among others. The common denominator to all these forms is their attachment to a culturalist thesis in which religions and ethnic groups are characterized by transhistorical specificities that define inviolable identities. Even though without scientific foundation, these positions are nonetheless able to mobilize the masses who are marginalized and made helpless by destructive capitalist modernity. They are thus effective means for manipulation that are incorporated into strategies designed to reinforce submission to the joint dictatorship of the dominant forces in capitalist globalization and their local and subaltern transmission channels. Political Islam is a good example of this method for managing peripheral capitalism. In Latin America and Africa, the proliferation of quasi-Protestant obscurantist “sects,” supported by North American authorities to hinder liberation theology, manipulates the helplessness of the excluded and their revolt against the conservative official church.
[ABOVE EXTRACTS ARE FROM THE REAWAKENING OF THE ARAB WORLD.]13
3. MODERNITY, DEMOCRACY, SECULARISM, AND ISLAM
The image that the Arab and Islamic region gives of itself today is that of societies in which religion (Islam) is in the forefront of all areas of social and political life—to the point that it seems incongruous to imagine that it could be otherwise. The majority of foreign observers (political leaders and the media) conclude from this that modernity, even democracy, must be adapted to the heavy presence of Islam, thereby de facto precluding secularism.
Modernity is a rupture in universal history that began in sixteenth-century Europe. Modernity proclaims that the human being is responsible for his or her own history, individually and collectively, and consequently breaks with the dominant premodern ideologies. Modernity thus allows democracy, just as it demands secularism, in the sense of separation of the religious and the political.
From this point of view, where do the peoples of the Middle Eastern region stand? The image of crowds of bearded men prostrating themselves, as well as cohorts of veiled women, can and does inspire hasty conclusions about the intensity of the religious commitment being expressed. The social pressures exerted to obtain the result are rarely mentioned. The women have not chosen the veil, it has been imposed on them with prior violence. Absence from prayer almost always costs the person in question work, sometimes even that person’s life. Western “culturalist” friends who call for respect for the diversity of beliefs rarely inquire into the procedures implemented by governments to present an image that suits them. There are certainly religious extremists (fous de Dieu). Are there proportionately more of them than the Spanish Catholics who parade at Easter, or the innumerable fanatics in the United States who listen to televangelists?
In any case, the region has not always presented this image of itself. Beyond differences from one country to another, we can identify a large region extending from Morocco to Afghanistan, including all Arabs (except those from the Arabian peninsula), Turks, Iranians, Afghans, and the peoples of the former Soviet Central Asia, in which the potential for the development of secularism is far from negligible. The situation is different among some neighboring peoples, such as the Arabs of the Arabian peninsula or the Pakistanis.
In this extensive area, the political traditions were strongly affected by the radical currents of modernity. The Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the communism of the Third International had an impact on thinking and acting and certainly were more important than Westminster-style parliamentarianism, for example. These dominant currents inspired the major models of political transformation that the ruling classes implemented, which in some ways could be called forms of “enlightened despotism.”
This was certainly the case in the Egypt of Muhammad Ali or the Khedive Ismail Pasha. Kemalism in Turkey and modernization in Iran proceeded with similar methods. The national populism characteristic of the more recent stages of history belongs to the same family of “modernist” political projects. The model’s variants were numerous (the Algerian FLN, Tunisian Bourguibism, Egyptian Nasserism, and Baathism in Syria and Iraq), but moved in a similar direction. The apparently extreme experiences—the so-called communist governments in Afghanistan and South Yemen—were in reality not very different. All these governments accomplished a great deal and, consequently, had very wide popular support. That is why, even when they were not truly democratic, they opened the way to a possible evolution in that direction. In some circumstances—such as those in Egypt between 1920 and 1950—an experiment in electoral democracy was attempted, supported by the moderate anti-imperialists (the Wafd) and fought by the dominant imperialist power (Great Britain) and its local allies (the monarchy). Secularism—admittedly implemented in moderate versions—was not “rejected” by the people. It was, on the contrary, religious figures that were considered obscurantists in public opinion—which most of them were.
Modernist experiments—from enlightened despotism to radical national populism—were not the product of chance. Powerful political movements, dominant in the middle classes, were behind these experiments. In this way, these classes were asserting themselves as full and equal partners in modern globalization, and their “national bourgeois” projects were modernist, secularist, and potentially bearers of democratic developments. But precisely because these projects came into conflict with the interests of the dominant imperialism, the latter fought them relentlessly and systematically mobilized obscurantist forces for this purpose.
The history of the Muslim Brotherhood is well known. The British and the monarchy literally created it in the 1920s in Egypt to counter the democratic and secular Wafd. Also well known is that the CIA and Anwar Sadat organized its mass return from Saudi exile after the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Then there is the history of the Taliban formed by the CIA and Pakistan to fight against the “communists” who had opened schools to everyone, boys and girls. Let us also remember that the Israelis supported Hamas at the beginning to weaken the secular and democratic currents of the Palestinian resistance.
Political Islam would have had much difficulty in expanding beyond the borders of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan without the firm, powerful, and ongoing support of the United States. Saudi society had not even begun its transition from tradition when the vast petroleum reservoirs were discovered. The business and political alliance between imperialism and the “traditional” ruling class was immediately sealed, thereby reinvigorating reactionary Wahhabi political Islam. For their part, the British succeeded in breaking Indian unity by convincing the Muslim leaders to create their own state, imprisoned from the very beginning in political Islam. Note that the theory by which this curiosity was legitimized—attributed to Mawdudi—had previously been fully drafted by English Orientalists in Her Majesty’s service.
In the same vein, the U.S. initiative to break the united front of Asian and African states established in Bandung in 1955 led to the creation of an “Islamic Conference” immediately promoted (beginning in 1957) by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Political Islam penetrated into the region by this means.
The least of the conclusions that should be drawn from these observations is that political Islam is not the spontaneous product of an authentic assertion of religious conviction by the peoples in question. Political Islam was systematically constructed by imperialism and supported, of course, by obscurantist reactionary forces and subservient comprador classes. It is undeniable that the various left forces neither saw nor knew how to confront the challenge, and that is their failure.
4. THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE UNITED STATES’ MILITARY PROJECT
The United States’ project, supported to varying degrees by its subaltern European and Japanese allies, is to establish its military control over the entire world—what I have called the “extension of the Monroe Doctrine to the planet.” With that in mind, the “Middle East” was chosen as the region for the “first strike” for at least four reasons: (i) it harbors the world’s most abundant petroleum resources, and its direct control by the armed forces of the United States would give Washington a privileged position, placing their allies—Europe and Japan—and its potential rivals (China) in the uncomfortable position of dependence on the United States for their energy supplies; (ii) it is located at the center of the old world and facilitates the exercise of a permanent military threat against China, India, and Russia; (iii) the region is going through a period of weakness and confusion that allows the aggressor