The decline of the Islamic empire wasn’t supposed to happen. Its armies had repulsed Crusades from the west and intruders from the east, but by 1300 the Caliphate was crumbling. In the centuries that followed, Europe underwent a renaissance—reclaiming Spain and Eastern Europe and going on to colonize much of North Africa and the Middle East.
As the Quran and Muhammad both made clear, Muslims were God’s newly chosen people. Islam was supposed to expand, and the dar al-harb was supposed to shrink, giving way to a global Caliphate and world of believers. Yet precisely the opposite had happened. It was a world turned upside down.
What went wrong, as Bernard Lewis asked in the title of his 2001 book? What went wrong with the dream of the global Caliphate? How could Islam return to the promise of its founding? There were no shortage of people with answers to those questions.
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WAHHABISM AND SALAFISM
“The abolition of man-made laws cannot be achieved only through preaching. Those who have usurped the authority of God and are oppressing God’s creatures are not going to give up their power merely through preaching.”
—Sayyid Qutb, Milestones
Ten miles outside Cairo, Egypt
July 21, 1798
Crossing the desert in the July heat had not been pleasant for the thirty-five thousand French soldiers or the imposing man now leading them. The port city of Alexandria had fallen without much resistance, but the rest of Egypt was not likely to succumb so easily. Not if the Mamluks had anything to say about it.
The Ottoman Turkish empire, which had inherited the seat of the Islamic Caliphate, had placed the Mamluks—warriors known as much for their courage as their cruelty—in charge of Egypt. Now Napoleon Bonaparte, walking in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, was intent on changing that by bringing the ideals of the French Revolution to the Middle East. His immediate goal was to expel the British from the Mediterranean, thereby protecting France’s southern coast. But his larger designs were far more ambitious: he hoped to cut Britain off from easy access to its colonial territories in India, the jewel of the British Empire.
They were a long way from home, but now they were in sight of Egypt’s famed Pyramids—something nearly every Frenchman had seen in books. “Soldiers,” Bonaparte said, “from the height of these pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you.”
Also looking down upon them was a fearsome line of ten thousand Mamluk warriors bearing sabers on horseback. They charged straight into Napoleon’s cannon fire. The battle was over in an hour. Up to six thousand Egyptian men lay dying, alongside a few hundred dead or injured Frenchmen.
The road to Cairo—and the rest of Egypt—was now open.
Napoleon was willing to do and say whatever was necessary to subdue Egypt. He proclaimed that he respected God, Muhammad, and the Quran more than Egypt’s own Mamluk feudal lords did. He brought with him historians, scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and Egyptologists and they made historic discoveries, like the Rosetta Stone, which eventually allowed archeologists to unlock the secrets of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Translating “Liberty! Fraternity! Equality!” into Arabic, Napoleon appealed to the people to take power for themselves and to throw out their Mamluk overlords and the Ottoman masters they served.
Napoleon’s reign did not last long. The British reacted forcefully by shoring up and expanding their alliances throughout the Middle East, establishing firm control along the Red Sea and Persian Gulf well into the twentieth century. The Russians seized on the opportunity presented by the challenge to Ottoman and British interests by advancing their southern frontier around the shores of the Black Sea, around the Caspian Sea, and into Central Asia. Together they would eventually combine to expel the French from Egypt.
Napoleon’s colonization of Egypt was the first effort among many to bring the lands of the crumbling Ottoman Empire under European control. A century earlier, the Ottoman Turks had occupied most of Eastern Europe and had gotten to the gates of Vienna in 1683. The Great Powers took advantage of the Ottoman Empire’s waning influence and started occupying large areas of the Islamic world. The French took Algeria in 1830, and Tunis in 1881, while the British occupied Egypt in 1882 and Sudan in 1889. The age of European empire building continued into the twentieth century with the Italian occupation of Libya in 1912, while Spain and France divided up Morocco between them. Western occupation, which began with Napoleon, unleashed forces that steadily unraveled the entire region over the next two centuries.
In the eyes of millions of Muslims something was deeply wrong with the new order of things. Islamic lands were now occupied by Western powers that had installed puppet governments. Europe had undergone a Renaissance, an Enlightenment, and an Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile the Islamic world was stagnating and falling behind the advances of the West.
Muslims searched for a reason why the march of the Islamic world seemed to be stuck in reverse. The answer many came up with was that their contraction correlated with their straying from the pure tenets of Islam. They had betrayed the legacy of Muhammad and ignored his teachings—and now they were paying the price.
The Desert Winds of Wahhabism
Islam had been born out of the deserts of Saudi Arabia. It would be reborn and returned to its purist form there as well.
Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, born in 1703, was one of Islam’s earliest reformers. A Sunni cleric from the central Arabian Desert, he believed that Islam had become corrupted with “superstitions,” such as worshipping at shrines and graves of early Muslims. He said that Christians and Jews were “sorcerers” who believed in devil worship.
According to Wahhab, Islam had grown corrupted and soft under Western influences. It ignored the unambiguous teachings of Muhammad, such as the stoning of women who had committed adultery, and the leaders in the Middle East had succumbed to the temptations and comforts of modern times. They were living in a state of ignorance, or jahiliyya, much as the Meccans before Muhammad had. Wahhab believed that he had to save Muslims from themselves by cleansing the alien elements from Islam and reviving the faith practiced by Muhammad and his followers.
Wahhab was the father of the modern Salafist movement. Salaf means “ancestor” in Arabic, and refers to the first few generations of the prophet’s followers, the Islamic equivalent of Christ’s early disciples. Wahhab called for a return to the pure Islam of those early generations. He taught that all Muslims should be Salafists—followers of the precedents of those earlier followers of the prophet Muhammad.
Wahhab found a powerful ally in the Saud tribe. Prince Muhammad bin Saud provided the army to build a new state and Wahhab provided the religious faith and fervor to fuel it. “You are the settlement’s chief and wise man,” Wahhab told bin Saud. “I want you to grant me an oath that you will perform jihad against the unbelievers.”
In 1744, Wahhab and bin Saud took an oath to each other and began decades of conquest to unite Arabia and reinstall a righteous Caliphate—much as Muhammad had a millennium earlier. As resistance to the Ottoman Empire grew among the Turks’ Arab subjects, the Sauds became an increasingly powerful force. The early Saudi state expanded into Iraq and then Oman. Wahhab and the Saudis denied the legitimacy of the sultan’s authority as caliph and his claim as guardian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
What remained of the Caliphate, now in Constantinople, Turkey, was a mere shadow of what it had been in the thirteenth century, when it stretched from Europe to India. In the eyes of pious Muslims, the corrupt caliphs seemed more interested in amassing harems of beautiful women and material wealth than in spreading the word of God preached by Muhammad. Instead of staying faithful to an inalterable set of laws, Muslim leaders had given in to modernity.
The result was a two-hundred-year effort to reclaim the fundamentals of the Islamic faith and re-create the early-seventh-century vision of Islam in Muhammad’s image. It was not just a spiritual revolution, but a political one as well. As Muhammad taught
, the two were inseparable under Islam. We know this philosophy today as Islamism—the use of Islam as a political system—a revolutionary ideology that aims to restore the glittering Caliphate that ruled at the dawn of the Islamic world.
Sykes-Picot and the Dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was being left behind. Its rulers had fashioned themselves as inheritors of the Caliphate—the rulers of the Muslim community, or umma, worldwide. But their lands were being steadily eroded and their power was waning. Europe, which was enriched by the gold and silver of the New World and then by the Industrial Revolution, had economies and militaries far more powerful than those of the Ottoman Turks.
World War I eventually destroyed the Ottoman Empire, but not before the empire first destroyed millions of its own citizens. The first genocide of the twentieth century happened twenty years before Hitler devised the “Final Solution” to exterminate Europe’s Jews. In fact, it happened well before genocide was even a word.
In 1915, the Ottoman Turks began a systematic campaign against Christians living in their lands who were viewed as disloyal to the empire. The campaign targeted Greeks and Assyrians, but the majority of the barbarism was focused on the Armenians, a people who had founded one of the first Christian nations in the world.
On April 24, the nightmare began. It did not end until as many as one and a half million Armenians were herded like cattle into the mountains and then slaughtered.
During World War I, the Ottoman Turks sided with Germany and Austria. That decision sealed their empire’s fate. In the midst of war, the Allies met to carve up the “sick man of Europe”—the Ottoman Empire. In secret negotiations they agreed to divide the Middle East into spheres of British and French control, with some areas ceded to Russia. The treaty, known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, created nations and borders where none had previously existed.
To implement this agreement and hasten the end of Ottoman power, Great Britain decided to foment an internal revolt among the Ottoman Empire’s restive Arab subjects. They entrusted the task to T. E. Lawrence, the dashing figure remembered today as “Lawrence of Arabia.”
Lawrence’s great achievement was to convince the two major Arabian powers—the Hashemites and Sauds—to unite against the Ottomans. He made many promises to the Arabs (the majority of which the British had no intention of keeping), but the most important was the promise of creating a unified kingdom of Greater Syria, which encompassed present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and parts of Iraq and Jordan. Meanwhile, the British government promised the Jewish people a “national home” in Palestine in the form of the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
Unbeknownst to the Arabs (or Lawrence), Sykes-Picot established new states chiefly for the purpose of facilitating control over them by Britain and France. Britain took advantage of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations to get the international community’s seal of approval for their territorial ambitions. The League assigned the administration of territories—or “mandates”—in Palestine and Jordan to Britain, and in Syria and Lebanon to France.
World War I marked the low point in Islam’s retreat before Western powers. The Ottoman Empire was dismembered and replaced by a largely secular Turkish republic. In 1924, Kemal Atatürk, the secular founder of modern-day Turkey, abolished the Caliphate. Suddenly, for the first time since the seventh century, there was nobody left to claim the title of caliph, leader of all the world’s Muslims. Radical Islamists, such as the followers of ISIS, consider the dissolution of the Caliphate a tragedy of history, committed by Atatürk, whom they refer to as a “Jewish traitor”—an anti-Semitic slur frequently used in the Islamic world to describe deceivers and mischief-makers.
For the Arabs, one of the bitter fruits of Sykes-Picot was the creation of a mandate in Palestine that allowed Jewish immigrants to fulfill the dream of returning to the land promised to them. Two decades before Israel was officially declared a state by the United Nations, Britain and France set up an entire structure governing how Jews and Arabs could coexist in Palestine.
The end of the nineteenth century brought a terrible wave of anti-Jewish persecution in Eastern Europe, chiefly in Russia, where there was a very large Jewish population. Homes were looted and whole villages were driven out of their homes. It was ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. Many of those refugees came to New York City to live in the tenements of the Lower East Side and Brooklyn.
A large number of refugees also went to Palestine, the land of their forefathers, inspired by the vision of Theodor Herzl, an Austrian Jew who launched the modern Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century. They came with the intention of working and living alongside the Arabs in the region, and the fifty other ethnicities and religions of Palestine. But many Arabs had different ideas.
During the 1920s and the 1930s, anti-Jewish sentiment became increasingly violent among the Palestinian Arabs. Attacks became common, and included the massacre of more than 130 defenseless Jewish civilians during the Palestinian riots of 1929.
When the British mandate was set to expire in 1947, the United Nations proposed a partition plan for Palestine, creating a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem to be under international administration. Israel readily agreed to the partition plan, but the Arabs of Palestine, and the surrounding Arab states, immediately rejected it. They went to war. Arab armies surrounded the Jewish communities of Palestine, cut off their water, and began to massacre them.
The massively outnumbered and outgunned Jewish people prevailed. Not only did the Jewish armies push Arab forces out of Israel, they miraculously managed to capture land beyond their original boundaries. Israelis today remember it as the War of Independence, and as the beginning of the Jewish state of Israel. The Arabs call it nakba: catastrophe.
The creation of Israel and the Arabs’ loss proved a useful propaganda tool for those who saw Islam as the answer for an upside-down world. Now it wasn’t only European powers that were subjugating the Islamic world: Israel itself was an outpost of Western secularism in the heart of the Middle East—and an enduring reminder of the humiliation they suffered.
The ruins of the Ottoman Empire also gave rise to another quasi-state that would one day become a powerful nation: Saudi Arabia. The Salafist movement of Ibn Abdul Wahhab, under the protection of the Saud family, was there to claim the title as the new protector of Islam. The Saudis, with the same alliance forged a century and a half earlier between the Wahhabs and the Sauds, again captured the holy cities of Mecca and Medina to the west. To this day the descendants of Wahhab control the religious institutions of the Saudi state, while the Sauds control its political, economic, and military institutions.
The kingdom of Saudi Arabia rose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in the Arabian Peninsula having staked everything on positioning itself as the strictest and most Salafist state in the Islamic world. The discovery of oil there in the 1930s by Standard Oil Company of California (later Chevron) also made the Sauds the richest and most powerful family in the Muslim world.
The Nazis, the Muslim Brothers, and the Rise of Militant Islam
The 1920s were a time of disarray for the Muslim world. Even during its centuries-long decline the Ottoman Caliphate had symbolized the unity of the Islamic faithful. After it was suddenly gone in 1924, Muslims had no one to look to as a religion-wide leader, as caliph. Christian powers had occupied and divided up their lands with secret and treacherous treaties like Sykes-Picot. In Bernard Lewis’s words: “Like every other civilization known to human history, the Muslim world in its heyday saw itself as the center of truth and enlightenment, surrounded by infidel barbarians whom it would in due course enlighten and civilize.” But after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Muslims watched as their culture was eroded, replaced with Western innovations and traditions like secular constitutions and nation-states that had invaded the Muslim world.
In the eyes of many Muslims, the solution to this upheaval was to revive
Islam. The radicals believed that too many Muslims saw their faith as something that was practiced privately, by prayer and personal communication between the individual and God or by attending mosques once a week on Fridays. But some now believed that this was why the Islamic world had fallen so quickly behind the West and, with the end of the Caliphate, was falling even further behind. Islam, they believed, was a complete and total system that prescribed a political vision and social order. Sharia was the only body of law worth recognizing. The nation-states that divided up the world were false boundaries; the only real boundary was between the Muslim community, the umma or dar al-Islam, and the community of unbelievers, or dar al-harb. The only way to properly realize these objectives was to set up an Islamic state to faithfully implement sharia as Muhammad and the first four rightly guided caliphs had done.
This was the message of the Salafist movement, and it began gaining traction across the Arab world—especially in Egypt, where social unrest and discontent with British occupation and their feckless puppet King Farouk simmered. Egypt was struggling. People couldn’t put food on their table. In the 1930s, Hassan al-Banna came along preaching a message that resonated. He said misery was caused by two things: Western influence, and the Jews.
“Allah is our goal, the prophet our model, the Koran our Constitution, the Jihad our path and death for the sake of Allah the loftiest of our wishes,” al-Banna proclaimed. He would go on to found the Muslim Brotherhood on a platform of violence and hatred that rejected the West and longed to reestablish a Caliphate. In doing so, Hassan al-Banna breathed new life into the fourteen-centuries-old longing for jihad and martyrdom.