Month: April 2006

by Christopher Chantrill
Are the Muslim peoples helpless victims or ruthless imperialists? Should we treat their aspirations are worthy attempts to build an authentic Islamic culture or should we treat it as a naked imperialist quest?

In an article in Commentary Efraim Karsh reminds us that Islam has always organized itself upon the model of the desert raiding party, living off the loot seized from the victims of its military raids. Asserts Karsh: Mohammed “devised the concept of jihad shortly after his migration to Medina as a means of enticing his local followers to raid Meccan caravans.”

This pattern was followed by all the inheritors of Mohammed’s mantle. It was always expansionist, always using the jihad as an excuse to colonize and expropriate other peoples’ wealth and labor. This “shameless exploitation triggered numerous rebellions throughout the empire,” rebellions that were ruthlessly and bloodily put down right down to the end of the Ottoman Empire.

The great question before us today is whether this ancient imperial model of conquest and plunder can work in the modern world, or whether the jihadists can make it work. We westerners like to think that the rise of commerce and industry in the last millennium has made the old imperial model obsolete. Continue reading “Islamists are Imperialists”

Islam’s Imperial Dreams

Mr. Efraim Karsh is head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, University of London, and his new book, “Islamic Imperialism: A History,” on which this article is based, is about to be published by Yale.

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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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. (Click on the title to read the whole article)