Hazhir Teimourian - Middle East Analyst and Commentator
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Political Islam, religious Islam

The Times, Monday February 25, 1991

Popular Muslim reaction to the waging of war on Iraq by the United Nations coalition has reinforced the belief of many people here in the West that the whole of the world of Islam is the enemy. Since the beginning of hostilities, and particularly since the American bombing of the air raid shelter/military command bunker in Baghdad last Wednesday (February 13), we have regularly watched Muslim demonstrators in the Middle East shouting hateful slogans against Europeans and, here in the heartland of Europeanism itself, Muslim settlers have displayed remarkable unity in opposing the war, as if none could see any merit in anything the West could ever do or say against any Islamic government. On this side of the divide, serious columnists, who are normally wary of indulging in generalisations, have spoken of the incompatibility of Islam with democracy – I agree with them on this point -  and the tabloid press has resorted to its usual catchy phrases against Saddam that are immediately interpreted by Muslims as insulting to the whole of their kind. If the hitherto moderate King Hussein of Jordan joins the radicals and claims that the West is out to destroy Islam and "Arabism", what may we expect of lesser educated men?

The hope must be that the seemingly total polarisation is more apparent than real. The world is now too small for big blocks of neighbouring populations to live together in perpetual hatred without their coming to blows sooner or later. Perhaps there is an element of posturing to the accusations of genocide being levelled at the West. Some will also hope that once the passion of the present crisis has subsided, sentiments will, on both sides, become less extreme. This hope may well not be disappointed, but it is not easy to be optimistic in the longer term. It would seem that the backing of most Islamic societies for Saddam Hussein is an outcrop of a deeper bedrock of alienation from the present hierarchy in the world. How else could we explain that the new hero of both Muslim activists and Arab nationalists is one of the least likeable characters in the whole history of Islam itself. Is he not the same Saddam Hussein who used poison gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja in March 1988 to kill an estimated 5,000 Muslim civilians in a single afternoon? Did not Muslim activists denounce him as "the Zionist agent" for launching the first Gulf war on Iran in 1980, which may have cost a million Muslim lives? One might have expected the bulk of Muslims and Arabs greeting the current attempt at diminishing or removing him as a great service to their brethren in the Persian Gulf region!

But this was never a possibility. After Halabja, which killed, deliberately, some 12 times as many people as the accidental bombing of Baghdad shelter, the governments, for example, of Kuwait and Jordan united in launching a diplomatic offensive to press Western governments not to impose trade restrictions on Iraq, and in the whole of the Arab world not a single demonstration was held to denounce the murderers. When it comes to one of their own, the Arabs' moral judgement is clearly selective, and unwise. Why should this be?

The answer is not difficult to find. It is vain to look for collective wisdom in societies where the average age is between 15 and 18. The population of the Islamic world is doubling in size approximately every 19 years. In the case of Jordan, which has the worst population explosion of all at four per cent a year, it takes only 16 years for the population to double itself. The combination of this unprecedented growth and the Palestinian frustrations of the majority 70 per cent means that moderate Jordan is dead for some time.

The question arises here: what has happened to the leadership of the Arab or Muslim elders of society who have been venerated in the past? Surely, apart from some politicians among them, they would see that the extremism of the young could only lead to disaster? The answer must be that they have been swamped by the sheer numbers of the young. The influence of the elders is still strong in rural areas, but the bulk of the populations now inhabit the towns, where social frustrations and raised expectations among the young combine with low levels of education to breed xenophobic political radicalism.

At a religious level, there are now two distinct Islams: the political Islam of the mobs in the cities, which is primarily a standard around which to gather for war, and the still personal, religious Islam of tradition in villages, the new ascendant Islam almost hiding its rival from view. This can only be exacerbated in the next twenty years, when the Muslim population of the world is expected to double in size to exceed two billion.

Saddam Hussein may be deluded in believing that he could survive a war against the rest of the world, but he is not mistaken in trying to pass himself as a champion of Islam. His personal character, as I have been told by Muslim radicals, is of no significance. What matters is that "he has taken on the West". If he is allowed to survive after inflicting such heavy costs on the world, the new Islam will be emboldened. But the turmoil we have seen in the recent years in the world of Islam will not end with him.

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