Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

In fact, Atatürk would turn out to be the prototypical Muslim leader of the half-century to come. Iran generated its own version of the prototype. After the war, the last Qajar king faced the “Jungle Revolution,” a guerilla insurgency launched by admirers of Sayyid Jamaluddin-i-Afghan. The king’s forces consisted of two armies, one commanded by Swedish officers, one by Russian mercenaries.1 Little did the king realize that the real threat to his rule lay not in the jungle but among the foreigners propping him up. When Bolsheviks began joining the jungle revolutionaries, the British got nervous.

Lenin had just seized power in Russia and they didn’t want this sort of thing to spread. The British decided the king wasn’t tough enough to squelch Bolsheviks, so they helped an Iranian colonel overthrow him. This colonel, Reza Pahlavi, was a secular modernist in the Atatürk mold, except that he had no use for democracy (few secular modernist leaders did). In 1925, the colonel declared himself king, becoming Reza Shah Pahlavi, founder of a new Iranian dynasty. From the throne, he launched the same sorts of reforms as Atatürk, especially in the matter of a dress code.

Head scarves, veils, turbans, beards—these were banned for ordinary citizens. Registered clerics could still wear turbans in the new Iran, but they had to have a license certifying that they really were clerics (and how could they meet this irksome proviso, given that Islam never had a formal institution for “certifying” clerics?). Still, anyone caugh...

Much the same thing was happening in Afghanistan, where, an impetuous young man named Amanullah inherited the throne in 1919. An ardent admirer of the Young Turks, this moon-faced fellow with a Hercule Poirot moustache gave Afghanistan a liberal constitution, declared women liberated, funded a nascent secular school system la...

What I find interesting about this dress-code policy is that radical Islamists did exactly the same thing fifty years later when they came back into power in Iran and Afghanistan, except that their dress code was the opposite: suddenly, women were forced to wear head scarves and men were beaten for appearing in public without beards. But the principle of beat...

Four new countries were carved out of the European mandates, a fifth one emerged independently, and Egypt acquired pseudoindependence. But one question remained unresolved: what should be done with Palestine? The principle of self-rule dictated that it too should become a country ruled by itself, but who was its “self?” Was the natural “nation” here the Arabs, who constituted nearly 90 percent of the population and had been living here for centuries? Or was it the Jews, most of whom had come here from Europe in the last two decades but whose ancestors had lived here two thousand years ago? Hmm: tough question.

In 1901, the first of the big Middle Eastern oil fields was detected in Iran by a British prospector named William Knox D’Arcy. He promptly bought exclusive rights to all of Iran’s petroleum from the Qajar king of the time, in exchange for a sum of cash stuffed immediately into that shah’s pockets, and a 16 percent royalty payable to the Iranian treasury later, a royalty to be calculated on “net profits” realized from Iran’s petroleum, not on the gross, which means that D’Arcy’s lease made no guarantees about how much money Iran ever stood to make from its oil.

For Iran, that realization came too late. William D’Arcy had already sold his Iranian oil concession to a company owned by the British government (it still exists: it’s now British Petroleum, or BP). By 1923, according to Winston Churchill, Great Britain had earned 40 million pounds from Iranian oil, while Iran had earned about 2 million from it.3 Meanwhile,

British company had joined forces with Royal Dutch Shell and certain U.S. interests to form a supercompany (“the Turkish Petroleum Company”) that proposed to look for oil in the Ottoman provinces bordering the Persian Gulf. By the time the supercompany was ready to drill, the area in question was part of the British “mandate.” It was then that the British created Iraq and put their Hashemite client in charge of it.

The oil consortium immediately approached King Faisal for a monopoly on the country’s oil resources, and he gladly accommodated them. Going into the negotiation, the Iraqis were hoping for a 20 percent equity share in the company, but they compromised at 0 percent, in exchange for a flat fee per ton of oil extracted, that sum not to be linked in any way to the price of oil or the company’s profits, at least for the first twenty years of the agreement. Equity in the company was divided amon...

Algeria’s eight-year war of independence from France claimed over a million Algerian lives, out of a starting population of fewer than 9 million, a staggering conflict.

As early as 1862, a German Zionist, Moses Hess, had drummed up support for political Zionism by proposing that “the state the Jews would establish in the heart of the Middle East would serve Western imperial interests and at the same time help bring Western civilization to the backward East.”4 The seminal Zionist Theodor Herzl wrote that a Jewish state in Palestine would “form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”

1914, Chaim Weitzman wrote a letter to the Manchester Guardian stating that if a Jewish settlement could be established in Palestine “we could have in twenty to thirty years a million Jews out there. . . . They would develop the country, bring back civilization to it and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.”6 Arabs who saw the Zionist project as European colonialism in thin disguise were not inventing a fantasy out of whole cloth: Zionists saw the project that way too, or at least represented it as such to the imperialist powers whose support they needed.

In 1936, strikes and riots broke out among the Arabs of Palestine, serving notice that the situation was spiraling out of control. In a clumsy effort to placate the Arabs, Great Britain issued an order limiting further Jewish immigration to Palestine, but this order came in 1939, with World War II about to break out and the horrors of Nazism fully manifest to European Jews: there ...

Instead, militant organizations sprang up among the would-be Jewish settlers, and since they were a dispossessed few fighting the world-straddling British Empire, some of these militant Jewish groups resorted to the archetypal strategy of the scattered weak against the well-organized mighty: hit and run raids, sabotage, random assassinations, bombings of places frequented by civilians—in short, terrorism. In 1946, the underground Jewish militant group Haganah bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one ordinary civilians, the most destruc...

But how could he finance the dam without selling his country to one of the superpowers? Then he saw the answer: the Suez Canal, of course. The canal was pulling in about $90 million a year, and Egypt was getting only $6.3 million of it, roughly. Here was the money Egypt needed for its development, and it was mostly draining away to Europe! In 1956, Nasser suddenly poured troops into the Canal Zone and took over the canal.

All this looked very good to Iranians. In the wake of World War II they were ready to resume a project dear to the secular modernists among them: replacing dynastic despotism with homegrown democracy. Reza Shah Pahlavi had blocked this project for decades, but he was gone, finally: the Allies, the wonderful Allies, had removed him during the war for flirting with the Nazis. The stage was set for Iranians to restore their 1906 constitution, resurrect their parliament, and hold real elections: at last they could build the secular democracy they had dreamed about for so long.

With high hopes, then, Iranians went to the polls and voted a secular modernist named Mohammad Mosaddeq into power as their prime minister. Mosaddeq had pledged to recover total control of the country’s most precious resource, its oil, and accordingly upon taking office he canceled the lease with British Petroleum and announced that he was nationalizing the Iranian oil industry. Nice try.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency immediately moved to stop “this madman Mosaddeq” (as U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles called him). In late August of 1953, a faction of the Iranian military carried out a bloody CIA-funded coup that left thousands dead in the streets and put Iran’s most popular political figure under house arrest from which he never emerged. In his place, the CIA restored the son of Reza Shah Pahlavi (also called Reza Shah Pahlavi) as the country’s king. The young sh...

It would be hard to overstate the feeling of betrayal this coup embedded in Iran or the shudder of anger it sent through the Muslim world. Just three years later, Eisenhower’s intervention secured the Suez Canal for Egypt, but the United States reaped no public relations benefit out of it among Muslims: Nasser got all the credit. Why? Because the damage done by the CIA coup in Iran was too deep. Across the Islamic heartland and indeed throughout the once-colonized world, the conviction...

Shah Reza Pahlavi, who had profited from Mosaddeq’s ouster, was a secular modernist in the Atatürk mold, but where Atatürk had been a fundamentally democratic man with an autocratic streak, the Shah of Iran was a fundamentally autocratic man with a totalitarian streak. He built a secret police outfit called SAVAK to consolidate his grip on the country, and as if just to salt his countrymen’s wounds, he signed a treaty with the United States giving American citizens in Iran complete immunity from Iranian laws—an astounding giveaway of sovereignty.

The shah’s tyranny energized a resistance movement that harkened back to the spirit of Sayyid Jamaluddin. Its leading theoretician, Dr. Ali Shariati was a Sorbonne-educated Muslim socialist intellectual. He crafted a vision of Islamic modernism that rejected what he called “Westoxification” and sought a basis for progressive socialism in Islamic tradition. Shariati said, for example, that Islam’s insistence on the unity of God expressed the need for human unity on Earth. In the modern era, the “polytheism” forbidden by Islam was embodied in the division of society into classes by wealth and race.

According to Shariati, the three idols that Muslims pelted with stones during the Hajj pilgrimage represented capitalism, despotism, and religious hypocrisy. He tapped Islamic stories and traditions as fuel for revolutionary fervor, pointing for example, to Hussein’s uprising against Mu’awiya as a symbol of the human struggle for liberation, justice, and salvation: if Hussein could inspire a group of seventy-plus against a massive state, then a small underground revolutionary group of just...

Like the Wahhabis of Sunnism, Khomeini claimed that Muslims had fallen away from “true” Islam as understood from a literal reading of the Qur’an and the traditions of the prophet and (because these were Shi’is) the imams who succeeded him. Khomeini attacked the Shah not for his despotism but for his modernism—for promoting the western dress code, favoring women’s rights, allowing nightclubs to be built in Iran, and so on.

Khomeini also tapped Shi’i tradition to construct a novel political doctrine: that government power properly belonged in the hands of the world’s single chosen representative of the Hidden Imam, a chosen one who could be recognized by his immense religious learning and the reverence that other learned scholars had for him. Such a man was a faqih, a leader with authority to legislate, and in the modern world, Khomeini suggested, he was that man.

After the war, the United Nations imposed sanctions that virtually severed Iraq from the world and reduced Iraqi citizens from a European standard of living in 1990 to one that approached the most impoverished on Earth. Incomes dropped about 95 percent. Disease spread, and there was no medicine to stem it. Over two hundred thousand children—and perhaps as many as half a million—died as a direct result of the sanctions.

One U.N. official, Denis Halliday, resigned because of these sanctions, claiming that “Five thousand children are dying every month. . . . I don’t want to administer a program that results in figures like these.”5 Iraqis, who had suffered through so many years of deepening horror trapped in a war-mad police state, were now reduced to inconceivable squalor. The only sector of Iraqi society on whom the sanctions had little impact was the Ba’ath Party elite, Saddam Hussein and his cohorts, the very people the sanctions were intended to punish.