Chapter I
THE ISLAMIC WORLD TODAY

The 20th century will be remembered in the collective Muslim memory as a period of failure and humiliation. Today, towards the end of the 20th century, there are more than a billion Muslims living mostly in their independent states which are grossly under-developed. With adherents spread all over the globe, Islam is the world's second largest religion after Christianity. Muslims constitute majorities in roughly 45 countries, from Asia to Africa to the Middle East. Though Muslims constitute nearly 20% of the world's population, they account for less than 5% of the globe's gross economic product, despite owning 54% of the world oil revenues which are worth almost US$11,500 billion. Economically and politically weak, they are still dependent upon and followers of the Western powers. Not one of the 50 Muslim states is capable of standing on its own feet. None of the Muslim countries has now any international importance, not even the status of a second-rate power. Today the position is that Muslim countries without a single exception are merely autonomous and are by no means the master of their destiny. Nearly two thirds of the Muslim countries fall into the category of the poorest nations, and nearly all the recent famines have occurred in countries with largely Muslim populations, among them the Sahel countries of Africa, as well as Somalia, Sudan and Ethiopia. Only a few countries, mostly with small populations, (such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Brunei) have income levels comparable to those of the developed countries.

Due to the unequal distribution of population and resources, the Muslim world is divided into two groups of nations -- the low income economies like Pakistan, Egypt, Bangladesh, and high income oil exporters like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Libya. The low income Islamic economies constitute amongst themselves nations with the lowest per capita income, lowest life expectancy, lowest adult literacy and highest infant mortality rate. The high income oil economies have higher life expectancy, higher per capita income and all indicators relating to quality of life indicate better standard of living. The marked difference between the two groups of Islamic nations can be appreciated if one sees the per capita GNP which averages $270 for the low-income Muslim world and $13,500 for the high income Muslim world. More than 600 million people live below poverty line.

Mass poverty in Islamic countries is a result of exploitative and oppressive global systems. This state of affairs is partly due to the fact that a majority of the Muslim countries had been colonized and exploited over the recent centuries, and their culture and economic development neglected. Today the Muslim states like other developing countries find themselves in a debt trap. More than one-third of their gross national product (GNP) now equals their external debt. The Muslims are excluded from the
advanced technological society which will shape the political future of the world, condemned to be passive s pectators rather than active participants.

Equipped with knowledge and technology, the Europeans have dominated the world for the last 400 years. The scientific revolution formulated the new experimental mathematical method of acquiring knowledge about the social, political, economic, cultural, psychical, physical, biological, geographical and cosmic world. This method is empirical and observational. This method acknowledges no authority except empirically and experimentally proven facts and theories. Most of the knowledge we live by today has been acquired through this method largely in the last 300 years. The non-Western world, including the Muslim bloc, has contributed very little to this knowledge. Even the very rich Muslim-ruled Arab countries spend insignificant amounts on acquiring knowledge. Though they are among the largest buyers of the products of latest science and technology. Being mostly consumers and insignificant producers of knowledge, the Third World pose no threat to the dominance o f the industrialized West. The Western world employs over three million scientists and engineers, whose only job is to create new knowledge and exploit the same for the development of new goods, services and new weapons systems. They spend nearly four hundred billion dollars on research and development.1

The peculiar manner in which political development has taken place in the Muslim countries has created elite groups which control all the economic resources and sources of power and, in their own interest, sustain dictatorships. They impose systems of education, economy, social institutions and mores to perpetuate the stranglehold they have established over the entire area of national life.

Most of the Muslim countries are ruled by vicious 'friendly' tyrants,2 surrounded by a predatorial narrow elite group. All the West has to do is to enter into private deals with tyrants; pamper the elite groups and leave the rest to them. The latter would do most of the exploiting and present wonderful prof its on the platter to the particular great power. Convergence of interests between the First World's own gainers and the Third World dictators and elites lead to collusive deals between the two that are facilitated by the government of the developed nations which are ever ready to play power games.3 Muslim countries have the fewest democracies in the world. In most of the Muslim countries, the head of government rose to power through force -- his own or someone else's. The result is instability and a great deal of internal coercion to control his own people. Governments are largely un-representantive and mostly unresponsive to public opinion which is easily manipulated. Ruling cliques in league with vested interests exercise power without accountability. Islam is used often as an instrument for preserving and perpetuating status quo.

The West (and the USSR) have for generations helped repressive and often incompetent regimes hang on to power. In this way, instead of contributing to the resolution of p roblems they have helped to aggravate and perpetuate them. Internal stagnation, the failure of ruling elites and prolonged economic misery are therefore, for a lot of people in the Middle East, closely connected with the West's predominance in the region. This perception may be exaggerated at times, and may also be dressed up as a conspiracy theory, but it is essentially appropriate. It is hardly surprising then that in the long term a considerable potential for resistance would build up in the Middle East, which would be directed not only against the dictators there but also against the men behind them - the West.4 To what extent democratic conditions prevail in Islamic countries has mostly been of precious little concern to the West. Dictators such as Saddam Hussein or Hafez Assad were, and in some cases still are, generously supported and armed by the West and the former Soviet Union. Movements wanting to democratize their societies are hardly mentioned in the Western media.5

In many Middle Eastern countries the ruling elites have long promised economic development, independence and a solution to the Palestinian problem, to mention but a few examples. Yet they have increasingly proved themselves incapable of resolving even a fraction of the problems of their countries, and instead have only pursued the interests of power, and in the process not uncommonly amply lined their own pockets. Western countries (and earlier to a certain extent the Soviet Unio) have played an
important contributory role in this. They have collaborated with the ruling elites, and in some cases even helped them to hold on to power artifically. Often, there has been a community of interests between Western governments and Middle Eastern dictatorships (the region being brutally free of democracy) against the people of Middle Eastern countries.6

The modern Muslim society is living under semi-feudal, tribal, rural and capitalist social formations. After its integration into the world capitalist system it now stands polarize d into a small minority of powerful elites and a vast majority of powerless and poor masses. These ruling elites, in league with the Western capitalists have been maintaining the exploitative systems of semi-feudalism and neocolonialism. They block all social change, since any change in favor of the poor masses will weaken and eliminate the control of these elites on power and privilege, economics and politics. The economic and political systems of the Muslim societies in general cater to the needs of the elites. During the 1960s and 1970s the western capitalists themselves had initiated development plans to create these elites in the Muslim societies. The evolutionary method of brining change through political pluralism and parliamentary democracy has also been monopolized and distorted by the elites. They always capture power through alignment with different groups within these elites, and through rigging elections and with all sorts of clever maneuvers.7

Oliver Roy comments with great insight on the politics of the Muslim states: "Their politics cannot be explained, as Seurat aptly demonstrates, without reference to the concept of the asabiyya, to segmentation and esprit de corps, which is to say to the establishment of clientele networks more concerned with their own prosperity than with that of the state. But these networks do not represent the permanence of a tradition behind a mere facade of modernity. The structures of the traditional asabiyya were dismantled by urbanization, by the shuffling of society, by ideologization: they rebuilt themselves along different lines (political patronage and economic mafias), but they may also disappear. The modern asabiyya are recompositions of the esprit de corps based on the fact of the state and the globalization of economic and financial networks; they are translations of a traditional relationship of solidarity into the modern realm. The modern asabiyya are not merely the permanence of tribalism or religious  communalism: they may be reconstituted on the basis of modern sociological elements (the new intelligentsia versus the old families), but they function as predators and perpetuate themselves through matrimonial alliances. Their space is no longer the grandfather's village but the modern city. The militia of Beirut may function as old urban asabiyya -- the futuwwa, brotherhoods of bad boys who ensure order and "protection" in the areas poorly patrolled by the palace -- while political parties may function as patronage networks around important notables.8 In Syria and Iraq, power is held by asabiyya, solidarity groups founded on ethnicity, clan and family. After the riots of October 1988 in Algeria, the sole strategy of the power in power, the FLN (National Liberation Front), was to stay in power, which it did through multiple manipulations of electoral law. In Pakistan, both the conservative party (the Muslim League) and the Bhutto family's People's Party were arms of large families with industrial and land holdings.9

In the presen t era, the Islamic countries are witnessing the eruption of great political fervor in the form of revolutionary and reformist movements which call for the Islamization of state and society. At the bottom of such an upsurge is the problem of harnessing the development of society -- which has been in a state of flux ever since the inertia was shed by the coming independence -- with an appropriate bridle. In this expedition, the search for a cogent ideology engages all competing social forces. This invariably involves questions about democracy, modernization and socio-economic reforms.10

Perhaps in every Muslim society in which Islam is followed by a substantial proportion of the population different political or ideological manifestations of Islam will be discernible. Three broad types of Islamic orientation may be identified: radical, conservative and moderate or secular. A moderate wishes to preserve Islamic culture and norms, but without taking this to the political arena. He believes in reforming the Islamic society on modern lines and argues that religion should not be invoked in political, legal and economic matters which should be conducted in the context of the present-day world. Islamic revival or fundamentalism in its radical aspect seeks to interpret Islam as a reform movement and is opposed to modernistic interpretations of Islamic teachings which are attempted by modernist and liberal-minded Muslims. A conservative interprets Islam in legalistic-ritualistic terms, that helped the ruling elites to use Islam as a political instrument.

Islamic resurgence, as a radical religio-political movement, essentially means going back to the origin sources and roots of Islam. It advocates adherence to the original beliefs of Islam in their liberalist interpretations as fundamental and basic principles thus transcending all social, economic, political and cultural transformations which span a period of fourteen centuries. The original sources of Islam are the Quran and Hadith which are revolutionary in the sense that they give broad and universal values, ideals and principles (of equality, brotherhood and freedom) to change any iniquitous and unjust social system.

Muslims feel that because of the strategic location of the Middle and Near East, they have been under siege for nearly two centuries. When faced with such a continuing and often over-whelming force, they have taken recourse to what is easily and immediately available. Because adherence to the Islamic Sharia brought so much glory to seventh century Islam, a number of Muslims feel that their present plight can be explained largely because of their failure to practice and follow certain clear and rigid principles and institutions of the Quran and the Sunna.11

Though the Muslim countries share the poverty and backwardness of the Third World as a whole, they differ from the rest of that world by virtue of their dynamic faith, and a glorious history of past accomplishments that inspires them. They have a deep-seated sense of brotherhood, and of sensitivity to the fate and fortunes of Muslims everywhere. The spark of the Islamic faith, and of the vision of a revived Ummah, is there, and inspires a growing number of Muslims all over the world.12

The political, utopian goal of recreating the Muslim empire and the return to a mystical golden age that holds the greatest attraction. It is the dream of magically transforming their weak, impotent and subordinate position in the world into one of domination. Although no one has yet explained how this transformation would occur simply by applying the Sharia. It is quite clear that the main preoccupation and sole purpose of these modern Muslim mass movements is instant utopian glory, unlimited worldly power in a project which is designed to recreate a cherished past.13

In the Middle East, high hopes were raised of a great Arab revival at the turn of the century following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Hopes of a great cultural and political awakening were raised again following the discovery and exploitation of oil. But as the century ends, the Arabs find themselves as weak and dependent on outside powers as when it began, if not more so. At the root of this is the gloomy fact of the Arab world's dismal political and economic failure. The early hopes that oil revenues would fuel an economic boom which would catapult the Arab nations into the industrial era were quickly dashed as these revenues tended to be squandered uselessly on arms or on inefficient industrial projects which themselves became a burden on the economy. Associated with economic failure is the political failure. The Arab political order created by the colonial power has remained virtually unchanged. This was a largely artificial order. As a result nearly all Arab states exist today either by direct violent repression of their people or by the threat thereof and few can claim to rule by the consent of the
populace. Quite apart from the Arab states' internal political bankruptcy, the living proof of Arab failure and imp otence came with the establishment of the state of Israel and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians across the Middle East.14

"The early Arab political response to the bewildering changes in the world and in the region was the formulation of Arab nationalism. This is a political creed which borrows heavily from Western sources and mixes this with images taken from Arab history yearning to recreate a mythical golden age based on the early Islamic Empire of the 7th-9th centuries. The most elaborate of the Arab nationalist sects is Ba'thism, which believes in a certain glorious, mystical destiny for the Arabs in the contemporary world and calls for the unity of all Arabs "from the Gulf to the Atlantic." This Arab state would then become the
third superpower (in a world where there were still two). The man in the Arab street responded with great fervor to the claims and promises of nationalism, seemingly unaware that a modern superpower is more than a large land mass a nd a sizable population. Nevertheless the vision was powerful and captivating, for all fantastic nature of the claims were either lost to them or subconsciously denied. The outrageous claims of the Arab nationalists were completely shattered in the 1967 Arab defeat by Israel. Far from attaining a superpower capability, three Arab armies were roundly defeated by the "Zionist entity" (the term used by the Arab media of the time), a mere client state of the US. As a result, Nasser, the most prominent Arab nationalist of the time, lost all credibility."15