The Penguin History of the World

To put such attitudes in perspective, moreover (and at first sight it is curious to western eyes that student radicals should happily espouse such obviously reactionary causes), they have to be understood in the context of a long absence within Islam of any state or institutional theory such as that of the West. Even in orthodox hands, and even if it delivered some desirable goods, the state as such is not self-evidently a legitimate authority in Islamic thought – and, on top of that, the very introduction of state structures in Arab lands since the nineteenth century had been in imitation, conscious or unconscious, of the West. Youthful radicalism, which had tried and found wanting the politics of socialism (or what was thought to be that, and was in any case another western import), felt that no intrinsic value resided in states or nations; they looked elsewhere, and that, in part, explains the efforts shown first in Libya, and then in Iran and Algeria, to promote new ways of legitimating authority. Whether the age-old Islamic bias against public institutions and towards tribalism and the brotherhood of Islam can be sustained remains to be seen. Even that brotherhood, after all, has to recognize that most Muslims in the world do not understand Arabic.

The potential for disorder and even internecine conflict in parts of the Islamic world makes it too tempting to simplify. The Islamic world is not culturally homogeneous. No more than the mythological ‘West’ denounced in the 1980s by popular preachers in the mosques can Islam be identified convincingly as a coherent, discrete, neatly bordered civilization. Like the ‘West’ it is an abstraction, occasionally a useful shorthand for expository purposes. Many Muslims, including some of a religious cast of mind, seek a footing in two worlds, committed in a measure to both western and Islamic ideals. Each world represents a historical centre of dynamism, a source of energies, boundless in their own ways, but also with impacts on each other that have reverberated through time, most recently through the massive influence that European ideas have had on the Muslim world.

The unsettled situation in parts of the Islamic lands, especially in the Middle East, was made the more explosive by demography. The average age of most Muslim-dominated societies is said to be between fifteen and eighteen, and some are still growing at very fast rates. The new generation of Muslims may go in very different directions politically, socially and ethically. What is clear is that they are hungry for change, away from a situation that has left far too many of them in poverty, without political representation and with values, which may be composite and complex, but which they feel are respected neither by the West nor by their own rulers.

4 The Closing of an Era

The 1980s were to bring startling changes, but few in the Middle East, where, as the decade began, they had seemed most likely. Instead, a fundamental stagnation seemed to hang over the region. Tension had been high there in 1980, as it had been for years, and so were the hopes of most interested parties about resolving the problems presented by Israel’s appearance as a successor state to the Ottoman empire in Palestine. Except perhaps among a minority of Israelis, these hopes were to be gravely disappointed. For a time, it had looked as if the Iranian revolution might transform the rules of the game played hitherto, and some had indeed hoped so. Ten years later, though, it would still be very difficult to say what it had actually changed outside Iran, or what the true significance was of the uproar in the Islamic world that it had provoked. What had looked for a time like an Islamic resurgence could also be seen as merely one of the recurrent waves of puritanism which have from time to time across the centuries stimulated and regenerated the faithful. Clearly, too, tension owed much to circumstance; Israel’s occupation of the third of Islam’s Holy Places in Jerusalem had suddenly enhanced the sense of Islamic solidarity. Yet the attack by Iraq on Iran in 1980 led to a bloody war lasting eight years and costing a million lives. Whatever else might have been behind it, it also mattered in that conflict that Iraq was Sunni, Iran Shi’ite. Once more, Islamic peoples were divided along ancient fault-lines as well as by contemporary issues.