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Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Osama’s Islamism and Saddam’s Baathism are more alike than you think

Oct 23, 2004 9:36 am By Robert Spencer

Many think that the Arab nationalism espoused by Saddam and the Baathists was and is essentially different from and opposed to Islamic radicalism. This is not in fact the case, as I have argued here several times, and as is illustrated by this important piece from Lee Smith at Slate (thanks to Ruth King):

Many analysts and journalists claim it was preposterous for the Bush administration to suggest that there could ever be any connection between an Arab nationalist and Islamic fundamentalist. After all, as one is secular and the other religious, they are natural enemies. A cobra would sooner consort with a mongoose than a stalwart jihadist like Bin Laden collaborate with a dyed-in-the-wool Baathist like Saddam.

This line of thinking, that Arab nationalism and Islamism are irreconcilable, is forcefully expressed in a recent Anatol Lieven article in The Nation. Among other things, the piece is a nasty attack on Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism, which, writes Lieven, is “historically illiterate and strategically pernicious” for its “suggestion that secular radical Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism are essentially similar phenomena.” Let’s see if they’re not.

The earliest incarnations of both Arab nationalism and Islamism appeared in the mid-19th century, and both were reactions to the West’s renewed presence in the Middle East. Western powers like France and England directly threatened the Ottoman Empire’s control of the region, which concerned many Muslims who had no desire to be ruled by infidel outsiders. Still, they recognized how far Islam lagged behind its historical rival the West and called for a return to the faith’s earliest principles, before the Ottomans had set Islam on its spiraling downward course. These were the salafis, Muslim reformers whose ideal Islam was that of the prophet and his companions and the righteous forefathers. These 19th- and 20th-century intellectuals inspired the Islamist movement.

At the same time, there were other activists and ideologues, Muslims and Christians, who wanted to secure their political independence from the Ottomans and used the Western powers to achieve it. These were the Arab nationalists. They reasoned that if shared language and history made England, France, and Germany nations, then the Arabs were also a nation. However, as Elie Kedourie wrote in Islam in the Modern World, “[T]o define the Arab nation in terms of its history is–sooner rather than later–to come upon the fact that Islam originated among the Arabs, was revealed in Arabic to an Arab prophet.” Hence, “Arab nationalism,” Kedourie explained, “affirms a fundamental unbreakable link between Islam and Arabism.” (Here’s an essay on the same subject, with a collection of quotes from Arab writers agreeing with Kedourie that Arabism and Islam are one and the same.)

So, why do people believe that Arab nationalism and Islam are opposed? Kedourie showed that it was the nationalists themselves who spread the idea. Among other things, they were “aware that their Western patrons and protectors looked with fear and aversion on Islam as a political force.” The result is that the misunderstanding lives on, which is why analysts have been at great pains to itemize, mistakenly, the differences between, say, Baathism and Islamism.

In his article, Lieven writes that Baath Party founder Michael ‘Aflaq’s conception of Arab nationalism was “secular and modernizing. He believed religion, whether Islamic or Christian, had no place in Arab politics.”

‘Aflaq was a Christian (although he is rumored to have converted to Islam before his death), but as Joshua Landis, a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma specializing in Syria, explains in his Weblog, ‘Aflaq believed that the Baath Party “would never appeal to the broad masses of the Sunni heartland without making it perfectly clear that Baathism was not secular or based on earthly truths. … He directed non-Muslim Arabs to ‘attach themselves to Islam and to the most precious element of their Arabness, the Prophet Muhammad,’ for he was the greatest Arab nationalist.”

Indeed, Aflaq was an Orthodox Christian who converted to Islam and urged other Christians to do so, saying, “Islam is Arab Nationalism” (quoted in Sylvia Haim, Arab Nationalism, 1962, p. 64, with thanks to Bat Ye’or).

So, if Baathism is neither secular nor disdainful of Islam in particular, what about Islamism? Are the Islamists contemptuous of ideologies that value the nation rather than religion? Many people argue, along with Lieven, that the “central allegiance” of Islamist radicals is not to Arabs alone, but “to the idea of the undivided umma, or transnational community of all … Muslims.”

Since the Quran itself reminds us at least six times that Allah has revealed to Muhammad an “Arabic Quran,” with the result that many Muslims believe a translation of the holy text is no longer the true Quran, it’s clear that the Arabic language is central to Muslim history and theology. And, because the prophet and his companions and their righteous followers were almost exclusively Arabs, Muslims are accustomed to holding the Arabs as a nation in high regard as well. In fact, the early 20th-century salafi Rashid Rida had a particular reason for putting the Arabs front and center. He believed that since the Ottoman caliphate had, among its other faults, overseen the decline of the Arabic language and exposed the umma to the depredations of the West, the Turks were responsible for Islam’s current weakened state. The only way to rectify the situation was to restore the Arabs to the privileged place they held when Islam was at its strongest.

Read it all.

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