This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part Two begins early in the twentieth century, as older ways of doing things and habits of thought give way. What follows is an era of cataclysmic struggles over what ideas and institutions will take their place. The course concludes in the present day, as communities everywhere are transitioning into a new era of world history. Again we work hard to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? Again we are drawn to pivotal choices made at key moments by individuals and communities.
The Muslim World
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The Modern World, Part Two: Global History since 1910
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The Next Phase (1991-2013)
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Philip ZelikowWhite Burkett Miller Professor of History
[BLANK_AUDIO].
Hi, welcome back.
Last time we talked about the bottom
billion and some of the problems that societies
beset by chronic violence and turmoil are dealing
with and the way they may be trapped.
This time I want to talk about a
different kind of outlier from the Great Convergence.
The problems of some Muslim societies in coming
to grips with modernity and adapting to the
modern world, problems that are still working themselves out.
Let's take a closer look.
Let's start as a baseline with thinking about traditional identities in Islamic
societies. As in many traditional
societies, you have
a ruler, called king or
sultan. Clergy. The clergy in
much of the Muslim world is not rigidly hierarchical or formally organized.
In the Sunni parts of the Islamic faith, the access
to the holy word of the Quran is
granted to anyone who can acquire literacy and read the Quran.
And there's not a kind of, Pope of Islam.
There's more of a structured hierarchy of clergy
in the Shia portion of the Islamic faith.
But the clergy in a way are guides.
But they also play the role of being judges because Islam is not
only a source of religious belief, it is also a source of law
to govern a wide variety of social and even commercial interactions, in which
the clergy can help to interpret Islamic law, Islamic
jurisprudence.
The role of the ruler then is important, but in a way relatively narrow.
More functioning atop the surface of a deeply traditional society.
And in that traditional society identities are religious, they're also
ethno-linguistic, for instance as Arabs, as Turks, but they're also
very, very oriented around families and clans.
So now think about the clash and
the overlap between Islamic ideals and liberal ideals.
The whole issue of how or whether Islam and European style liberalism could
be reconciled has been a fertile subject for comment by many Islamic writers.
For instance like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani during the 1800s,
arguing that in fact Islam was quite open to ideas of tolerance, scientific
innovation, that Islam and liberalism were perfectly compatible.
So that Jamal al-Din al-Afghani said that the clash between
Islam and Europe was not over liberalism, it was over imperialism.
It was over foreign intervention in their societies.
On the other hand, some Islamic
thinkers have argued that liberal ideals are
simply too tolerant, too open, and instead
that Islam needs to push back to
defend its culture against the invasion of outsiders.
Therefore, it needs to shelter its
commerce, shelter its world of ideas, shelter
its social customs, and can't simply be passive and open to whatever comes.
Another potential tension between Islamic ideals and liberal ideals
is over the notion of a rule of law.
In European style liberalism, the rule of law is the rule of secular law, outside
of the set of religious beliefs, tolerant of
different religious beliefs but formed through civic traditions.
In the Islamic
tradition, however, the rule of law is deeply religious, and so the issue of
how to accommodate other kinds of legal preferences is a difficult one.
In addition, some liberal ideals are very much
oriented around democracy, majority rule.
Islamic ideals aren't necessarily opposed to majority rule, but
there is this tension of suppose the majority
want something that is deemed to be un-Islamic.
Well, for a devout Islamic believer, the Islamic ideal has to
prevail, even if the majority has voted in a different direction.
Because, after all, one is the word of God.
Again, this kind of tension that we
talked about in the earlier classes, between common
sense as a liberal ideal, the appeal to general belief, and the assertion that in
fact, general belief might not be an
expression of philosophical, religious, or even scientific truth.
But one of the most interesting issues for Islamic philosophers is:
What is the role of the nation state?
You see one of the arguments that's being made in much of the world is that the
nation is the definition of the relevant community, but
the nation is an ethno-linguistic definition of community.
It's even a civic definition of community, and if the nation says,
We provide education, we provide
laws, and the administration of justice based on that definition of community,
what about people who have a profoundly religious definition of community?
What is the relevance of the nation state
in an Islamic ideal of how to organize governance?
So now empathize for a moment with the dilemma of an Islamic thinker,
an Islamic philosopher, confronting European imperialism in
the 1800s, someone like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani.
So his answer back then was to appeal to pan-Islamic rulers, like say
the Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, to
represent all of Islam in combating European imperialism.
But especially with the destruction of
the Ottoman Empire, what alternatives are left?
Well, one major alternative that's found,
is actually a secular and nationalist answer.
So what would be an illustration of that? Well that would be Mustafa Kemal,
also known as Ataturk, and his creation of the
nation state of Turkey. Another example of that was Reza
Shah, and his creation of a more secular nationalist state called Iran.
Both of which were designed to create another kind of
community that could resist outside imperialism, but did so by emphasizing
these definitions of community. So, here's another answer though.
By the 1950s, there was a secular pan-Arab and socialist
answer that was taking shape in places like Egypt and Syria and Iraq.
That's a different definition of community, indeed Gamal
Abdel Nasser tried to create something he called the
United Arab Republic that would be based in both Egypt
and Syria and places like Yemen, united under rule by Cairo, by of
course President Nasser, but representing a pan-Arab and socialist ideal.
As that ideal disappointed, what were people left with then?
They had the secular nationalist answer with
top-down modernizers, national conservatives in places
like Turkey and Iran; pan-Arab socialism didn't
really seem to be very convincing either.
There was then a renewal of traditional answers, that is, maybe an Islamic rule was
needed, an Islamic revolution and, of course, that's
exactly what happened in a place like Iran.
Before we turn to the Iranian Revolution Of the late 1970s, let�s just again get a sense
of where Muslims live in the world, because
they live in a lot of diverse places.
There are a couple of ways of looking at this.
Take a look, for instance, at this map that
illustrates countries that have more than a million Muslims.
If you studied this map for a minute you'll immediately realize
that the Arab world is certainly not synonymous with the Muslim world.
Indeed, the majority of the world�s Muslims are not Arabs,
and they live in places as far flung as Indonesia and even a non-trivial
number's in Russia and China and just a little bit in the United States.
Little bits of Muslim population here in Europe as well, but also in Africa.
Here's another map, provided by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public
Life, that's another way of graphically
representing the world distribution of Muslim population.
You can see that a country like India actually has one of the
largest Muslim populations in the world, even
though the majority of the population are Hindus.
Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, plus Indonesia, huge concentration
of Muslim population in those four countries.
Then you see Iran here, plus some of the Arab Muslim world,
places like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Notice
also the significance of Nigeria, here, with Turkey
and the Turkic Muslim world, in this area.
The Iranian Revolution of 1978 and 1979
really is an important world historical development.
It represented a rejection of the secular
nation state, the national conservative top-down modernizers.
There was an economic agenda there, a sense of people who were left out, but
also an assertion of religious identity. In
Shia Islam, there is a hierarchy of clerics with
ayatollahs being at the top. This particular rally
was taking notice of an exiled ayatollah, an opponent of the
shah's regime, who was returning to Iran and would lead the Iranian revolutionary
government that took power in 1978 and �79. Here he is, Ayatollah Khomeini.
Ayatollah Khomeini sets himself up as the absolute authority of
Islamic law in Iran, and therefore the supreme leader of the state.
Now among other ayatollahs, the whole entry of an ayatollah
into the more civic domain of taking charge of a state was
something that left them very uneasy, and is very controversial to this day.
But that's been the reigning ideology of
the Iranian Revolution for now nearly 40 years.
There was another Islamic revolution in Afghanistan.
This one also against a top-down modernizer, but the
revolution in the 1970s in Afghanistan wasn't against someone who
was an ally of the United States, it was against
Top-down modernizers who were allied with the Soviet Union.
Things got so out of hand that the Soviet
Union itself felt compelled to invade Afghanistan with its troops
by the end of 1979. So by the early 1980s, the Muslim world
was in a good deal of upheaval. Saudi Arabia was challenged by this.
Because what was happening is the Iranians are asserting we're now
the center of dynamic Islam. We're now leading
the Islamic revolution, and so, just as Moscow and
Beijing were once rivals for who would lead the international socialist
revolution, Tehran and Riyadh had become rivals as to what would be the
center of the Islamic revolutions of the 1980s and 1990s.
So Saudia Arabia, with its oil wealth, puts a huge amount
of money behind supporting its version of Islam, as being dynamic,
evangelizing, spreading its faith throughout North Africa, in
Yemen, in countries like Pakistan, through Islamic
foundations, spreading its fundamentalist view as a way
of balancing against the arguments being made coming out of Iran.
But the competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran, making these fervent Islamic
arguments, have some important effects in places likes
Pakistan and Sudan and the Balkans during the 1990s.
Pakistan also then undergoes civil turmoil, and under a
military dictatorship, effectively adopts a kind of Islamic rule.
Sudan consciously adopts an Islamic government during the 1990s, and gives
shelter to the leader of a new organization
called Al-Qaeda, a man named Osama Bin
Laden, who lived in Sudan, under the protection
of the Sudanese government, in the early to mid-1990s.
Until, in 1996, he left Sudan for an
even better safe haven in Afghanistan, from which
the Soviets had now left, and an Islamic republic
is being created by a group called the Taliban.
And during the 1990s in the Balkans, when Muslims are under attack in places like
Bosnia from Serbians and Christians, both Catholics or Greek Orthodox Christians,
people in Saudi Arabia felt like they needed to rally to the
cause of defending their Muslim brethren under attack, say, in Bosnia, in Sarajevo.
So places like Pakistan, Sudan,
the Balkans, all become theaters of conflict
in the rivalry between Iran and Saudi
Arabia, and the general sense among many Muslims that their faith was under attack.
So from the point of view of these revolutionary Islamic believers
in places like Saudi Arabia or in Iran, in the 1980s and 1990s, who are
they against?
Well, the Saudi Arabian government isn't funding
people to attack the government of Saudi Arabia.
Now, Al-Qaeda, which is based, at this point, by the
late 1990s, in Afghanistan, is against the government of Saudi Arabia.
But the Saudis and their fundamentalist beliefs, they're looking at general threat
to the Muslim world and indeed the kind of enemies they identify,
like the kind of enemies the Iranians are identifying, are above all the global
America. Not just the American government, not just American government policies,
it's all the things America represents culturally, socially, that gives them
the sense that the Muslim world is not just under physical attack.
It's under cultural attack through the insidious workings
of television, movies, books, the arguments for the liberation of
women that will upend the traditional social conservatism that they
argue is a characteristic of Islam they want people to
practice in Saudi Arabia, in Yemen, in Pakistan, in Sudan.
America isn't their only enemy, they are
also opposed to the government of Russia which
they feel is persecuting the Muslims in Russia's borders, the
Chechens in the Caucasus region. They also hate the government of India,
ruled by Hindus persecuting, in their view, Muslims,
and engaged in a geopolitical battle with the state of Pakistan
since the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947.
It also had been opposed, of course, to the state of Israel which had been a
chronic irritant ever since its creation in 1947 and 1948.
I haven't talked that much about the
Arab-Israeli conflict in the course so far.
I actually find this conflict fascinating.
I've spent a lot of time working on it, but as a
historian, I don't think the Arab-Israeli conflict has actually been a big causal
engine in the course of world history, though I
think the Suez Crisis of 1956 itself is extremely important.
But it's worth, in this context, reminding ourselves what that conflict was about.
The creation of a Jewish state of Israel and the competing
claims of national community and identity in this part of the world.
This was the original U.N.
scheme of partition. When neither side really accepted this partition, though the
Israeli state was perhaps a little more willing to go along with it,
there was a war in 1948 and 1949 that
produced the borders you see here outlined in red.
Then there were a series of further Arab-Israeli wars in 1967 and 1973.
By the end of 1973, all these
areas in purple and violet were occupied by Israel.
In a peace treaty with Egypt negotiated in 1978,
this area, the Sinai, was returned to the
government of Egypt, the Israelis remain an occupying power
in the West Bank, here, and the Golan
Heights, here, overlooking Israeli agricultural settlements in the Galilee.
For some devout Muslims, the whole existence of
the state of Israel is an affront; for
many of other devout Muslims, and many Arabs
living in the area, they're prepared to accept a
two-state solution, but they have arguments about what
the delineation of the states should be, and
they want Israel to relax its control of
the West Bank and perhaps even the Golan Heights.
So you see all these external
enemies that are so much the focus of Islamic revolutionary hostility in the
1980s and 1990s, but there are also internal enemies, especially governments like those
in Egypt that represent secular modernizers
who don't accept their Islamic ideals, and,
of course, they believe that these
governments are puppets of the United States.
At least, that's the view of an organization
like Al-Qaeda.
These Islamic revolutions come home over the last 15 years.
A first big explosion actually occurs in Russia in late 1999.
Apartment buildings in Moscow are blown up.
Hundreds of Muscovites lose their lives. The finger is pointed at Chechen Muslims
in the south.
This was seized upon by the Yeltsin government and became the vehicle for
the rise to power of Vladimir Putin and the reconstruction of the Russian state.
The Russians do find themselves in a civil war against the Chechen Muslims.
Al-Qaeda, an Islamist extremist group based primarily
in Afghanistan, though receiving support from Pakistan and
from the local Taliban, organized a series
of attacks against the United States, attacking
embassies in East Africa in 1998, attacking
an American warship in Yemen in October 2000,
and finally getting the full attention of the United States with,
of course, the famous 9/11 attacks that occur on September 11, 2001.
The United States thus does acknowledge that
is indeed at war with this group that had been fighting
it for years, and the United States counterattacks in full force,
sending its troops to Afghanistan to chase Al-Qaeda out of
its safe havens, and the remnants retreat into the state of Pakistan.
Here's a map from September 2001.
The Taliban mainly controlled this area you see here.
They were locked in a civil war against a
Northern Alliance of a number of different ethno-linguistic groups that
are noted on this chart, who are receiving supports from governments like
the Russian government, the Indian government, the Tajik government.
The concentration of American effort then was to ally themselves with the Northern
Alliance, attack southward, defeat the Taliban allies of Al-Qaeda,
run them off, and then chase the Al-Qaeda remnants away as well.
That war has continued in one form or another
up to the present day, and even now in
early 2013, there are about 60,000 American soldiers still
stationed in Afghanistan, helping the government of Afghanistan that was
reconstructed in 2001 and 2002.
The wars in the Islamic world then expanded to include the state of Iraq.
Iraq was a chronic source of conflict for the last 30 years.
It was ruled by one of the most brutal dictatorships in the entire
world under a man named Saddam Hussein, who took power during the 1970s.
In the 1980s, he launches wars against Iran.
Iran counterattacks. In 1990, he launches another invasion,
this one of
the neighboring oil sheikdom of Kuwait.
An international coalition, under United Nations authority, rallies, expels him
from Kuwait, puts strictures on Iraq, and what Iraq can do, dismantles
the nuclear weapons program, that in 1990-91 was really quite well advanced.
Iraq slowly breaks free from those international restrictions.
The international inspections regime
that had put in place in 1991 had broken down by 1997.
Chronic tensions ensue over Iraq.
Regular low grade combat operations in the skies over Iraq trying to police
the inspection regime keep Iraq from
restarting its nuclear or biological weapons programs.
That's the context then, when America is attacked on
9/11, goes into Afghanistan, and the American government decides, in 2002, that
it has to settle the issue of Iraq once and for all.
Iraq, itself, does not get plunged into war
because it is a center of violent Islamist extremism.
It is not part of an Islamic revolutionary movement,
but a consequence of the American invasion of Iraq in
2003 and the displacement of the dictator is they
take the lid off a very deeply divided country.
And what happens then, really, is an Iraqi Revolution.
The Shia majority population, in effect, wants to
take over control of the new Iraqi state.
That revolution, in turn, triggers a civil
war, and the civil war includes the element
of a fight, a war, against the foreign occupation of the United States.
So this is now a fairly complicated war that ensues.
It's both an anti-foreign war, some Iraqis
fighting the Americans, but the Americans are also
allied with many Iraqis, including many Shia,
who are trying to establish their new state.
And that new state is in turn prompting a civil
war, in which Sunni Arabs are fighting
Shias, Sunnis in the north are fighting Kurds.
In the south, some Shias are fighting other Shia Arabs, who are also fighting the
Americans, so both an international war and a civil war blending together,
until the United States finally withdraws from Iraq and the country moves
into a tenuous peace, still working out how it will
attain long-term peace in a deeply divided but new state.
Now, after the Iraq War subsides, the attention begins to shift away from the
United States, in the foreground of all these problems in the Muslim world.
The United States out of Iraq, United States withdrawing from Afghanistan, and
more and more Muslims, but especially Arabs, are looking at the governments in charge,
and they're rejecting the model of secular,
national dictatorships. There, above all, we
see the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya,
where all those dictatorships are being thrown out.
Now, a civil war going on in Syria, against yet another one of those kind
of national dictatorships. But what will take its place?
That's the issue currently being decided
in this transitional period in world history.
Ask yourself: What are the options for what could take
the place of these secular, national, or pan-Arab socialist models?
Well, one option, Islamic dictatorships?
Tried in Sudan, didn't work out very well. Being tried in Iran,
but the Iranian model is not widely regarded as a success outside of Iran.
Democratic socialism? This could be another secular model.
And that's actually the point of view of a lot
of people in the working class in Egypt, for instance.
They reject the pure Islamist model, but they want
to overthrow the aristocracy created by the crony capitalism
of the top-down modernizers who are enriching just
themselves and their friends at the expense of everybody else.
So, in that sense, the Egyptians might be looking to models from,
say, mid-20th century Mexico
or Brazil. What about Islamic social democracy?
The same kind of model we've been talking about of social democracy, but perhaps
with an Islamic flavor: more adherence to Islamic ideals, figuring out what areas
of the public life to carve out for civic ideals and for Islamic ideals.
For instance, just this dilemma and tension is being worked out in countries like
Turkey today, which has reacted against the purely secular model, with
more of an Islamist democracy, but along these lines of a social democracy.
Or in a large country like Indonesia, or in
a country like Bangladesh, or maybe there is some
other option that I'm not putting here, or some hybrid that we're not seeing.
What is clear, then, is that this is
a period of active political transition and turbulence for
a lot of the Islamic world, in which
they're still sorting out how to organize their societies.
The kind of arguments that played out through much of
the century are very much still playing out in these countries,
including such fundamental issues as: What will be the
role of the half of our population who are women?
So let's pause and take stock of what we've covered so far.
We talked about the postwar settlements, broad
set of political economic structures that come into play.
We've talked about a Great Convergence
with globalization and some positive trends.
We've talked about outliers from some of those positive trends, outliers of two
very different kinds, that bottom billion
problem, beset by chronic violence, and also
the problems, the distinctive problems, of some of the Islamic societies and how
they're wrestling with how to organize
communities and come to grips with modernism.
In the next presentation,
I want to return to one more facet of transition in modern world history.
What is going on with modern capitalism?
That'll be the subject for next time. See you then.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
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