ISLAM’S IMPERIAL DREAMS
by Efraim Karsh

Commentary, NY
April 1 2006

When satirical depictions of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper
sparked a worldwide wave of Muslim violence early this year, observers
naturally focused on the wanton destruction of Western embassies,
businesses, and other institutions. Less attention was paid to the
words that often accompanied the riots-words with ominous historical
echoes. “Hurry up and apologize to our nation, because if you do not,
you will regret it,” declared Khaled Mash’al, the leader of Hamas,
fresh from the Islamist group’s sweeping victory in the Palestinian
elections:

This is because our nation is progressing and is victorious. . . . By
Allah, you will be defeated. . . . Tomorrow, our nation will sit on
the throne of the world. This is not a figment of the imagination but a
fact. Tomorrow we will lead the world, Allah willing. Apologize today,
before remorse will do you no good.

Among Islamic radicals, such gloating about the prowess and imminent
triumph of their “nation” is as commonplace as recitals of the long and
bitter catalog of grievances related to the loss of historical Muslim
dominion. Osama bin Laden has repeatedly alluded to the collapse of
Ottoman power at the end of World War I and, with it, the abolition of
the Ottoman caliphate. “What America is tasting now,” he declared in
the immediate wake of 9/11, “is only a copy of what we have tasted. Our
Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than 80 years, of
humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled,
its sanctities desecrated.” Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s top deputy,
has pointed still farther into the past, lamenting “the tragedy of
al-Andalus”-that is, the end of Islamic rule in Spain in 1492.

These historical claims are in turn frequently dismissed by
Westerners as delusional, a species of mere self-aggrandizement or
propaganda. But the Islamists are perfectly serious, and know what
they are doing. Their rhetoric has a millennial warrant, both in
doctrine and in fact, and taps into a deep undercurrent that has
characterized the political culture of Islam from the beginning.

Though tempered and qualified in different places and at different
times, the Islamic longing for unfettered suzerainty has never
disappeared, and has resurfaced in our own day with a vengeance. It
goes by the name of empire.

“I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but
Allah.'” With these farewell words, the prophet Muhammad summed up
the international vision of the faith he brought to the world. As
a universal religion, Islam envisages a global political order in
which all humankind will live under Muslim rule as either believers or
subject communities. In order to achieve this goal, it is incumbent on
all free, male, adult Muslims to carry out an uncompromising “struggle
in the path of Allah,” or jihad. As the 14th-century historian and
philosopher Abdel Rahman ibn Khaldun wrote, “In the Muslim community,
the jihad is a religious duty because of the universalism of the
Islamic mission and the obligation [to convert] everybody to Islam
either by persuasion or by force.”

As a historical matter, the birth of Islam was inextricably linked
with empire. Unlike Christianity and the Christian kingdoms that once
existed under or alongside it, Islam has never distinguished between
temporal and religious powers, which were combined in the person of
Muhammad. Having fled from his hometown of Mecca to Medina in 622
c.e. to become a political and military leader rather than a private
preacher, Muhammad spent the last ten years of his life fighting
to unify Arabia under his rule. Indeed, he devised the concept of
jihad shortly after his migration to Medina as a means of enticing
his local followers to raid Meccan caravans. Had it not been for his
sudden death, he probably would have expanded his reign well beyond
the peninsula.

The Qur’anic revelations during Muhammad’s Medina years abound
with verses extolling the virtues of jihad, as do the countless
sayings and traditions (hadith) attributed to the prophet. Those
who participate in this holy pursuit are to be generously rewarded,
both in this life and in the afterworld, where they will reside in
shaded and ever-green gardens, indulged by pure women. Accordingly,
those killed while waging jihad should not be mourned: “Allah has
bought from the believers their soul and their possessions against
the gift of Paradise; they fight in the path of Allah; they kill and
are killed. . . . So rejoice in the bargain you have made with Him;
that is the mighty triumph.”

But the doctrine’s appeal was not just otherworldly. By forbidding
fighting and raiding within the community of believers (the umma),
Muhammad had deprived the Arabian tribes of a traditional source
of livelihood. For a time, the prophet could rely on booty from
non-Muslims as a substitute for the lost war spoils, which is why he
never went out of his way to convert all of the tribes seeking a place
in his Pax Islamica. Yet given his belief in the supremacy of Islam
and his relentless commitment to its widest possible dissemination,
he could hardly deny conversion to those wishing to undertake it. Once
the whole of Arabia had become Muslim, a new source of wealth and
an alternative outlet would have to be found for the aggressive
energies of the Arabian tribes, and it was, in the Fertile Crescent
and the Levant.

Within twelve years of Muhammad’s death, a Middle Eastern empire,
stretching from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to northern Syria, had
come into being under the banner of Islam. By the early 8th century,
the Muslims had hugely extended their grip to Central Asia and much
of the Indian subcontinent, had laid siege to the Byzantine capital
of Constantinople, and had overrun North Africa and Spain. Had they
not been contained in 732 at the famous battle of Poitiers in west
central France, they might well have swept deep into northern Europe.

Though sectarianism and civil war divided the Muslim world in the
generations after Muhammad, the basic dynamic of Islam remained
expansionist. The short-lived Umayyad dynasty (661-750) gave way to
the ostensibly more pious Abbasid caliphs, whose readiness to accept
non-Arabs solidified Islam’s hold on its far-flung possessions. From
their imperial capital of Baghdad, the Abbasids ruled, with waning
authority, until the Mongol invasion of 1258. The most powerful of
their successors would emerge in Anatolia, among the Ottoman Turks who
invaded Europe in the mid-14th century and would conquer Constantinople
in 1453, destroying the Byzantine empire and laying claim to virtually
all of the Balkan peninsula and the eastern Mediterranean.

Like their Arab predecessors, the Ottomans were energetic
empire-builders in the name of jihad. By the early 16th century, they
had conquered Syria and Egypt from the Mamluks, the formidable slave
soldiers who had contained the Mongols and destroyed the Crusader
kingdoms. Under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, they soon turned
northward. By the middle of the 17th century they seemed poised to
overrun Christian Europe, only to be turned back in fierce fighting
at the gates of Vienna in 1683-on September 11, of all dates. Though
already on the defensive by the early 18th century, the Ottoman
empire-the proverbial “sick man of Europe”-would endure another 200
years. Its demise at the hands of the victorious European powers of
World War I, to say nothing of the work of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
the father of modern Turkish nationalism, finally brought an end
both to the Ottoman caliphate itself and to Islam’s centuries-long
imperial reach.

To Islamic historians, the chronicles of Muslim empire represent a
model of shining religious zeal and selfless exertion in the cause of
Allah. Many Western historians, for their part, have been inclined to
marvel at the perceived sophistication and tolerance of Islamic rule,
praising the caliphs’ cultivation of the arts and sciences and their
apparent willingness to accommodate ethnic and religious minorities.

There is some truth in both views, but neither captures the deeper and
often more callous impulses at work in the expanding umma set in motion
by Muhammad. For successive generations of Islamic rulers, imperial
dominion was dictated not by universalistic religious principles but
by their prophet’s vision of conquest and his summons to fight and
subjugate unbelievers.

That the worldly aims of Islam might conflict with its moral and
spiritual demands was evident from the start of the caliphate. Though
the Umayyad monarchs portrayed their constant wars of expansion as
“jihad in the path of Allah,” this was largely a facade, concealing
an increasingly secular and absolutist rule. Lax in their attitude
toward Islamic practices and mores, they were said to have set
aside special days for drinking alcohol-specifically forbidden by
the prophet-and showed little inhibition about appearing nude before
their boon companions and female singers.

The coup staged by the Abbasids in 747-49 was intended to restore
Islam’s true ways and undo the godless practices of their predecessors;
but they too, like the Umayyads, were first and foremost imperial
monarchs. For the Abbasids, Islam was a means to consolidating their
jurisdiction and enjoying the fruits of conquest.

They complied with the stipulations of the nascent religious law
(shari’a) only to the extent that it served their needs, and indulged
in the same vices-wine, singing girls, and sexual license-that had
ruined the reputation of the Umayyads.

Of particular importance to the Abbasids was material splendor. On
the occasion of his nephew’s coronation as the first Abbasid caliph,
Dawud ibn Ali had proclaimed, “We did not rebel in order to grow rich
in silver and in gold.” Yet it was precisely the ever-increasing
pomp of the royal court that would underpin Abbasid prestige. The
gem-studded dishes of the caliph’s table, the gilded curtains of the
palace, the golden tree and ruby-eyed golden elephant that adorned
the royal courtyard were a few of the opulent possessions that bore
witness to this extravagance.

The riches of the empire, moreover, were concentrated in the hands
of the few at the expense of the many. While the caliph might bestow
thousands of dirhams on a favorite poet for reciting a few lines,
ordinary laborers in Baghdad carried home a dirham or two a month. As
for the empire’s more distant subjects, the caliphs showed little
interest in their conversion to the faith, preferring instead to
colonize their lands and expropriate their wealth and labor. Not until
the third Islamic century did the bulk of these populations embrace the
religion of their imperial masters, and this was a process emanating
from below-an effort by non-Arabs to escape paying tribute and to
remove social barriers to their advancement. To make matters worse,
the metropolis plundered the resources of the provinces, a practice
inaugurated at the time of Muhammad and reaching its apogee under
the Abbasids. Combined with the government’s weakening control of the
periphery, this shameless exploitation triggered numerous rebellions
throughout the empire.

Tension between the center and the periphery was, indeed, to become
the hallmark of Islam’s imperial experience. Even in its early days,
under the Umayyads, the empire was hopelessly overextended, largely
because of inadequate means of communication and control. Under the
Abbasids, a growing number of provinces fell under the sway of local
dynasties. With no effective metropolis, the empire was reduced to an
agglomeration of entities united only by the overarching factors of
language and religion. Though the Ottomans temporarily reversed the
trend, their own imperial ambitions were likewise eventually thwarted
by internal fragmentation.

In the long history of Islamic empire, the wide gap between delusions
of grandeur and the centrifugal forces of localism would be bridged
time and again by force of arms, making violence a key element
of Islamic political culture. No sooner had Muhammad died than
his successor, Abu Bakr, had to suppress a widespread revolt among
the Arabian tribes. Twenty-three years later, the head of the umma,
the caliph Uthman ibn Affan, was murdered by disgruntled rebels; his
successor, Ali ibn Abi Talib, was confronted for most of his reign
with armed insurrections, most notably by the governor of Syria,
Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufian, who went on to establish the Umayyad dynasty
after Ali’s assassination. Mu’awiya’s successors managed to hang
on to power mainly by relying on physical force, and were consumed
for most of their reign with preventing or quelling revolts in the
diverse corners of their empire. The same was true for the Abbasids
during the long centuries of their sovereignty.

Western academics often hold up the Ottoman empire as an exception
to this earlier pattern. In fact the caliphate did deal relatively
gently with its vast non-Muslim subject populations-provided that they
acquiesced in their legal and institutional inferiority in the Islamic
order of things. When these groups dared to question their subordinate
status, however, let alone attempt to break free from the Ottoman yoke,
they were viciously put down. In the century or so between Napoleon’s
conquests in the Middle East and World War I, the Ottomans embarked on
an orgy of bloodletting in response to the nationalist aspirations of
their European subjects. The Greek war of independence of the 1820’s,
the Danubian uprisings of 1848 and the attendant Crimean war, the
Balkan explosion of the 1870’s, the Greco-Ottoman war of 1897-all
were painful reminders of the costs of resisting Islamic imperial rule.

Nor was such violence confined to Ottoman Europe. Turkey’s Afro-Asiatic
provinces, though far less infected with the nationalist virus,
were also scenes of mayhem and destruction. The Ottoman army or
its surrogates brought force to bear against Wahhabi uprisings in
Mesopotamia and the Levant in the early 19th century, against civil
strife in Lebanon in the 1840’s (culminating in the 1860 massacres
in Mount Lebanon and Damascus), and against a string of Kurdish
rebellions. In response to the national awakening of the Armenians
in the 1890’s, Constantinople killed tens of thousands-a taste of
the horrors that lay ahead for the Armenians during World War I.

The legacy of this imperial experience is not difficult to discern
in today’s Islamic world. Physical force has remained the main if
not the sole instrument of political discourse in the Middle East.

Throughout the region, absolute leaders still supersede political
institutions, and citizenship is largely synonymous with submission;
power is often concentrated in the hands of small, oppressive
minorities; religious, ethnic, and tribal conflicts abound; and the
overriding preoccupation of sovereigns is with their own survival.

At the domestic level, these circumstances have resulted in the world’s
most illiberal polities. Political dissent is dealt with by repression,
and ethnic and religious differences are settled by internecine strife
and murder. One need only mention, among many instances, Syria’s
massacre of 20,000 of its Muslim activists in the early 1980’s, or
the brutal treatment of Iraq’s Shiite and Kurdish communities until
the 2003 war, or the genocidal campaign now being conducted in Darfur
by the government of Sudan and its allied militias. As for foreign
policy in the Middle East, it too has been pursued by means of crude
force, ranging from terrorism and subversion to outright aggression,
with examples too numerous and familiar to cite.

Reinforcing these habits is the fact that, to this day, Islam has
retained its imperial ambitions. The last great Muslim empire may
have been destroyed and the caliphate left vacant, but the dream
of regional and world domination has remained very much alive. Even
the ostensibly secular doctrine of pan-Arabism has been effectively
Islamic in its ethos, worldview, and imperialist vision. In the words
of Nuri Said, longtime prime minister of Iraq and a prominent early
champion of this doctrine: “Although Arabs are naturally attached to
their native land, their nationalism is not confined by boundaries.

It is an aspiration to restore the great tolerant civilization of
the early caliphate.”

That this “great tolerant civilization” reached well beyond today’s
Middle East is not lost on those who hope for its restoration. Like
the leaders of al Qaeda, many Muslims and Arabs unabashedly pine for
the reconquest of Spain and consider their 1492 expulsion from the
country a grave historical injustice waiting to be undone. Indeed, as
immigration and higher rates of childbirth have greatly increased the
number of Muslims within Europe itself over the past several decades,
countries that were never ruled by the caliphate have become targets
of Muslim imperial ambition. Since the late 1980’s, Islamists have
looked upon the growing population of French Muslims as proof that
France, too, has become a part of the House of Islam. In Britain,
even the more moderate elements of the Muslim community are candid in
setting out their aims. As the late Zaki Badawi, a doyen of interfaith
dialogue in the UK, put it, “Islam is a universal religion. It aims
to bring its message to all corners of the earth.

It hopes that one day the whole of humanity will be one Muslim
community.”

Whether in its militant or its more benign version, this
world-conquering agenda continues to meet with condescension and
denial on the part of many educated Westerners. To intellectuals,
foreign-policy experts, and politicians alike, “empire” and
“imperialism” are categories that apply exclusively to the European
powers and, more recently, to the United States. In this view of
things, Muslims, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, are merely
objects-the long-suffering victims of the aggressive encroachments
of others. Lacking an internal, autonomous dynamic of its own,
their history is rather a function of their unhappy interaction with
the West, whose obligation it is to make amends. This perspective
dominated the widespread explanation of the 9/11 attacks as only a
response to America’s (allegedly) arrogant and self-serving foreign
policy, particularly with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

As we have seen, however, Islamic history has been anything but
reactive. From Muhammad to the Ottomans, the story of Islam has
been the story of the rise and fall of an often astonishing imperial
aggressiveness and, no less important, of never quiescent imperial
dreams. Even as these dreams have repeatedly frustrated any possibility
for the peaceful social and political development of the Arab-Muslim
world, they have given rise to no less repeated fantasies of revenge
and restoration and to murderous efforts to transform fantasy into
fact. If, today, America is reviled in the Muslim world, it is not
because of its specific policies but because, as the preeminent world
power, it blocks the final realization of this same age-old dream of
regaining, in Zawahiri’s words, the “lost glory” of the caliphate.

Nor is the vision confined to a tiny extremist fringe. This we saw in
the overwhelming support for the 9/11 attacks throughout the Arab and
Islamic worlds, in the admiring evocations of bin Laden’s murderous
acts during the crisis over the Danish cartoons, and in such recent
findings as the poll indicating significant reservoirs of sympathy
among Muslims in Britain for the “feelings and motives” of the suicide
bombers who attacked London last July. In the historical imagination
of many Muslims and Arabs, bin Laden represents nothing short of the
new incarnation of Saladin, defeater of the Crusaders and conqueror of
Jerusalem. In this sense, the House of Islam’s war for world mastery
is a traditional, indeed venerable, quest that is far from over.

To the contrary, now that this war has itself met with a so far
determined counterattack by the United States and others, and
with a Western intervention in the heart of the House of Islam,
it has escalated to a new stage of virulence. In many Middle
Eastern countries, Islamist movements, and movements appealing to
traditionalist Muslims, are now jockeying fiercely for positions of
power, both against the Americans and against secular parties. For the
Islamists, the stakes are very high indeed, for if the political elites
of the Middle East and elsewhere were ever to reconcile themselves
to the reality that there is no Arab or Islamic “nation,” but only
modern Muslim states with destinies and domestic responsibilities of
their own, the imperialist dream would die.

It is in recognition of this state of affairs that Zawahiri wrote
his now famous letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda
in Iraq, in July 2005. If, Zawahiri instructed his lieutenant, al
Qaeda’s strategy for Iraq and elsewhere were to succeed, it would have
to take into account the growing thirst among many Arabs for democracy
and a normal life, and strive not to alienate popular opinion through
such polarizing deeds as suicide attacks on fellow Muslims. Only by
harnessing popular support, Zawahiri concluded, would it be possible
to come to power by means of democracy itself, thereby to establish
jihadist rule in Iraq, and then to move onward to conquer still larger
and more distant realms and impose the writ of Islam far and wide.

Something of the same logic clearly underlies the carefully plotted
rise of Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, the (temporarily thwarted)
attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to exploit the demand
for free elections there, and the accession of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
in Iran. Indeed, as reported by Mark MacKinnon in the Toronto Globe &
Mail, some analysts now see a new “axis of Islam” arising in the Middle
East, uniting Hizballah, Hamas, Iran, Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood,
elements of Iraq’s Shiites, and others in an anti-American, anti-Israel
alliance backed by Russia.

Whether or not any such structure exists or can be forged, the fact
is that the fuel of Islamic imperialism remains as volatile as ever,
and is very far from having burned itself out. To deny its force is the
height of folly, and to imagine that it can be appeased or deflected is
to play into its hands. Only when it is defeated, and when the faith
of Islam is no longer a tool of Islamic political ambition, will the
inhabitants of Muslim lands, and the rest of the world, be able to look
forward to a future less burdened by Saladins and their gory dreams.

Efraim Karsh is head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College,
University of London, and the author of, among other works, Arafat’s
War, Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography, and Empires of the Sand:
The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East. His new book, Islamic
Imperialism: A History, on which this article is based, is about to
be published by Yale.