though this article by Professor Ahmad was written over a decade ago, it is as relevant today as it was when it was written and it will remain relevant for times to come in the future as well. The article has a broad canvas on Islam and Islamism, but we are going to focus on the imperialism part of it.

The overall message is that given the huge diversity in the Muslim world spanning various continents; there is not one Islamism but there are many Islamisms. As far as imperialism is concerned, an analytical examination of the map of the Muslim-majority countries from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to 1965 shows that from Indonesia to Algeria; Muslim countries were greatly attuned to leftwing and secular dispositions except for some Middle Eastern countries.

However, this leftwing/secular trend began to change from the mid-1960s onwards with the US-backed coup in Indonesia that wiped out half a million leftwing progressives, the defeat of secular Arab armies of Nasser’s Egypt and others over the Arab-Israel war of 1967, and then 1978 Islamic revolution in Iran, and the onset of the Afghan jihad in 1979-1980. The earlier secular and leftwing forces got into deep crisis in the Muslim world and the increasing polarization between Iran and an important Middle Eastern country got to dominate the body politic of the Muslim world since then backed by the US and the West.

Given the huge diversity in the Muslim world spanning various continents; there is not one Islamism but there are many Islamisms.

In Iran, it was the secular nationalist liberal government of Mossadegh that the CIA coup helped to overthrow to reinstall the monarchy in 1953. Mossadegh wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil and got into conflict with the monarchy over it. The CIA coup helped to create the savage internal security force SAVAK in Iran after the overthrow of Mossadegh through which liberals and communists were eliminated and the clergy was left untouched.

It is the clergy that made a resounding comeback after its leader Khomeini returned from France to Iran to a ground situation where the remaining leftists/secularists had effectively campaigned along with the clergy against the Shah. The Islamic regime utilized it to usher in an Islamic revolution and then, later on, went around eliminating the remaining leftwing/liberal contingent in Iran as part of the consolidation of its regime.

In Iraq, Saddam’s Baathist party, mostly Sunni, ruled on the principle of personal loyalty to Saddam. Both Shias and Sunnis were in the army led by Sunni Baathists and fought together in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s mostly in Shia areas. There were scores of Sunni-Shia intermarriages under Saddam’s watch. Yet, post the US invasion of Iraq, the US “swiftly moved to communalize it, re-making it along sectarian lines”.

Almost one-tenth of the Iraqi population died and many more lost their homes and became homeless. Unemployment rose to almost 70% and health and education facilities were seriously undermined by the matching proliferation of arms. Couples of Sunni-Shia intermarriages were asked to divorce each other. Iraq may have the pretence of liberal democracy post the US invasion but it is seriously undergirded by sectarian and ethnic divides and is unstable. This is another example of how the US and the West lied through their teeth about the imagined weapons of mass destruction to invade Iraq and then destroyed a Muslim nation and tore apart its social and political fabric.

Afghanistan is another country that has been ravaged by US imperialism. Afghanistan was functioning pretty well under a “mildly Muslim” monarchy till the first leftwing Communist government was imposed there in the late 1970s and the US/West rallied troops from around the Muslim world to fight them. The religious parties in Pakistan that had a “marginal position” till then were given huge financial and military resources to foster Afghan Mujahideen and teach the former Soviet Union a message. Afghanistan was a tribal society with modern urban pockets in the cities and it has been destroyed beyond recognition in various wars. Professor Ahmad draws a similarity between the Taliban’s “horrendously punitive and arcane regime” of Taliban with the war-ravaged Communist Pol Pot regime in Cambodia; both were destroyed by US imperialism.

The author brings in Samuel P. Hungtington’s infamous 1996 publication on “Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of the World Order” whereby Hungtington divided the world into seven or eight civilisations and calls it a “shoddy performance”. Huntington’s thesis is that the Western civilization with Catholic and Protestant orientations must defend itself from other civilizations, particularly Islamic countries and China. Countries with Orthodox churches are also different. The West must denounce its universalistic affirmations and recognize its unique position to fight off the challenges from non-Western countries principally Muslim and China. The most important differences are “cultural”. In other words, Hungtington was setting the stage for permanent warfare with non-Western countries. It shows how the intelligentsia in the West perceives the rest of the non-Western world particularly Muslim countries and China as enemies forever.

The overall conclusion that one can draw from these selected insights from Professor Ahmad is that the US and West want to de-state-ize Muslim countries; breakdown their state, political, and social institutions as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan resulting in a huge amount of loss of lives, livelihoods, and serious undermining of the quality of life. In our regions, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and over 200 million Muslim population in India better watch out!

The writer is an Islamabad-based social scientist. She can be reached at fskcolumns@gmail.com and tweets @FoqiaSadiqKhan