Bereans Blog

One of our Bereans colleagues e-mailed to say he wished one of us would blog on the situation in the Middle East and on Islamic radical ideology.  He had watched a Heritage Foundation event on the subject, which I had seen a part of as well.  Well, I will take up the challenge, but realizing that it is really a pretty big task, since it requires a significant examination of historical background.  So don’t be surprised if the blog requires two (or more) parts.

Most people who watch the news have a rough idea of what is happening now in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Palestine and Israel.  In each region, we see a more or less organized group of terrorists whose apparent aim is to either kill or dominate all non-confessors of Islam, kill Americans, establish some form of an Islamic religious state, or kill Jewish people, OR all of the above.  Sometimes they even advocate killing their own fellow Muslims if they are seen as not sufficiently radical or religious.  All of these terrorist organizations are to some extent related, not just regarding their belief systems but also in their common or overlapping origins.  So let’s begin back in the Middle Ages—I promise this will be brief.

First I don’t want to forget the earliest internal dissension within Islam not too long after Muhammed’s death, the Sunni-Shia split.  This continuing fracture has historically been the most important factor in Muslim on Muslim violence, but the split is not as important in the current radicalization.  Still it is important to bear in mind as we consider, for example, that Iran is a Shiite regime while others are Sunni, and that Iraq contains Sunnis, Shiites and Sufis, resulting in conflict.  But again, Sunnis and Shias both have spawned radical groups and sometimes even cooperate against the common enemy—the West.

Up to around 1100 AD, the Islamic world, while not exactly a paragon of peace and virtue, did produce a fair amount of what we call “civilization,” as evidenced in its philosophy, scientific thought (albeit borrowing much from the Greeks), and to some degree in its theological discussions and debates.  To simplify what happened next, along came a philosopher named al-Ghazali  who began to reject philosophy and pretty much any influence from the West.  He advocated a return to the strict adherence to the Quran.  Some might call this “Fundamentalism,” but that is an unfortunate term, since Christian Fundamentalists are nowhere near the Islamic type of strict adherent.  At any rate, as time passed, al-Ghazali’s ideas came to resonate more and more with those in secular and religious power—and with certain more fanatical elements of society.  Bernard Lewis has articulated well the attitude of many in the Arab Islamic world in the 13^th through the 19^th centuries with the title of his book What Went Wrong?  The conclusion by many was that two major, very bad things happened:  the influence and power of the West and the failure to return to a Quran-based religion.

The first organized group of dissenters was the Wahhabi movement of the late 18^th century in what is now Saudi Arabia.  Osama bin-Laden owed much to its influence.  Other radical groups were not too long in developing, particularly as the European powers asserted control of the Arab world.  The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in the early 20^th century in Egypt.  Anti-Jewish sentiment fueled further radicalism, both after World War One and especially when Israel became a state in 1948.  After the European powers left in the 1940s, the militant groups and centers of activity began to proliferate—Hizbollah, al-Qaeda, al-Islamiyya, al-Jihad, Taliban, Shiite radicalism in Iran, ISIS, Hamas, and others, older and newer.  They were kept in check to some extent by secular dictators (like Saddam Hussein and Abdul Nasser).  But as time passed radicalism became increasingly difficult to hold back.  As early as 1972 we see terrorism at the Munich Olympics directed specifically at Jews.  But by the end of the 1970s this activity had expanded to the Western powers.

We also have to include here as part of the context for modern terrorism the often duplicitous actions of England and France before World War I, during World War I, after the war, during World War II and after, promising first one group, then another, using one faction against another.  One might call that inevitable realistic diplomacy, but it did act as a catalyst for the rise and proliferation of terrorism—even if terrorism is not justified.  So while we can speak about terror groups independently of any supposed justification for their existence, we cannot ignore the context out of which they arose, if only to avoid such entanglements in the future.

One more historical issue:  Some would like to say that the West’s insatiable demand for oil was the cause of imperialism in the Middle East and the wars fought there.  While oil was discovered there in the early twentieth century, it has not been particularly crucial to the rise of terrorism, except to help fund it in some instances.  Especially after 1973, with the formation of OPEC, the Middle East nations have been compensated extremely generously for their cartel operation, much more than they would have received in a free market.  And most of those nations have not used the oil revenue to enhance the lives of their citizens but to line the pockets of cronies, friends, relatives and to purchase weapons to use against Israel at one time or another—or against each other.

This has been a quick historical overview of the background to the problems in the Middle East.  In the next installment I will address ideological, theological and other ideas that have contributed to the “Terrorist Mind.”