Reading is believing

 

In the past, insurgent movements have been systematically demonised, whether it was the FLN, the Mau-Mau, the Vietcong, the Khmer Rouge, the PLO, the Tamil Tigers, the FARC, etc. etc. Their ideologies were nationalist and social, often inspired by Stalin and/or Mao. These were Cold War insurgencies against European and American imperial dominion, and they had the logistical and/or verbal support of Russia and/or China. Though they were legitimately fighting to get rid of foreign rule and oppression, they were cast as proxy combatants instigated and encouraged by the empire’s Cold War opponents. They were enemies threatening the existence of Western societies, so that their extermination justified the use of high explosives, napalm, agent-orange, drugs, murder and mayhem. Insurgents were savage terrorists who killed civilians with knives and hand grenades, so their villages and towns could justifiably be reduced to rubble by aerial bombing.

For the first thirty years of the Cold War insurgencies were one-sided, but in 1979 the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan and was soon confronting insurgents supported by America and its allies. This reversal of proxy skirmishing was a paradigmatic substitution that went unnoticed at the time. It was seen as a tit for tat. Afghanistan would be for the USSR what Vietnam had been for the USA, a festering sore whose infection would spread to neighbouring countries. So it was, and when the Soviet troops left ten years later, the USSR was in such a pitiable state, morally and economically, that it would only last two more years. But this opposition of Super Powers, where the one’s loss is the other’s gain, masked the mutation of insurgent motivations. Social nationalism had become religious tribalism.

The 4^th Afghan war set off a revival of Sunni fundamentalism unseen since Abd al-Wahhab two centuries earlier. These new insurgents were not practicing dialectal materialism. They were applying a literal reading of the Koran. Instead of a one party dictatorship with a supreme leader, they had a theocracy with an emir as their secular and religious authority. Malraux once commented that, just as the 20^th century had been materialist, the 21^st century could be spiritual. Concerning insurgencies this was prophetic, for the rest time will tell. Saudi fundamentalism had set up schools in the Pashtun tribal region along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. These madrasa formed the beliefs of the Taliban insurgency, using the recipes that had provided an army for Ibn Saud’s conquest of a kingdom in the 1920s. This salafist proselytism spread to North and West Africa, to Iraq and Syria and to Central Asia, with generous funding from Saudi Arabia. It was like a trail of powder waiting to be lit.

Religious fundamentalism is a powerful force. It set Europeans at each other’s throats for a couple of centuries and left visible scars. It provides a degree of certainty that overrides reason and accepts no compromise. It resides in the other dimension of ethereal existence, where some primordial being presides over universal destiny. In the Hellenic world laws were man made. Greek gods were too busy to intervene more than occasionally in human affairs, and when they did their motives were more often erotic than moral. In Mesopotamia the first known set of rules is attributed to Hammurabi, and he seems to have claimed some celestial backing. Then, according to the transmitted story, about half a millennium later Moses used thunder and lightning – he was a famous magician – to give a theological origin to his Commandments. Much later still, the origins of written laws in West and East formed a hybrid when man was made god in Augustinian Rome and god was made man in rural Galilee, and when the two concepts were merged by Constantine. The god-man made him man-god at the Milvian Bridge. In the Eastern tradition, Jesus/Joshua was a prophet who heard god. This did not mean anything to Greeks who made him a son of god, in accordance with their own mythologies. The only trace of his passage was first and second-hand anecdotal accounts collected and written down afterwards. But Christian dogma and consequent schisms were not about the message of the Gospels. They centred round the nature of Christ, his conception and birth, his death and resurrection, and the consistence of the Christian sacrament, bread and wine or flesh and blood. The East had no taste for this, however, and as soon as the Greco-Latin influence waned a traditional god-hearing prophet arose with a new set of god-given commandments.

Fundamentalism is the literal interpretation of the original texts. Christian fundamentalism should logically found itself on the Gospels, but they contain more parables and miracles than injunctions (love thy neighbour, turn the other cheek, render unto Caesar). This absence of solid ground means that Christian fundamentalists go back to the Pentateuch, which puts them on a paradoxical par with Jewish fundamentalists. Moslem fundamentalism has the Koran, more or less dictated by Mohamed under angelic influence, and the Hadith, a compilation of the prophet’s acts and words passed on by contemporary witnesses. Fundamentalists have to go back in time. Their literal interpretation of a text needs a reconstitution of its historic context. For Jews and Christians this leads to the obscure times of Bronze Age warring kingdoms and Iron Age migrations, whereas the foundation of Islam in the 7^th century is so much closer. All the more so in a region where medieval institutions still existed at the beginning of the 20^th century, and where tribal structures are still in place concerning alliances and land rights. For those who inhabit the stretch of land that goes from Mesopotamia to the Red Sea, travelling fourteen centuries into the past does not demand a great feat of imagination. For them the Hegira was yesterday.

For most of the last century insurgents wished for a different future and rejected their colonial and pre-colonial past. They opposed the Western empires and took the Eastern empires as models. This resulted in various one party police-states. These new national regimes, like their standards in Moscow and Peking, pushed religion into a corner and some imagined they could eradicate it. Religious organisations were considered a singular part of a nation’s cultural heritage or they were reproved as reactionary forces. In the 1980s, insurgency changed camps in Afghanistan (and Angola). The Soviet army (Cubans in Angola) was the target and America was supporting the insurgents. However, liberal market capitalism is not compatible with an insurgent war so that neither Cold War adversary could serve as a model, which left the way open for a regression to ancient faiths and practices. Nevertheless, Afghan insurgents were presented as resolute Western allies, and Massoud became a celebrity. This enthusiasm waned when Soviet troops retreated and different factions turned to fighting one another. It was evaporated by 9/11.

Reagan and Bush Senior had seen off the Soviet empire and won the Cold War, but it was Clinton who reaped all the benefits. By the time Dubya Bush took office the insouciant hedonistic epoch was over. The dotcom crash had cast a shadow, and the September attack would trigger off the 4^th World War. Dubya had lost his birthright of ease and golf, he compensated by declaring a global War on Terror. In “Absolute Friends” (2003), John Le Carré has one of the “friends” (Sasha) define a terrorist as someone who has a bomb, but does not have a plane to drop it from. Because the ultimate terror, all witnesses seem to agree, is aerial bombardment, when everything explodes in flames and smoke, when bodies are dismembered and burnt, when fighting back or hiding are impossible. The first publicised case was Guernica (1937) during the Spanish civil war (earlier British aerial bombings in Iraq during the Mandate had gone unnoticed). It provoked an uproar and inspired a famous painting, but it would soon become a banality and a periodical daily routine. When asked what he felt when he dropped a bomb on Gaza, an Israeli pilot explained that his plane would buck when the 1000lb. load was released. How could he feel anything else while going about his daily business between breakfast and lunch? Piloting a very sophisticated machine (F-16) needs absolute concentration, so that any qualms he might have about the fate of those on the receiving end of his munitions would have to be repressed, though he might dream of them at night. The military feel no compunction about killing men and women, young and old, because they have been ordered to and have been trained to obey, and because it is usually done with weapons that kill, maim and burn at a distance. The air force is the most detached and the deadliest.

The nuclear stand-off between major powers resulted in all actual fighting being asymmetric, B-52s against hand-grenades, Reapers against kitchen-knives. Dropping TNT and toxic agents indiscriminately from the sky was the civilised norm, whereas planting a (roadside) bomb at a selected target was despicable and barbaric. Arresting and torturing all opposition was a government’s prerogative, but taking hostages was beyond the pale. The asymmetric fighting produced an asymmetric discourse. Reducing a city to rubble was far more moral than a check-point car bomb, the first was war and the second was terrorism. Making war, whether defensive or pre-emptive, is a regalian power of governments. The use of force against those governments is banditry. In the past, one side’s criminal was the other side’s freedom fighter. Then, as the Soviet Union began to fall apart and its satellite countries ousted their former governments, the possibility of regime change spread far and wide. For some the transition was Velvet or Orange, for others there were violent eruptions, which led to war in the Balkans and Caucasus. Elsewhere police repression maintained the status quo. However, the idea that authoritarian regimes were not perpetual was sown and it would flower, at least briefly, wherever the one-party police state was in place.

In the 1980s, as Reagan warmed up the Cold War, religious fundamentalism was encouraged and used as a weapon, not only in Poland and Afghanistan. The Catholic pope was an instrument and so was Saudi Arabia, whose rigorous Sunni ideology conveniently opposed the breakaway Shia regime in Iran. The Vatican gave its moral support and may have influenced opinions. The Saudi family used some of its vast financial resources. They built schools and mosques, they funded charitable organisations and ended up supporting political oppositions. After the Russian retreat in 1989 and after taking Kabul in 1992 the Afghan insurgency split into factions and started fighting for supremacy. Having no particular allegiance to any of the parties, this ethnic and tribal conflict left the foreign volunteers out on a limb. Many decided to go back to their home countries. Their numbers were small, but the aura of the successful Jihadi may have weighed in the balance when popular Moslem movements opposed their governments in Algeria, Bosnia and Chechnya, and when opposition turned into armed conflict. They prevailed in Bosnia because of a strong nationalist sentiment against Serbian (Orthodox) dominion, and because of external (UN) intervention. In the other two countries the Islamists were pummelled, which caused a lot of collateral damages and deaths. A few exhausted survivors were offered an amnesty, but there is still insurgent activity in both countries.

The first decade of the new millennium seemed a reversion to past practices, with Moscow sending troops to support its puppet governments in Georgia and Chechnya, and Washington doing the same in Afghanistan and – after a mysterious jostling inside Dubya’s mind – in Iraq. This was classic foreign intervention and curtailment of sovereignty. The novelty was that these were no longer considered to be proxy conflicts, so the Chechen got no support from the West and the Afghans got none from the East. However, it was the fateful invasion of Iraq in 2003 that set off the new line of fracture. Saddam Hussein’s one-party police state rested on the Sunni Arab tribes and the urban Christian Arabs. It excluded the Shia Arabs living in the South and the Sunni Kurds living in the North. This situation, with neighbouring Syria’s Alawi regime, maintained a balance between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. When the Americans forced a change of regime in Iraq they had to rely on the Shia Arabs, and this completely upset that balance.

Iran and Saudi Arabia oppose each other at multiple levels. The most obvious difference is religious. The followers of Omar and those of Ali split up long ago. These two paths could be compared to the Orthodox and catholic variations of Christianity, they agree on the origin but disagree on how it should be followed up. They tolerate one another but can use the argument to get into a fight (vis. Serbia and Croatia). However, the religious split posed no particular problems when Iran was ruled by a Pahlavi Shah. At the time, under the patronage of the oil Majors, Riyadh and Tehran were quite close. The rift came when Iranian revolutionaries installed an Islamic (Shia) Republic. Religion turned political and the two regimes became totally incompatible. Sunni make up 90% of Moslems and cannot feel threatened by the Shia 10%. It is the Saudi rulers who feel threatened by the 99% of Saudi Arabians. The menace is social not religious. Religion, as usual, is an instrument of power politics. Tyrannies have recourse to it everywhere, but it is particularly true of the Saudi monarchs. Their rule was founded by an alliance between a war-lord and a religious reformer. Rigorous orthodoxy makes obedient soldiers, and is a pretext for absolutism. Sunni fundamentalism is based on texts compiled and written down in the decades following the Prophet’s death. Shia fundamentalism is full of murder, mystery and hidden Imams. It is mystical and waits for a New Coming, which prevents it from adopting the absolutism of its Sunni counterpart.

In the Moslem world, the separation of church and state and the banishment of religion to the private sphere was attempted almost everywhere, when the nations outlined by European powers obtained their independence. This forced secularisation (it is always forced) was perceived by many as a form of neocolonialism, a post-colonial residue of what had been. It was not a success, and the secular authorities’ failure to realise social equality and justice gave the religious parties control of the egalitarian discourse. (The Protestant Reformation in Europe had been driven by Luther and Calvin making similar critical judgements of church and royal opulence). Combating social deprivation and promoting back-to-the-roots nationalism inspired wide popular support and inevitably ended in confrontation, with ballots for the lucky few, with guns and executions for the many. When religious orthodoxies are banished from power, they form an opposition that can coalesce a mass of disfranchised, disfavoured and disgruntled people. This happened in Europe during the 19^th century as lay republics replaced anointed kings. And, in the 1920s and 30s, church prelates would be instrumental in the reactionary backlash. Elsewhere it only occurred after the end of colonial rule, as new national governments looked Eastward for their model.

Belief in a spiritual hereafter and the numerous systems that have been constructed around this credence evolve with time, but they will not go away. They offer eternity, equality and impartial justice, where materialism can only offer statistical longevity, a housing ladder and prejudiced judgments. Pies in the sky have more appeal than the tastiest sausage-roll if it is out of reach. This applies when life is precarious because of poverty, climate, health or war. When death looms close, an afterlife can be a great comfort. As for having god on one’s side, warring armies have claimed it since the first armies were assembled. Language is the primal social bond. A similar speech supposes a shared identity. Words give a structure to the perceived world and they create worlds that can only be imagined. “The fool on the hill sees the sun going down, and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round”. Words can build a Theogony and a Genesis, they can conjure up dragons and nymphs, and they try to make sense of bosons, gravity and life. Words set down laws, they give the terms of contracts and treaties, they express all sentiments and they describe everything real and fictive. And words move around, bringing new sense to foreign idioms. Words can open up the mind and they can restrain it with boundaries. Protestant Puritans believed the Bible contained all the necessary words. That was back a few centuries, but there are still innumerable people who think that one or two books can contain the universe. This is psychologically reassuring in a period of historic mutations, be it five hundred years ago or today. In the developed world it has become quaint or farcical. In the developing world it can be as violent as ever.

The impact of mass literacy has been described by McLuhan in “The Gutenberg Galaxy”. The passage from an oral society to one that reads and writes has multiple repercussions. And the books by which the literacy is acquired are the basis of the new social mind-set. In Germany it was Luther’s translation of the Bible, in Britain and North America it was the King James Version, whereas in Catholic Europe it was the largely miraculous Lives of Saints, a very different wold view. Then, in the 19^th century, primary school text books became the foundations of nationalist storytelling. Learning to read and write forms cerebral connections that do not exist in an oral context. The first building blocks will influence what comes later. And when the blocks are the same for all, mass education and its mass media relays generate totalitarian uniformity. It occurred in Europe, where men went willingly to war in droves. Each army believing it was the best and only, having read it at school and in the press. The Chines Red Guards had their primary Red Book, and now a great swath of people from Africa to Asia has a primary Koran. And the first reaction to mass literacy seems to be the violence of certainty. It has been shown that marching together boosts assurance and aggressiveness. Thinking together seems to produce the same effects, and the two are easily combined.

The fundamental Moslem doctrine of Abd al-Wahhab has been propagated by the oil-dollars that flow so abundantly into the coffers of the Saudi family. The Koran addresses a tribal society, and its fundamentalist revival appeals most to people who still live in a tribal environment. It has spread across North Africa to the Atlantic, and North of Iran to the Himalayas. It has also taken hold of Sunni tribes in Iraq and Syria. And the rebellions in this Islamic Crescent are as sociological as they are religious. They reject the modern state and the end of communal land property as much as they aspire to Sharia law. At least since Julius Caesar’s Gallic wars, tribes have fought to maintain their traditions of land tenure (1). They fought for centuries in America, for decades in Algeria and sporadically everywhere. Today’s uprisings are probably tribalism’s final throes before extinction. Isis is far more dangerous than are lions and tigers, but like them it is an endangered species.

1. See Rosa Luxemburg, “The Accumulation of Capital”, section III.