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Jihad in a World of Shattered Dreams: Islam, Arab Politics, and the Gulf Crisis
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18963 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
5,000 Words |
| Author
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John L. Esposito
John L. Esposito is director of the Center for International
Studies and professor of Religious Studies at the College of
the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts and president of the
Middle East Studies Association and of the American Council
for the Study of Islamic Societies. Among his recent
publications are Islam and Politics (Syracuse University
Press) and Islam: The Straight Path (Oxford University Press). |
Just as the events of 1979 (the Iranian revolution) and of 1989 (detente and the triumph of the democratization movement in Eastern Europe) were unforseen watersheds in world history, so too the Gulf crisis of 1990 has altered the map of the Middle East and with it turned upside down and inside out the politics of the region. The Middle East as it has been known and understood is no more.
On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein did the unexpected; for the first time in modern history an Arab nation invaded and seized (and subsequently annexed) another Arab country. A short time later, Saddam Hussein, a secular socialist who had suppressed Islamic fundamentalism at home and abroad, did what some had thought unthinkable. Saddam cloaked himself in the mantle of Islam and called for a jihad.
For many in the West, the Gulf crisis is the product of a modern-day Hitler whose naked aggression against Kuwait and threat to the Gulf have been confronted by an unusually united international community, from the United Nations Security Council to the European Community to the Arab League. However, as popular support in many parts of the Arab and Muslim world have shown, in the eyes of many the crisis in the Gulf is but another episode of Western intervention and occupation. On the one hand, some Western commentators have tried to explain relations between Islam and the West in general and the Gulf crisis in particular in terms of Muslim rage. On the other hand, many Muslims see the West's response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as another example of Western imperialism and, with the passing of the "Red Menace," a contemporary Western fear of the "Green (Islamic) Menace."
Despite the tendency by Western governments and the media to regard the Gulf crisis as a clear battle between the forces of good and evil, a struggle between a Western alliance supported by the world community (including the bulk of the "moderate" Arab world) and a ruthless dictator, the reality is far more complex. The Gulf crisis has simultaneously seen an apparently united Arab response to a rapacious, expansionist Iraq and, at a deeper level, an Arab and indeed Muslim world divided to an unparalleled extent. Understanding these seeming contradictions requires a perspective that distinguishes between the rhetoric of governments and the Western media and the popular sentiment in the Arab and broader Muslim world. In particular, an appreciation of the Islamic dimension of the Gulf crisis, Saddam Hussein's appeal to Islam and call for a jihad as well as the Muslim response to his appeals, must be seen against the background of Islam's impact on Middle Eastern politics
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