This is the fourth in a series of lectures for the Hillsdale College Summer Hostel program, “Islam and the West.”

 

Imagine a giant Salt Lake City. Those of you who have visited Salt Lake City know that it is surrounded by mountains, which protect it from attack. At the time Mormons founded it, they had every reason to want a defensible topography—a natural fortress. Iran is a country located within just such a fortress-like topography. The Persians are an ancient people, one of the peoples of the Old Testament, and their only conquerors in that long time were the Mongols.

It is a big country, with a population of about 78 million and growing fast—already sixteenth in the world, and larger than France or the United Kingdom, much larger than its neighbors Iraq (25 million), Afghanistan (30 million), and Saudi Arabia (20 million Saudis, in addition to seven or eight million foreign workers). There is an unusual mixture of population and geography, in that most Iranians live in the mountains; the lowlands are marshes, inhospitable to human settlement. Unlike Salt Lake City residents, the people of Iran live not in the central flatlands but in the mountain borders. Another important feature of this population is its ethnic and to some extent religious diversity—a possible vulnerability. Only about sixty percent of Iranians are Persians, and there is a substantial percentage of the population who are Sunnis or of some other religion, including pockets of remaining Zoroastrians.

There is one break in the mountain defense, along the border with Iraq. Here is where Persians have ventured out to conquer, when their rulers have seen the opportunity to build an empire. Here is the key land area where the Persians of antiquity fought the empires centered in the Fertile Crescent, in Mesopotamia. This is why the western part of Iraq consists of Shi’a Muslims, not Sunnis, why today’s Iranian rulers seek to dominate their religious brethren there.

Geography also gives modern Iran more importance in naval warfare than the size and quality of its fleet would ordinarily bring. The Strait of Hormuz at the southeastern end of the Persian Gulf is one of the key geopolitical chokepoints in the modern world, given the oil shipments from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates which flow through it, out to world. A relatively small naval force can disrupt shipping, with worldwide economic consequences.

Iran also has allies around the Middle East: Hamas in Gaza; Hezbollah in Lebanon; the Alawites in Syria; the Houthis in Yemen. If strengthened, this could form the ligature of what Americans in the Civil War called an ‘anaconda’ strategy, a way of squeezing such enemies as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the non-Shi’a regions of Iraq. This might or might not lead to a new Persian Empire, but however far it got the new Iranian regime would make its increased geopolitical power serve the purposes of an Islamist regime, not those of a relatively tolerant emperor like Cyrus the Great. There would be no Xenophon marching with the forces of the Islamic Republic.

What exactly is an ‘Islamic Republic’? The most powerful authority in the Iranian regime isn’t the president or the parliament. It is the Supreme Leader, the head of the Shi’a clergy—the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini yesterday, the Ayatollah Ali Khameini today. Americans very often underestimate Iran’s Grand Ayatollahs. These men are very far from being the narrow-minded fanatics seen in a thousand political cartoons. They are learned men, knowledge not only with respect to the Koran and the sharia, but also with respect to Western philosophy and religion. They are polymaths, and judged to be infallible not only regarding religious doctrine but also regarding politics, inasmuch as Islam is a system of laws, a political regime. Notice that this regime unites religious and monarchic authority much more tightly than the Saudis do. The Iranians anathematize monarchy, associating it with pagan religious practices.

We have been studying the confrontation of Islam with modernity. It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that the sons of the Iranian royal family and aristocracy began attending universities in Europe, almost always in Paris, which at the time laid claim to intellectual preeminence among the cities of the West. The political liberalism they brought back was perforce French republicanism of the sort seen in the Third Republic, not the republicanism of Great Britain or the United States. French republicanism had a strong anti-clerical and indeed anti-religious edge. To put it another way, Anglo-American liberalism was Lockean; French liberalism was Voltairean. Young Persians often returned to their country thinking of Islam the way many French intellectuals thought about the Catholic Church. Although some Islamic clerics attempted to integrate European liberalism with Islam (as had some French Catholics, prior to the French Revolution), most recognized an enemy when they saw one.

What interested the reigning monarch, Nasir al Din, was Western technology—specifically, military technology. The features of the modern West that made sustained technological progress possible—property law, experimental science—did not seem very interesting to him. In an attempt to speed up his country’s modernization, the Shah sold rights to minerals, railways, and banking to Europeans. Not only the clerics opposed this, but also the merchants, who wanted economic protection, and secularized young intellectuals, who partook of he European ideology of nationalism.

This set up several of the factions seen in Iran to this day. Clerics opposed foreign modernism as a new form of apostasy. Overmatched by Western capital, merchants opposed modernism for business reasons. Secular intellectuals opposed one piece of the modern project—international capitalism—with another piece of it—politically liberal nationalism. These groups could unite against foreigners and against the Shah. But if they won, they could not stay united, having fundamental, principled disagreements with one another. Of the three groups, only the clerics had the mass of peasants on their side.

The first revolution under these conditions came between 1905 and 1911, at the same time the Ottoman Empire was faced with similar convulsions. Both Sunni Islam and Shi’a Islam suffered the same sort of crisis at the same time. But in Iran no one of the stature of Mustafa Kemal would emerge.

The Constitutional Revolution of 1905 saw the establishment of a parliament or majlis. This represented a victory for the secular intellectuals. But they had no  real base of support among the Iranian people as a whole, who continued to follow the clerics. But the clergy split between apolitical, quietist ‘Twelvers” who awaited the return of the Twelfth Imam and the adherents of Ayatollah Nuri, who rejected constitutional democracy and pushed for a regime based on the sharia.  Furthermore, like so many French intellectuals of the 1790s, the Iranian secularists had more experience in writing and speaking than they had in governing. Backed by both the Russian and the British empires, an aristocrat named Muhammad Ali staged a coup and became the new shah in 1908. Now the clerics realigned themselves with the Constitutionalists, inducing the Europeans, ever calculating the balance of forces within the country, to abandon the new shah and back the new coalition. Muhammad Ali fled and the parliament chose his twelve-year-old son to reign as a figurehead. This republican regime last until 1911, wracked immediately by the same internal factionalism that helped to ruin the previous republican regime. Once again, Russians and Brits tilted toward the monarchy; so we may conclude that although Iranians were never conquered by the European empires they were whipsawed by them.

Iran endured the First World War in the resulting condition of political weakness and confusion. Oil had been discovered in some of its provinces, but British oil interests simply bypassed the central government, such as it was, to cut deals for drilling rights with local tribes. Needless to say, little in the way of oil revenues got as far as Tehran. By 1921, however, the Soviet Union was stirring the Iranian pot. The Bolshevik regime declared the Soviet Republic of Gilan on the Iranian side of the Caspian Sea. The British sought to drive them out by demanding control of a nearby division of the Iranian army. But an ambitious midlevel office named Reza Khan acted before the Shah could agree, marched his troops toward Tehran and extracted the Shah’s blessings for command of the division. He then turned around, crushed the Gilan Bolsheviks and went on to defeat rebellions in Azerbaijan and Khorasan, Iran’s richest provinces. He finally brought rebellious Kurds to heel. By 1923 he had reunited all but one sheikhdom in Iran.

Reza Khan briefly considered imitating Mustafa Kemal’s republican founding, but preferred monarchy. He also listened to the clerics, who called him to Qom and explained forcefully that they would have no part of republicanism. They offered a deal. They would back Reza Khan as the new shah in exchange for his rejection of republicanism and endorsement of Shiism. Notice that this is similar to the arrangement between the Wahhabis and the House of Saud. At this point, the clerics were not especially hostile to monarchy; they preferred it to republicanism. Under those terms, Reza Khan became the new shah in 1925.

Thus secular nationalism in Iran passed from republicanism to monarchy, as Reza Khan gave lip service to Islam while embarking on a campaign of enforced modernization. In his first ten years of rule he organized a standing army of 100,000 troops and a 90,00o-strong modern bureaucracy. He attacked the ancient social structures of the tribes by conscripting youths into his army and relocating their chiefs to Tehran. Whole tribes were resettled, often on lands that could not be cultivated, resulting in mass deaths. As for the aristocrats, Reza Shah stripped them of lands and titles, while redistributing their lands not to the peasants but, in large measure, to himself. He renamed himself ‘Pahlavi’—which means ‘Persian-speaker’—with the intent of establishing a new royal dynasty. All of this follows the strategies of centralizing modern state-builders throughout the modern world.

This left the clergy. In an attempt to overcome their authority, he harkened to the glories of ancient Persia. Islam, he rightly proclaimed, had come not from the Persians but from the Arabs. Indeed, the term ‘Persian’ itself had been imposed upon the Iranians by the Greeks, and so the country should be renamed ‘Iran,’ a move he made in 1935, when he was allied with Nazi Germany. Iconography recalling Zoroastrianism and Cyrus the Great came into prominence, but of course entirely at the service of modernization. He required that every mullah serve two years of active duty in the national army, outlawed the veil, and extended secular education to women on the grounds that “one-half of the country’s working force has been idle.” He attempted to make Shi’ism a civil religion by putting the clerics on the state payroll and claiming most of the income of the shrines for the state. But the clerics maintained their financial support outside the state grid, and so retained a degree of independence that proved crucial to their survival and, eventually, their revenge.

Resisting British interests , the Shah brought technicians from Germany, Italy, France, and other European countries into Iran for assistance in his various developments projects. What he did not foresee was the Second World War. Britain regarded the German technicians in Iran as spies intending to sabotage British-owned oil fields; they demanded that the Germans be expelled. The Shah refused. When the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the British, in collaboration with its newfound Bolshevik ally, invaded Iran, deposed the Shah and replaced him with his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. They took control of Iran’s railroad network, a key link between the Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf. Both powers agreed to withdraw their troops within six months of the war’s end, a commitment reaffirmed at the Tehran Conference, which included the United States as well. The Soviets dragged their feet, but eventually did leave in May 1946.

During the war, under the hesitant reign of the young Shah, Iranian politics liberalized somewhat, with the parliament gaining some authority. The Soviets financed an Iranian communist party, the Tudeh, which organized quickly during the war. By May Day 1946 the Tudeh could mobilize 80,000 marchers in Tehran. Like the young Persian intellectuals of the turn of the century, however, the communists’ secularism alienated the clerics and therefore never san roots into the countryside—this, in sharp contrast to the successful communist revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cuba, which depended for their success on peasant support.

The Tudeh made the mistake of attempting to assassinate the Shah in 1946. The Shah survived, making an anti-communist alliance with military and clerical factions. As the United States faced off against the Soviet Union in the Cold War, it sought to strengthen the Shah. U. S. Army Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, earlier the head of the New Jersey State Police during the Lindbergh baby kidnapping investigation, organized a national police force in Iran, strengthening the powers of the still-shaky modern state.

The Shah nonetheless faced not so much a military or a policing problem but a civil/political problem. The parliament had assumed significant power during the war. Nationalistic as ever, the parliamentarians resented the continued control of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. For some years the move to nationalize the oil companies had stalled, but in March 1951 the parliament installed Mohammad Mosaddeq as prime minister and the movement gained momentum. Mosadeqq was 69 years old, and an old enemy of the Pahlavis. He had started in politics in 1914 as a provincial governor under the Qajar dynasty, gaining election to parliament in 1923. But he had resigned after Reza Khan became the new shah, only returning to parliament in 1944 as a member of the National Front Party, whose platform called for the expulsion of foreigners. After becoming prime minister, Mosaddeq enforced legislation to nationalize the assets of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Unamused, the British blockaded the Persian Gulf. Additionally, as Mosaddeq had not quite grasped, Iran had no experts in either the oil extraction or oil financing business, which boded ill for the whole nationalization project.

Nonetheless, the ensuing economic hardships only heightened Mosaddeq’s popularity, and he requested emergency military powers from the Shah. These the distrustful Shah refused, and Mosaddeq resigned. When the new prime minister announced a return to the bargaining table with the Brits, nationalist, communist, and radical Muslim protesters filled the streets, prompting the Shah to bring Mosaddeq back and granting him the military powers he had requested. This led to another of the alliances of convenience between secular republicans and Shi’ite clergy, with the communists adding even more volatility to the mixture. Mosaddeq not only proceeded with the nationalization of the oil industry but also collectivized agriculture.

He then made what proved a politically fatal error. Seeking to bring the military further under his control, he fired officers who had been loyal to the Shah. The disaffected officers approached the British and the Americans with plans to overthrow Mosaddeq. United States envoy Vernon Walters had become increasingly out of patience with Mosaddeq, who inclined to an emotional rhetoric in public and private that played better with Iranians than it did with business-is-business American sensibilities. Mosaddequ’s increasingly close alliance with the Tudeh Party, the possibility of overtures to the Soviet Union (which of course sought renewed access to the Persian Gulf) and his rash breakoff of diplomatic relations with Great Britain finally persuaded President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Churchurcill to remove him in 1953.

Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., Teddy’s grandson, ran the CIA’s Near East and Africa division. Roosevelt directed Operation Ajax, a joint CIA-British effort to overthrow Mosadeqq. Roosevelt first tried to get the Shah to dismiss Mosaddeq from office, as he was constitutionally empowered to do. The Shah refused. The CIA turned to fomenting distrust among the communist and Shiite parts of Mosaddeq’s political base. Increasingly, suspicious, Mosaddeqq called for a national referendum to dissolve parliament, rigging the vote to win a nearly 100% approval for the move. This accomplished little more than to give the U. S.- and British-funded opposition newspapers a major talking point. Communists, clerics, and merchants all abandoned the coalition. This left the communists as the single most powerful organized political faction in Iran, although of course the main social power remained in the hands of the clerics, headed by the Ayataollah Abal-Ghasem Kashani. Kashani turned against Mosaddeq when Mosaddeq refused to implement government by Islamic law. Kashani also feared the increasing power of the Soviet-backed Iranian communists.

Mosaddeq tried to persuade the Shah to leave the country, and the Shah responded by firing him. When Mosadeqq refused to leave office and prepared to fight, the Shah (by no measure the military man his father had been) himself fled. Civil war broke out. Backed financially by the CIA and the British MI6, pro-Shah military forces ousted Mosaddeq in August 1953. After the Shah’s return, he negotiated an agreement with foreign oil companies in 1954. The Shah and the clerics agreed to implement a two-year campaign to crush the Iranian communists, and the Ayatollah Kashani’s successor, Ayatollah Seyyed Hassein Borujerdi, remained in alliance until the Ayatollah’s death in 1961. Thus for a brief period the Shah and the clerics reconstituted something of the relationship that Persian shahs and clerics had forged during the centuries of the empire.

The alliance did not survive the Ayatollah’s death because the Shah persisted in the Pahlavi Dynasty’s decades-long quest to achieve a modern state. He rested his power squarely on the military, the police, and his internal intelligence organization, SAVAK. This tendency toward tyrannical institutions alarmed the Kennedy Administration, which pressured him to implement mostly cosmetic economic and political reforms in 1963. Called, grandly, the White Revolution (in contrast to the black garb of the clerics), the movement was abandoned after Kennedy’s murder, when the Johnson Administration turned its attention to Southeast Asia.

Nonetheless, the White Revolution had consequences. Its basic strategy was a renewal of the effort to remove the economic foundations of both the landed aristocrats and the clerics by redistributing land. It is crucial to see that the leading clerics came from the aristocratic class. The Shah’s policy would have put the axe to both the secular and religious aristocracies at the same time. Further, the Shah’s plan differed from his father’s in being much more populist; the peasants who worked the land—some 75% of the population—would actually get the land, not the Shah. If it had worked, this would have been another example of a major strategy of modern state-builders in Europe and elsewhere: to centralize the government, the monarchic or republican regime of the modern state allies with the people against those political powers which stand between the regime and the state it control and the people. Then replace the old regime’s political structures with your own, modern-statist bureaucratic structures, military and civilian.

The clerics divided between those who preferred to remain quiet (recall the Sufis) and those who did not—exactly the division seen in the 1905-1911 period. The Shah aggravated this division by making a speech in Qom claiming that only supporters of land reform were truly “our religious leaders.” By ratcheting up the pressure on the clerics who enjoyed a considerable measure of authority in Iranian civil society, the Shah pushed modernization in their faces. To use the jargon of political sociologists, he threatened to ‘cage’ them. Generally speaking, when people are ‘caged’ by the modern state they have an incentive to start working rather hard to take control of that cage. In other words, by moving to ‘cage’ the clerics, the Shah helped to turn Islamic clerics more decisively toward Islamism—toward trying to take over the modern state or, alternatively, to break out of it and get rid of it.

Here is where the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini comes in. Born in 1902 to a middle-class family claiming descent from Muhammad, Khomeini followed the example of many of the men in his line, becoming a mullah in 1925, when Reza Khan founded his dynasty. A firm anti-modernist, Khomeini followed both the activist Ayatollah Kashani and the quietist Ayatollah Borujerdi in the postwar years. But after Borujerdi’s death he emerged as an opponent of the Shah, condemning the White Revolution as anti-Islamic. A year later he strongly condemned Iran’s Status of Forces Agreement with the U. S. military, which he regarded as a compromise of Iranian sovereignty. For his pains, the Ayatollah was exiled to Baghdad.

What was the substance of the Islamist political stance Khomeini assumed?

Unlike many other prominent Islamists, Khomeini was a respected if controversial cleric, not a mere intellectual or political organizer. He had extensive formal training in Islamic theology, and enjoyed the authority of a learned man in a country where learning was thought to bring a man closer to God, and therefore closer to the supreme authority. Unlike bin Laden, he decided to found, if not exactly a state, a territorially limited political regime where a modern (and tyrannical) state had been.

In his book, Islam and Revolution, Khomeini condemns the imperialists, notably the Americans who support the Shah of Iran. The Americans’ materialism makes them “even more satanic” than Jews. Against them stands Islam, a militant and evolutionary religion, now traduced by servile false Muslims who ape the imperialists by attempting to separate politics from religion—making the mosque a mere church. Apostate clerics serve as tools for the imperialists, for whom an apolitical misreading of Islam is all-too-useful, as it renders their subjects docile. The imperialists, however, misread even their own nominal religion. Jesus could never have told his disciples to “turn the other cheek.” Imperialists want people to believe such things, not prophets.

To those who fear the technological power of the imperialists, Khomeini replies, “Let them go all the way to Mars or beyond the Milky Way, they will still be deprived of true happiness, moral virtue, and spiritual advancement, and be unable to solve their social problems.” Technology in itself is good, but imperialists only use it to drag civilization to “barbarism”; in this trope, Khomeini is reversing the characteristic imperialist claim of bringing civilization to primitive peoples. Barbarism results from what the West calls liberalism. “Governments that do not base themselves on divine law conceive of justice only in the natural realm”—natural rights. “you will find them concerned only with prevention of disorder and not with the moral refinement of the people. Whatever a person does in his own home is of no importance, so long as he causes no disorder in the street…. Divine governments, however, set themselves the task of making man into what he should be. In his unredeemed state, man is like an animal, even worse than other animals….. And if a person were to conquer the entire globe, he would begin planning the conquest of the moon or Mars. Men’s passions and covetousness, then, are unlimited, and it was in order to limit men, to tame them, that the prophets were sent.”

Khomeini, then, clearly sees several of the key elements of the modern project. He sees, and rejects, the modern attempt to conquer nature with a technologized scince. He imputes to the conquest of nature exactly what Machiavelli intended: the liberation of the desire for acquisition from religious and rational constraints. He also sees and rejects the attempt to limit Machiavellianism with natural justice or natural right. To reduce government to the securing of natural rights is to give up the most important function of government, namely, to hold human souls to a higher standard than that of comfortable self-preservation. Political liberalism forgets that ‘statecraft’ must be ‘soul-craft,’ consequently re-barbarizing the world as its imperial project advances around the world.

How, then, to get rid of the modern project, both its statism and the modern liberalism that seeks to limit the state the modern project established? Every Muslim should be “a walking embodiment” of the divine law. Such men will eliminate the problem of faction—the problem the Americans addressed by founding a commercial republican regime—by “join[ing] together like the fingers of one hand.” This unity notwithstanding, after a law is enacted, Muslims must also establish an “executive power”; Muslims need a leader, an Imam, because men never “become angels”—Khomeini’s language closely parallels that of Publius, here. The leader is the most perfect embodiment of the divine law. He becomes the leader through the consensus of other clerics, who can be depended upon to recognize such moral excellence. The leader rules a constitutional government consisting of the Koran and the sayings of Muhammad; this is the same as in Saudi Arabia, except of course that Khomeini interprets the Koran and the hadiths as a Shi’a, not as a Sunni. “Islamic government may be defined as the rule of divine law over men.” It differs from all other governments in lacking human legislators, at least with respect to its constitutional law. God alone is sovereign in the Islamic Republic. In practice, this means that the clerics are the sovereigns on earth.

Insofar as all consent is to the sharia, in principle the problem of action that concerns Publius and all other thoughtful writers on politics simply disappears. Given the non-angelic character of even Muslims, the law needs an enforcer, a stern guardian against heresy. The problem of faction will not be solved the American way, by the encouragement of liberty under a government that merely secures natural rights, but by the exercise of executive power by one virtuous man selected by a ruling body of lesser but still virtuous men. Such a selection obviates the need for a wider election, giving the people the executive, the leader, they want—satisfying mere desires, rather than God.

The Imam needs no bureaucracy, no “file-keeping and paper-shuffling.” The whole modern, statist apparatus will disappear. The Imam needs only judges. “When the judicial methods of Islam were applied, the sharia judge in each town, assisted only by two bailiffs and with only a pen and an inkpot at his disposal, would swiftly resolve disputes among people.” Such judges obviate the need for central bureaucracy and maintain local government without local legislation, as in the town meetings Tocqueville had admired in America. Unlike the townships of New England, however, in Muslim regimes the people must not rule. They are children with respect to their local judges and the nation’s Imam—the “trustees of the Prophets.” Not Aristotelian political rule—ruling and being ruled—but what Aristotle calls parental rule will prevail in the true Muslim regime. The Imam and the judges rule by command, for the good of their children, the people.

Whereas the American founders defined tyranny as the consolidation of executive, legislative, and judicial power into one set of hands, and whereas Aristotle defines tyranny as monarchy in the service of the selfish interests of the monarch, Khomeini defines it as rebellion against God in the form of self-legislation, human-all-too-human legislation or ‘autonomy.’ The consolidation of executive and judicial power is not only not tyrannical, it is just, inasmuch as it gives action to law and to the legal verdicts rendered according to it, requiring no separation of powers that would only pervert the law and excuse perverse or unlawful actions.

To oppose the tyranny of the imperialists and their puppet-Shah, Khomeini writes, “We must create our own apparatus to refute whatever lies they issue.” Propagation of correct ideas and instruction “are our two fundamental, most important activities,” activities that will “pave the way in society for the implementation of Islamic law and the establishment of Islamic institutions.” Muslims must sever relations with existing government agencies; refuse to cooperate with those agencies; refuse even to appear to aid them; and establish new judicial, financial, economic, cultural, and political institutions that which take over when the secular monarchy collapses. Thus Khomeini sees exactly what Gandhi had seen in India, and what Vaclav Havel would later see in Czechoslovakia: his people can overthrow the modern state, get out from under a modern empire, by constructing their own independent, parallel set of institutions on the level of civil society, institutions that will under mine the official state offices and replace them. New rulers and new offices, animated by an Islamic rather than a ‘modern’ ethos, and all developed in this time of “incubation,” will then effect regime change. Even more ambitiously, they will change the very kind of political partnership that is symptomatic of the modern world; they will eliminate the state itself, replacing it with the Shi’ite version of the Islamic ummah or body of believers united under the sharia. The City of God will replace the City of Man.

Once established, this new regime and new political partnership will not survive if isolated and encircled by its many enemies. “We must strive to export our Revolution throughout the world.” After the Shah’s overthrow and the founding of the Islamic Republic, Khomeini exhorted Iranian youth to “defend your dignity and honor” with “the Koran in one hand and a gun in the other.” The “oppressed,” worldwide, “will inherit the earth and build the government of God.” It will do so in opposition to America, “the number one enemy of the deprived and oppressed people of the world,” a country whose actions are coordinated by “international Zionism.” “Iran,” he tells Iranians, “is a country effectively at war with America.”

In its rivalry with Iran, America will speak of the alleged virtues of democracy. But the Islamic Republic must never be a democratic republic. “To juxtapose ‘democratic’ and ‘Islam’ is an insult to Islam,” which is “superior to all forms of democracy.” At best, democracy might limit itself by natural right. Khomeini insists that all persons must limit themselves by divine right, the only earthly source of which is the Koran and the sayings of Muhammad. In a larger sense, then, Khomeini is right to say that Iran is effectively at war with America—with the idea of America.

Khomeini therefore calls for a return to the old empire of Islam, against the new empire of modernity and, more specifically, against the American empire of liberty. The American empire of liberty is really the tyranny of Zionism and, ultimately, Satan.

We see in Khomeini a comprehensive critique of modernity, including the modern state, and of the commercial republican regime that Americans founded as an antidote to the bad features of statism. This critique resembles other Islamist critiques, but adds a key strategic dimension: an appeal to oppressed classes in Iran and oppressed peoples worldwide. As mentioned earlier, Khomeini also differed from the other Islamists in his credentials as an Islamic scholar. In adopting and Islamically adapting the language of ‘Third Worldism,’ he spoke to the radically democratic social circumstances of modernity articulated by Tocqueville. He brought the authority of Islam to a young, sometimes Marxist-oriented constituency, persons who had read Franz Fanon, Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the other leftist polemicists fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s. Combining their rhetoric with his own, he speaks “in the name of the God of the disinherited.” In Latin America, leftist Catholic clerics did this, too, crafting the ‘Liberation Theology’ that came to prominence in the same period. But precisely because Khomeini needed and wanted almost nothing from Marxist doctrine itself, his Islamism easily withstood and actually benefited from the crackup of communism in the years 1989-91. By then, Islamism appeared as the ‘last ideology standing’ against the empire of modern liberalism.

Today, more than a quarter-century after the revolution, Iran has problems, although not regime-ending problems. Economically, it has declined steadily. Its per capita income is one-third of what it was before the revolution; its oil production is two-thirds of what it was. Inflation has remained high and, with two-thirds of its population under the age of thirty, economic stagnation has resulted in high unemployment. In response, the clerical regime—now clearly an oligarchy, and a rather corrupt one, at that—finally has cut a cosmetic nuclear-arms deal with the West, in the hope of improving its trade. It has also announced that it will adopt the Chinese economic model, meaning economic growth via state-owned enterprises in exchange for continued political authority for the mullahs. This strategy might work. Most Iranians have returned to the political quietism they exhibited during the many Persian monarchies. But, as the Islamic Republic’s founder, the Ayatollah Khomeini, told an aide a few years before his death in 1989, the revolution is not about the price of watermelons. Its legitimacy derives from Shiism and nationalism, not the gross national product.

In addition to their future nuclear-weapons stockpile, Iran continues to operate one of the best-organized state-sponsored terrorist networks in the world, with tentacles in Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere. As you know, one concern is that nuclear weapons and terrorist networks might some day be combined.

Iran serves as the most prominent of the several examples of an Islamic clerical regime that rules a country in the modern world. Others have included Afghanistan under the Taliban, Sudan, Nigeria, and, to a limited extent, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Rule by clerics has looked better to many Muslims in contemplation than in practice. By aiming for an high moral tone, rigorously enforced, Islamists find themselves especially embarrassed by routine corrupt practices. Such regimes could easily be allowed to decline and fall at their own rate, were it not for the inconvenient fact that they can use the powerful technology of much-despised modernity against the moderns. This is the apparent plan of those Islamists who deliberately seek not control over modern states but their destruction and replacement with the ummah, the community of believers organized  into pre-modern, non-statist political societies.

 

 

 

 

This is the third in a series of lectures for the Hillsdale College Summer Hostel program, “Islam and the West.”

 

The eminent scholar Bernard Lewis tells the story of an official of the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth century who marveled at an English gunboat in Istanbul. The gunboat symbolized Europe’s new military technology and commercial reach. That official could not foresee the implications of the modern political-philosophic project that the ship represented. By the end of the First World War—itself a debacle for the old aristocratic and monarchic regimes of Europe—foreign, modern empires dominated Islamic civilization.

The Wahhabi movement is, in a way, the first modern Islamist movement. It began in the eighteenth century and provided the ruling principles of today’s Saudi Arabia. The life of Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahab spanned most of that century, the century in which the modern project began to take hold beyond Europe. He called his followers Muwahhadun, meaning Unitarians—believers in the oneness of God, as distinguished from polytheists (including those Trinitarians, the Christians). God, he taught, is not only unitary; God is also “exclusive,” meaning he must be addressed directly, with no physical, human, or even ideational intermediaries. A physical intermediary might be an amulet, a gravestone, or any sort of ornamentation on a mosque (minarets should be torn down, he taught). A human intermediary might be a saint or a holy man. An ideational intermediary would be a philosophic doctrine, or any other mental structure not seen in the Koran. In practice, Abdul-Wahab asserted that any dependency other than dependency upon god is justly punishable by the forfeit of property and life, on the grounds that any such dependency implies polytheism blasphemy. Your amulet, your holy man, your philosophy has become, in effect, another god to you.

Abdul-Wahab was a Koranic fundamentalist or literalist. Whereas much of traditional Islamic jurisprudence had been founded upon the consensus of believers, held to be the foundation of the sharia, Wahhabists regard the Koran itself as the only foundations of the sharia. To this day, the Koran is the constitution of Saudi Arabia. Abdul-Wahab based many of his teachings on the writings of such medieval jurists as Ibn Tamiyya, whose writings were republished in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s.

Abdul-Wahab especially loathed the Sufi branch of Islam, which inclines toward peaceable mysticism, and might lead to innovation; his Islam insists on strict legalism. Wahhabism also requires asceticism—again, on the grounds of the ban on polytheism, broadly understood. Above all Wahhabism requires jihad or struggle (very much including armed struggle) against the polytheists and infidels. Wahhabists tend to regard true Islam as preeminently Arabian, a claim which happens to comport with one aspect of the modern world, the nationalism that democratization and statism both foster.

As these teachings suggest, Abdul-Wahab, like the Prophet himself, had the soul of a warrior. His movement has been compared to the more militant forms of seventeenth-century Protestantism. Although profoundly anti-modern in his doctrines, Abdull-Wahab had no compunction about the use of modern technology on the battlefield; he used firearm, not lances, in his many wars. In 1744 he allied with Muhammad ibn-Saud, the emir of a village near what is now the city of Riyadh. Ibn-Saud came from a distinguished family, as Abdul-Wahab did not, and family, then as now, counted for a lot in Arabia. Ibn-Saud needed Abdul-Wahab for the warriors he brought with him, and of course benefited from the authority conferred by the Wahhabist religious message.

Declaring jihad against neighboring Arab tribes, the two men expanded their territory. Their successors captured Mecca in 1803—just as the United States and the Barbary monarchs went to war. This conquest attracted the unfavorable attention of the Ottoman Empire, home of the caliphate. The Ottomans sent Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman ruler of Egypt, to quell the movement. Ali expelled the Wahhabis from Mecca in 1812 and stayed in the region until 1819, conquering Riyadh itself. Defeated, the Wahhabi House of Saud nonetheless remained intact.

As the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the early twentieth century, the Saudis saw their chance. The Wahhabi-Saudi alliance recaptured Riyadh in 1902, and they consolidated their power over local Bedouin tribes during the First World War. With the Ottomans out of the area after the war, the Saudis recaptured Mecca and Medina in the mid-1920s. True to their iconoclastic doctrines, Wahhabis smashed tombs of Muslim saints and imams throughout the Arabian peninsula. Europeans recognized the sovereignty of King Ibn Saud in the mid-1920s, but other Muslims did so more reluctantly—the last holdouts being the Egyptians, who waited until 1936. The other Muslims had reason for concern about Wahhabist control over the two most holy cities of Islamic civilization.

The British backed the House of Saud, over the objections of T. E. Lawrence “of Arabia,” who advocated support of the Hashemite royal family as rulers of the area. More radical elements among Wahhabis, opposed to the infidel British presence in the kingdom, were crushed in 1929 by the Saudis. When Osama bin Laden condemned American troops in his country he was echoing these radicals of seventy years earlier.

Ibn Saud proclaimed the Saudi Arabian Kingdom in 1932. It was a modern, unitary state in its structure, but one dedicated in theory to the strictest Islam. While the figure of the armed prophet—Muhammad himself, as well as Abd al-Wahab—and the valorization of war do indeed square with Machiavellianism, the rest of Islam does not. How could Islam support a modern state?

In 1933 Standard Oil of California entered into a contract with the new monarchy. Just as Abdul al-Wahab had availed himself of modern military technology as an instrument subordinate to the expansion of Islam, so the House of Saud would employ oil technology for the same purpose. The monarchs of nineteenth-century Germany and Austria had failed to meet the political challenges of modernity, but they had modernized their economies quite successfully. Among their main techniques was the state-owned enterprise, typified by railroad companies. Monarchs love state-owned revenue sources. Such enterprises radically decrease the need for tax revenues, and thus decrease the need for recognizing political demands for government by consent and representation—republicanism. The kinds of enterprises the German and Austrian monarchs owned rather unfortunately required complex manufacturing legislation, and support from other infrastructure. This meant that those monarchies became tooo complicated to remain truly monarchic. They became highly complex and cumbersome states; under pressure of protracted war, they finally spun out of the control of their rulers.

Oil is a different kind of revenue source. The technology needed to extract and refine it can be ‘farmed out’ to limited numbers of foreign infidels, who can be isolated from the rest of society. Oil as been indispensable to the operations of the modern world, but its exploitation did not require the importation of any monarch-threatening bureaucracies—at least, not in the short or medium term. Revenues from state-owned oil companies precluded the need for taxation and with it any call for popular political representation. The American republican slogan, “No taxation without representation,” can have little attraction to those who pay no taxes.

At the end of the Second World War, Saudi oil fields produced 21.3 million barrels annually. By 1975, they produced 2,852 million barrels. In that time, the enormous wealth generated by that production transformed Saudi society. Aristotle remarks that a regime may change if one part of the political partnership drastically increases in size and wealth relative to the rest of the political parts. How would the Saudi monarchy fare as the royal family enlarged and enriched itself.

As I mentioned earlier, as early as the 1920s some Wahhabis grumbled that Ibn Saud had become too lax, taxing tobacco instead of banning it, allowing the use o telegraphs and other suspect devices. By Ibn Saud faced them down, by force and by law. He made the Koran the constitution of his kingdom, and his successors, if anything, toughened the laws they inherited from him—restricting the activities of women outside the household, for example, and actively persecuting Christians instead of merely holding them in quiescent submission.

The 1940s and the Second World War saw an important change in the monarchy’s alliance structure. The British had used the disruptions of World War I to undermine the authority of the Ottoman Empire in the region; now, President Franklin Roosevelt made a move to replace the Brits as the Saudis’ main ally. Americans feared the return of the Great Depression after the war, and of course had never much liked the British Empire to begin with. FDR in particular seldom missed a political opportunity. On September 23, 1943, FDR toasted King ibn Saud by saying, among other things, “We have much in common. We both love liberty”—a love, presumably, for independence from the British Empire, and not so much for, say, the Bill of Rights. But FDR was just warming up. “I think we all know that the King is a very wonderful person. I was reading this afternoon a little magazine, and it was all about the King, and there was one little paragraph at the end that I liked a lot—all of it goes along with my own philosophy. [Reading]: ‘Ibn Saud’s most engaging quality is a kingly belief in eventual rightness.’ [That does sound rather like FDR’s self-estimation, doesn’t it?] ‘It did not surprise him greatly when Allah, who sent Arabia its ancient rains, provided also its new oil. Nor will it surprise him greatly if God presently provides not merely victory but even the bright and honest world that should go with it.'”  For FDR, the bright and honest post-war world was to have the United Nations as its centerpiece, but the Saudi king probably had somewhat different ambitions, ambitions that became clearer in the decades to come, as displayed by his sons and heirs to the throne.

Weakened by the war, the British Empire did begin its retreat from the Middle East and Asia generally in the next few years, and the U. S. and Saudi Arabia found common cause in opposing the Soviet Union. One of the causes of the collapse of the Soviet empire was the Saudi’s deliberate lowering of oil prices, a principal source of revenue for the Soviet Union. But the Saudis began to see some troubles of their own, beginning in the 1960s. At that time, the kingdom saw an influx of Islamist activists and militants who had been exiled from Egypt, Syria, and Iraq—nationalist/secular regimes then allied with Moscow. The foreign Islamists were often affiliated with the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood. The interaction of these Islamists with Wahhabis led to the radicalization of many of the latter, especially in the younger generation. Crucially, that was a large generation; Saudi Arabia had experienced the same postwar ‘Baby Boom’ seen in the United States and Europe, with parallel social and political consequences. King Faisal, who had taken the throne in 1964, was assassinated by a member of this younger generation eleven years later. More significantly, however, by then the vast increase in oil revenues had led to social tensions between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in Saudi society; the most obvious symptom of this crisis was the November 1979 takeover of the Great Mosque in Mecca by young militants. To maintain cohesion, the monarchy turned once more to the Wahhabis, who for their part demanded and received ironclad control over the kingdom’s education system. But the Wahhabis the monarchy enlisted were culled not from the clergy—now despised by the younger generation—but from the ranks of the militants. To find a parallel in American history, one might consider the way in which the New Left militants were brought into the universities in the 1970s as teachers and administrators; in both cases, the established regime hoped to co-opt the radicals, and the radicals hoped to take over the institutions and funds the regime had made available. Militants who refused this peaceful solution were often sent off to fight in Afghanistan against the Soviets, where those who survived learned guerrilla warfare tactics.

These ‘safety-valve’ tactics deferred revolution for a decade, but in August 1990 Iraq provoked a new crisis by invading Kuwait. King Fahd then invoked a defense agreement King ibn Saud had made with FDR near the end of the Second World War, and American sent troops into the kingdom to protect the oil fields. This didn’t sit well with the Wahabbis, who endorsed the move only in exchange for further Islamization of Saudi civil society. Osama bin Laden offered to deploy his jihadists on defensive positions in order to make the U. S. troops unnecessary, but the monarchy refused, and of course ‘the rest is history.’

Less clearly understood is the oil-revenue-funded activity of the non-al Qaeda Wahhabis, the ones who remained in the kingdom as allies of the monarchy. They have funneled substantial monies into an international campaign of proselytizing and militancy. Just as the Iranians run a network of propaganda and paramilitary organizing in many countries, the Wahhabi-Saudi alliance extends to such allied countries as Quatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Although Kurds, Jordan, Turkey, and most European Muslims remain outside the Wahhabist camp, substantial inroads have been made in Kosovo, Algeria, and Tajikstan, where they have met defeat, and in Chechnya, Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and, of course, the United States, where many mainstream Muslim organizations (such as CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations) are Wahhabist. The notion of “Pan-Islamism,” pioneered in the modern world by the Ottomans in the 1770s, now bears a Wahhabist stamp.

The Saudi monarchy has thus achieved many of the benefits of modernity without admitting into its realm any substantial number of the characteristic social class of modernity, the middle class. This is not just a social or economic issue but a regime issue Saudi Arabia lacks the very class inclined to demand political representation and to moderate the republicanism they often demand. This is true not only as a matter of demographics but also with regard to the country’s way of life. Oil revenues fund a vast welfare state. The commercial side of commercial republicanism is just as weak as the republican side. There is no ‘work ethic,’ as seen in the West. For the young there is more incentive to study Koran than calculus. the Saudi economy lacks commercial diversity and the opportunities such diversity brings. Indeed, the economies of the twenty-two countries of the Middle East, with a combined population of some 300 million, produce fewer manufactured goods than Spain. Ambitious men look to careers to religion and politics, but political careers are blocked by the monarchy. No wonder that their ambitions turn toward the use of Islam for revolutionary politics and not, for example, toward commercial entrepreneurship. In the West, the political philosopher Montesquieu proposed that the energies generated by religious passions be re-channeled into peaceful, commercial pursuits. The Saudi regime carefully blocks any such re-channeling—politically, doctrinally, and economically.

The Saudi way of life thus always stands ready to injure the monarchic portion of the Saudi ruling body and to overturn or take over Saudi political institutions if that ruling body strays too far and too conspicuously from the purposes of the clerical portion of the Saudi ruling body. The wealth generated by the oil economy has tempted the Saudi royal family to stray—quite far, in some instances. Add to this a crisis in the oil industry itself. Revenues to support the Saudi state declined as oil prices fell in the past three decades—that is, throughout the lives of the current generation of youth, now the most numerous of any Saudi generation hitherto. In Saudi Arabia, the ‘baby boom’ of the postwar years wasn’t followed by a ‘baby bust,’ as in the West. Saudi Arabia has the highest population growth rate in the world. The Saudi population has risen from about 3 million in 1950 to about 20 million today. Half of the population is under the age of twenty-five.

Population growth has hit the royal family itself. The king receives his title through the consensus of the royal family; family members, the sharia, and the clerics limit his authority. A Saudi king is no tyrant. The Saudi royal family consists of over 30,000 members, a number that will double in the next two decades. Given current economic trends, such a large family cannot sustain itself at the levels of affluence it has grown accustomed to enjoying. Further, such affluence has led to a degree of luxury, of personal and social corruption, that the stricter Wahhabis find offensively impious: hence Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi renegade, bred of the regime itself and dedicated to its destruction.

How do things stand in Saudi Arabia today?

Saudi Arabia looks like a throwback to the Europe of the early modern period, the sort of traditionalist monarchy that declined in the West in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But despite the problems I’ve mentioned, the Saudis have proven resilient, surviving such crises as a revolt by religious militia in the late 1920s, the deposing of King Saud in 1964 by his half brother, King Faisal, and then the assassination of Faisal in 1975. Islamist rebellions have been quelled, so far; the size, wealth, and the political experience of the Saudi royal family have kept the regime in place. The threat from al Qaedists peaked in 2003-04, but that threat declined after an effective campaign of internal repression, helped by the U. S. troop surge in in Iraq a couple of years later, wherein Iraqi Sunnis turned against al Qaeda forces in that country.

A recent conference of Islamic clerics hosted by the Saudis was condemned by an al Qaeda spokesman: “He who is called the defender of monotheism by sycophantic clerics is raising the flag of brotherhood between religions… and thinks he has found the wisdom to stop wars and prevent the causes of enmity between religions and peoples. By God, if you do not resist heroically against this wanton tyrant, the day will come when church bells will ring in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula.” But such hand-wringing is just about all al Qaeda has been able to muster against bin Laden’s old arch-enemy regime in Riyadh. Most non-jihadists, both in Saudi Arabia and in Iraq, care first of all about their local communities; they do not appreciate the military attention al Qaeda brings to their towns. And all that oil money that has flowed into Saudi coffers—from $40 per barrel in 2003 to $104 per barrel before the recent decline, instigated by the Saudis themselves—has purchased a lot more friends in those towns.

The main threat to the Saudi regime today is Iran, itself seeking to extend its influence throughout the Gulf, through Shia proxies in Iraq and elsewhere. Here too theological-political disputes push the Saudis and Americans into cooperation. At the same time, the Saudis do not want the United States to attack Iran and rid the Sunnis of their Shi’a problem more or less altogether; having seen the Americans in Iraq, the Saudis doubt that the American military would do a more effective job in Iran. But the Saudis do need the Americans for defensive purposes, being military unimpressive themselves. As we have all seen, the Obama Administration’s nuclear weapons deal with the Iranians worries them not only for the obvious reasons but also because they fear it might betoken a U. S. alliance shift away from themselves. The civil war in Syria has only complicated matters, as the Iran-backed Alawite regime fights for its life against Saudi-backed Sunni militants who will fight to undermine the Saudi regime itself, if and when they return to their homeland.

Under such circumstances, the Saudi rulers would like to do what their onetime rulers, the British, excelled at; they want to muddle through, live to see another day, and meanwhile use their considerable economic leverage, worldwide, to promote their own interests, including Wahhabi Islam, through the construction of mosques and other means of religious ‘networking.’ They have been rather good at that, for the last century or so.

The Saudis are tending to their substantial economic interests in a variety of ways. They are investing some of their oil revenues in refining capacity and in the petrochemical industry. At the moment, the top five refiners are the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and Germany. The Saudis want to join that club, and the state-owned Saudi Aramco hopes to bring the kingdom from #12 in the world (where it is now) into the top five, by early in the 2020s. That is optimistic, but there is no reason to think that this goal is unachievable eventually. It is a matter of money, and the Saudis have a lot of it.

One vulnerability often overlooked when we look at Saudi Arabia is food. The country is as food-poor as it is oil-rich. Desalinization is not sufficiently advanced technically o make cereal grains viable on the Arabian peninsula. The Saudis have given up on their program to grow wheat. Solution? The purchase of overseas agribusinesses. But here is where the Saudis’ lack of military capacity could hurt them. In a worldwide food crisis, food producers will feed their own populations first, and the Saudis will need to cut deals for any surplus that remains—if there is one. This will hold true whether or not the Saudis own the farmlands in foreign countries.

More ambitiously, the Saudis have unveiled a longer-range plan to diversify its economy. This would be economically beneficial, but how will the regime manage the concomitant rise of a middle class? Will that class support or undermine the monarchy, in the long run? But that’s the long run. More immediately in using modernity to resist modernity—by using oil revenues to enhance the sway of Wahhabism—the monarchy has insulated itself from its weak middle class, the usual backbone of social democratization, but without making itself immune from social democratization itself. If the extended royal family may be said to constitute a sort of oligarchy, is threatened today not by a modern middle class but by a fanaticized, Wahhabi-educated, Wahhabi propagandized populace, angry at corrupt royal rule.