West Asia At War: Repression, Resistance and Great Power Games

by Talmiz Ahmad

Fromkin points out that ‘the modern belief in secular civil government is an alien creed in a region most of whose inhabitants, for more than a thousand years, have avowed faith in a Holy Law that governs all of life’. He then notes ‘Islam’s hold on the region’ and points out that ‘European officials at the time had little understanding of Islam’.60 What Fromkin misses out is that it was not the ‘Holy Law’ that made the West Asian soil infertile for Western institutions; it was the fact that these institutions imposed by Western powers were not really modern, secular, democratic entities, but were fake imitations of Western order – hollow structures without the informing spirit of freedom, equality and justice. In fact, the literature of the period from Arab sources is replete with proclamations, petitions, pamphlets and journalistic outpourings calling on Western powers to grant to the Arabs the very ideas and institutions they had at home. The nationalism of the Arabs at this time, as Hourani notes, was secularist and constitutionalist; to be modern ‘was to have a political and social life similar to those of the countries of western Europe’.61 The Western response to these aspirations was intolerant and violent – firepower, incarceration, torture, executions and exile. This, rather than Holy Law, should be held responsible for the legacy of insecurity and instability that has been bequeathed to the region. Fromkin is however right when he says, ‘The settlement of 1922, ...

Perhps the mosf important insight.