Twilight of the Ayatollahs : Islamic fundamentalism is on the wane

National Review, August 30, 1999 by David Pryce-Jones

A civil war has been under way these last twenty years throughout the Muslim Middle East. The rulers in power, most of them nationalist and in outlook, have had to confront Islamic fundamentalists attempting to overthrow them. This conflict has roots deep in history, for it contains an issue of identity to which no clear answer has yet been found: How exactly is a society to be both modern and Muslim? Much of this civil war has been subterranean, conducted through mutual assassination and other acts of terror. But in Egypt, and even more frighteningly in Algeria, the civil war has been in the open. The outcome held the key to the region's future.

In both Egypt and Algeria, the nationalists have now won-and they are winning elsewhere as well. The repercussions are enormous. Islamic fundamentalism is losing its triumphalist energies. And as the movement's violence slowly dies down, the Middle East can define its peaceful place in the global order.

The extensive civil war had its origins in Iran, in the successful bid in 1979 of the Ayatollah Khomeini to overthrow the Shah. That was a defining moment. It will always remain a historical marker. Khomeini had his solution to the troubling question of identity: A Muslim did not need to be modern, he had only to be a Muslim. In Khomeini's eyes, Muslims had, over the centuries, strayed as sectarians (Sunni or Shia), nationalists, liberals. Some had Westernized, and they were particularly guilty of heresy and apostasy.

Neighbors such as Saddam Hussein in Baghdad or the King of Saudi Arabia were to Khomeini hardly better than infidels. "There are no frontiers in Islam." This favorite saying of the Ayatollah's involved a program charged with threat. Duly united as in the glorious dawn of the faith, the virtuous would receive their reward, and the wicked their punishment. Self-appointed as Righteous Guide-in other words, a despot with a religious title-Khomeini set about enforcing what he saw as the word of God. The task was immense, nothing less than a reshaping of relations between Muslims, and then further between Muslims and the rest of the world.

In the absolute societies of the Muslim Middle East, men of ambition engage in a ceaseless careerist struggle to seize the supreme power that is tantalizingly within their grasp. Ayatollah Khomeini discovered how to translate Islam and religion into political ends of his own. With a rather brilliant blending of pathos and sternness, he played on the widespread sentiment that Muslims everywhere had been overpowered, victimized and finally humiliated by outsiders. Here was an account that he promised to square.

No matter whether they were called Christians, imperialists, or Westerners, outsiders and unbelievers were depicted as conspiring to deprive Muslims of their birthright by inflicting alien values on them. To the Ayatollah, Western democracy was particularly odious, and its culture non-existent, or pagan. "Arrogance" and "Satan" became current terms of abuse in Iran for America. The death sentence on Salman Rushdie for his novel was a warning that public opinion in the West would have to change, and submit to Islamic will. In an open letter to Gorbachev, Khomeini recommended conversion to Islam as the true perestroika. The Soviet Union might be expiring, but Islam was now on the march, and a far more all-embracing challenge too.

Distinguished scholars in the West like Samuel P. Huntington lent credence to this vision of the world, speaking of the coming clash of civilizations. Islam, in the words of another opinion-forming academic, Richard Bulliet of Columbia University, had become "the center of political and moral discourse" throughout the Middle East. More realistically, it was central to violence.

Far from original, Khomeini's mindset was a legacy from colonial times, when Iran fell into the conflicting spheres of influence of Britain and Russia. A small number of activists had kept alive an ideal of religious mobilization against the outsiders. In Egypt between the world wars, activists of this sort founded the Muslim Brotherhood as a response to the British occupation. Strict observance of Islam would lead to the rejection of the British and everything they stood for, and afterwards to revenge and power. This was the prototype of Islamic fundamentalism. Spreading across the Arab world, Muslim Brotherhood cells have popularized violent resistance against everything Western. Reducing the whole West to a single malign entity fit for bomb-throwing, the Saudi millionaire and terrorist Osama bin Laden today embodies that outlook.

In due course, a prototype nationalist ruler, the Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser, saw the danger and did his best to suppress the Brotherhood, hanging its leaders. In Nasser's wake, nationalist rulers all chose to modernize their countries and societies along Western lines. Islam to them was an impediment to modernity, a heritage perhaps, but not an organizing principle of society. Two short years after Khomeini had taken power, Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat (a devout Muslim), was shot and killed at a military parade by a member of a group that had split off from the Brotherhood under the influence of the new Iranian fundamentalism. It was the first shot in an Arab country of the civil war to come.