Colonialism, Racism, Islamophobia & Zionism: The Enduring Western Narrative.
The colonisation of the Islamic Middle East & the white, Christian supremacist attitudes it fostered still justify the continuing annexation of Palestine, the genocide of the native population, and the Judaeo-Christian military domination of the region, perpetuating a narrative that goes back a millennium or more.
‘The popularity of the notion of modernization must be sought not in its clarity and precision as a vehicle of scholarly communication, but rather in its ability to evoke vague and generalized images which serve to summarize all the various transformations of social life attendant upon the rise of industrialization and the nation-state in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.’
Dean C. Tipps; Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective (1).
‘The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilisations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of deepest and most recurring images of the Orient.’
Edward Said; Orientalism (2).
The West’s last great colonising project…
With the exhaustion of modernist theories to explain social development and the emergence of postmodernist narratives after WWII, particularly emanating from post-colonial regions where the dominance of Westernised approaches, specifically those underpinned by the supposed ‘logic’ of social Darwinism, found that a new language was needed to explain the development, or more precisely, the lack of development, of non-Western societies without the discriminatory bias.
And yet, the terminology and language surrounding this would appear to be so deeply embedded, even as it was being discredited, that one finds that an almost unconscious use of certain words to describe relative states in this regard remains acceptable, even among respected authors and academics.
Theories of modernisation are taken to be theories of the transformation of nation states, and have origins that can be traced back to the post-WWII years when American politicians and elites sought a way to quantify and clarify the emergence of what used to be called ‘Third World’ societies following the impetus for decolonisation, but also with respect to assessing the impact of the Cold War on American, and Western societies (1).
The study of social change in non-Western post-war nations is deeply rooted in the perspective of developmentalism built on the methods employed by Western theorists who themselves had leaned heavily on eighteenth and nineteenth disciplines of pre-Socratic theories on social progress and evolution, and within this, traditions of Western thought, evolutionary theory and, more latterly, twentieth century functionalism (1).
Whilst many theories have defied definition, having based their approaches on multi-faceted processes (i.e. economic development, industrialisation, rationalisation, structural differentiation, political development, social mobilisation and/or secularisation), they are often thought to be discriminatory, the use of relative terms (i.e. partially developed) to describe the extent of modernisation is perhaps illustrative of this point.
Nevertheless, the history books will tells us that the so-called modernisation of the Middle East began with an almighty jolt in 1798 when Napoleon casually brushed aside the cream of the Egyptian military in a matter of two hours.
The once great Mamluks had become foppish caricatures of their feared forebears and found themselves hopelessly out-gunned, out-manoeuvred and out-thought by perhaps the most modern army in the world at the time (3).
Once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire, Egypt went on to become the breadbasket of the Ottoman Empire, and then following Napoleon’s conquest, to become France’s leading supplier of grain and cotton. Once the pride of North Africa, Egypt’s stock had been steadily falling ever since Cleopatra’s legendary asp bit home.
The prevailing narrative says that for centuries Islam had been like a closed shop we are told. There had been nothing intellectually new on the shelves in generations; complacency, doctrinal stagnation and fossilisation meant that new teaching methods, new ideas and innovation had been stifled (3).
Europe, or what we might now call the West, had been consistently defined in contrast to the Orient in the Judaeo-Christian imagination in respect of ideas, progression, civilisation and culture. Edward Said explains that if we take the late eighteenth century as a ‘roughly defined’ starting point, Western attitudes, that Said defines as encapsulated in the term ‘Orientalism,’ ‘can be discussed and analysed as a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient — dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient (2).’
And the domination, the restructuring, the authority wielded by the colonial powers, all undertaken allegedly, for the benefit of the ungrateful native wretches, became the myth that was described, taught, settled, and ruled over, and all because the exaltation of the imperialist coloniser and the humbling of the downtrodden colonised native wretches becomes economically fruitful, and that expediency was all the justification that was ever needed to dominate.
As Albert Memmi (4) wrote: ‘Just as the bourgeoisie proposes an image of the proletariat, the existence of the colonizer requires that an image of the colonized be suggested. These images become excuses without which the presence and conduct of a colonizer, and that of a bourgeois, would seem shocking. But the favoured image becomes a myth precisely because it suits too well…/…It is impossible to save the colonized from this myth — a portrait of wretchedness has been indelibly engraved.’
A point rammed home by Franz Fanon (5), who laments that ‘to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil,’ that driven to its logical imperialist conclusion, cannot do other than dehumanise the native; to turn the native into an animal.
Thus, the twenty first century, post-9/11 narrative follows that the Muslim terrorist, born with a burning hatred of the civilised Westerner indelibly etched into his/her subconscious must then be punished, beaten, humiliated, dispossessed, deprived and dominated. And the Muslim fundamentalist must be mutilated and killed to show them the error of their ways. But this is not education meant in any way for the native subject; it is a lesson in economic objectivity and military prowess for those safe at home, far from the wilds of the untamed Orient or the walled, isolated, besieged enclave of Gaza, as the aghast colonisers cry, ‘Look what wonders we perform on their behalf and still they hate us!’ And they throw up their arms in disgust! ‘They must want to be punished!’
And so they are. Again. And again. And again.
After all, the Jewish and the Christian fundamentalists know the right way, the only way, as witnessed by their great wealth, their great power, and their great weapons and the great destruction that always portends their great arrival. This is the lesson, and it is a lesson that is ubiquitously, ominously ever-present in the colonial curriculum of every great and heroic Western leader, from the brutal soldier to the callous politician or diplomat. And they never tire of teaching it via the baton, the bullet, the clenched fist, the prison cell and the noose.
And this lesson has been taught unremittingly to West Bank Palestinians every day of every year since 1967, who, by virtue of their animalistic instincts and minimal intellect, seem incapable of learning the lesson; that just by breathing, just by existing, they are committing a crime, and as such, become a legitimate security concern in the eyes of the Israeli government, the IDF, and the settlers who burn their houses, burn their fields, kill their children and beat their men, sometimes to death for this most heinous of crimes.
Worse yet, should a Palestinian dare to announce their legal right under international law to resist by picking up a stone when faced with dispossession, injury, or something far worse, and dare to try and stop the settlers or the IDF from destroying all they own, then they are immediately condemned as a terrorist; an irresistible function of their existence in the eyes of Israeli’s and their blind, immoral Western post-colonial backers.
Just by resisting they have fulfilled Western expectations; the uncivilised nature of their resistance becomes clear. Rather than simply acquiescing to a life of endless torment and humiliation, they have once again fitted themselves neatly into the box prepared for them by their colonial betters, and as such, they, and their inconsequential life(s), become fair game.
‘This conduct,’ writes Memmi, ‘which is common to colonizers as a group, thus becomes what can be called a social institution. In other words, it defines and establishes concrete situations which close in on the colonized, weigh on him until they bend his conduct and leave their marks on his face. Generally speaking, these are situations of inadequacy. The ideological aggression which tends to dehumanize and then deceive the colonized finally corresponds to concrete situations which lead to the same result (4).’
The world of the colonised and of the would-be colonised is a world of compartments; ‘a motionless, Manichaeistic world, a world of statues,’ writes Fanon (5). A statue of the President who dropped the bunker busting bombs on nuclear installations; a statue of the settler-hero who destroyed a village, then killed and scattered its residents; for the Western world, replete with muscular, grain fed colonisers, military mauling and crushing machines, and would be resource strippers is a confident world, ‘a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with stones the backs flayed by whips,’ which dismembers with excessive, successive munitions the habitat of the native, as well as the natives themselves, who, as mere collateral damage do not heed the given lessons to stay to stay in their place; to not exceed the limits so graciously provided them by their superiors.
And as Trump, and a deliberately manipulative and fawning Netanyahu sat in Washington a few weeks ago, mulling over how they might rid Palestine of its native inhabitants, both men — neither of them known for their pious religiosity — by simple weight of military might, lord it over nations and people that claim specific religious affiliations and as such, are labelled as dangers to the West.
But violence is contagious; it is a disease of the soul, of our morality, the very core of our being, and only leads to more violence…
As David Brooks wrote in an Op-Ed in the NYT recently, ‘Extremist Christian language and theology can lead to extreme Christian violence in the same way that extreme language can lead to extreme violence in other faith traditions and among people who have no faith at all.’
Ah, yes! But most Western eyes and certainly most Western leaders, are blind to such wisdom…
One of Netanyahu’s ‘advisers’ in Washington, one of the architects of the shamefully named ‘humanitarian’ city plan for Gaza— called by former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, a ‘concentration camp’ for the ‘purposes of ethnic cleansing’ — was Mossad Chief, David Barnea, coincidentally, the grandson of a refugee who was ethnically cleansed during WWII by the Germans, and the son of Joseph Brunner, who was just three years old when he fled the devastation of the onrushing Holocaust with his parents.
Yet for Israelis, the use of terms and practices, such as ‘concentration camp’ and ‘ghettoisation,’ learned from the Nazis have been employed openly since the very inception of the State of Israel against the Palestinian people.
And almost with a sense of desperation one feels, David Myers and Adam Raz point out that, ‘it serves no therapeutic purpose to deny the complex causal chains that link the suffering of the Jewish and Palestinian people. In moving toward a position of such radical empathy, it might be helpful to recall, as Amos Goldberg and others recently have, a bracing Hebrew text, the last stanza from “Rationalization” (1958) by the poet Avot Yeshurun:
“The Shoah of the Jew of Europe and the Shoah of Arabs in Israel are a single Shoah of the Jewish people. The two look straight in the face of the other.” Indeed,’ assert Myers and Raz, ‘we must look straight in the face of the tragedy of the other that we have created.’
Yet, in this world, where the victims have become the victimisers, the face of the truth is barely recognisable, hidden beneath rich, thick layers of misdirection, mistruths, alternative facts, cherry-picked selective histories, and outright fabrications, that morph lies into pseudo-truths and facts into lies.
‘Memory works in interesting ways,’ say Myers and Raz, ‘Just as there was more open talk of the expulsion of Palestinians in 1949 than in 1979, so too there was less inhibition about using terms such as “ghetto” and “concentration camp” in Israeli political discourse then than now. The passage of time has led to a narrowing of semantic horizons.’
And even as Israel bombs, assassinates, and dismembers the starving Palestinian population with the impunity granted by a guilty West, ‘the practice of historical denial adopted by Israelis since 1948 has grown more pervasive, seeping into the fabric of society. Israeli society finds itself at a moral and political crossroads: Coiled to defend itself against charges of genocide like a snake ready to strike, the Netanyahu government readily invokes the Holocaust to reassert its position as chief victim in the ongoing passion play between Jews and Arabs.’
Memory works in interesting ways indeed…
Gideon Levy points out the grim, yet unrecognised similarity between the actions of a man known all too well to Israeli Jews; one Adolf Eichmann, who, whilst young Joseph Brunner was fleeing for his life, was still discussing and finalising plans for the ‘Final Solution,’ just as Barnea is doing now in respect of the native population of Palestine.
‘Barnea told his interlocutors’, on Israel’s woefully, racially biased Channel 12, ‘that Israel has already begun talks with three countries on this issue,’ wrote Gideon with evident dismay, ‘and the irony of history hid its face in shame. A grandson of a refugee of ethnic cleansing in Germany discusses ethnic cleansing, and no memory comes to mind.’
We must look straight in the face of the tragedy of the other that we have created…but rarely, if ever, do we…
Such is the Western world today; one that ignores and rewrites history to suit its own purposes; simple matters such as shame, truth, facts, morality, or personal connections are crushed beneath the all-consuming imperative that is domination in all its imperious, imperial glory.
As the late, great Tony Judt explained with typically forthrightness and prescience all the way back in 2006:
‘Seen from the outside, Israel still comports itself like an adolescent: consumed by a brittle confidence in its own uniqueness; certain that no one “understands” it and everyone is “against” it; full of wounded self-esteem, quick to take offense and quick to give it. Like many adolescents Israel is convinced — and makes a point of aggressively and repeatedly asserting — that it can do as it wishes, that its actions carry no consequences and that it is immortal.’
‘Israel, in the world’s eyes, is a normal state, but one behaving in abnormal ways,’ Judt continued.
But then perhaps the point. For many Israeli extremists, Israel is simply not a normal state like any other. Meir Kahane, whose radicalism inspires so many in the Knesset today, rejected traditional notions of Zionism as ‘normalcy;’ Ben Gurion’s quest to have Israel join the international family of democratic nation-states, would cause the collapse of Israel he said (6).
For Kahane, ironically a strong supporter of American democracy, insisted that democracy in Israel would undermine the idea of a true Jewish state; there could be no room for equality of citizenship for Jews and any others in a Jewish state. Israel, Kahane asserted, had a different fate by virtue of its religious standing and role in the ‘end of days’ and the arrival of the Messiah. Therefore, for Israel to fulfil its’ fate it needed to be ‘abnormal (6).’
But this fantastic notion of Zionism remains the preserve of a small clique of extremist religious Zionists, and does not fit at all within recognised international norms and laws that the rest of the planet lives by, let alone with the religious beliefs of many Jews. The arrogant assumption is then, that the whole world should accept Israel’s behaviour, good and bad, as part of its’ place in destiny, and that is just not going to happen outside of the guilt-laden, kow-towing West, that is.
The problem with prophecies is that when they don’t pan out as expected, it can shake one’s faith…for example, among ancient Jews, a certain date — 4291 in the Hebrew calendar, or 531–2 in the Christian — was held as the year when the Messiah was fated to return. When this didn’t occur the date was revised, and revised again to fit developing events.
David Levering Lewis (7) tells us that there was considerable unrest in the caravan towns and cities of the Hijaz in the late sixth century, about 50 years later or so, driven in large part by the commercial dominance of Meccan merchants who had seen their wealth spiral dramatically as a result of the creation of a cartel which saw business leaders pooling their resources, and selling venture shares (almost a thousand or so years before the Dutch East India Company began the trend in the West) to those who could afford it, maximising the practice of buying cheap and selling expensively, all at the expense of those at the bottom of the ladder.
As the seventh century arrived, this practice served only to highlight the seismic economic inequality between the elites and the common folk, and as poverty grew, many left their traditional nomadic ways of life for the cities, particularly Mecca, which fast degenerated into a desperate place of thievery, exploitation and sexual depravity.
The mass movement of people disrupted normal trade routes; the ‘desert democracy’ which had always held equality as a vital function of community wellness, suddenly collapsed.
The depth of misery and economic calamities led to fights between normally stable clans and groups. Lewis quotes a contemporary Jewish observer as having said, ‘when you see kingdoms fighting themselves,’ then Jews always ‘look for the footsteps of the Messiah.’
‘The eschatological certainty appeared to be corroborated as war, famine and plague raked the Middle East,’ Lewis tell us, leading to some of the more exotic, fringe deities of the fertile crescent to leech into the underbelly of the rapidly expanding Meccan metropolis, which Lewis describes as the economic powerhouse of the Middle East at the time; the worldly lodestone of al-Jahiliyya (the time before Islam) in the region (7).
Lewis quotes one contemporary authority; al-Tabari [see references in Lewis (7)] who said that Islam ‘developed as an answer to the problem resulting from Meccan commercial prosperity;’ yet, as Lewis says, this might seem facile and shallow, but given the troubles of the time, as a theory, it holds much water nonetheless.
Mani, a third century Persian aristocrat whose teachings and wisdom ‘narrowly missed becoming the established religion of the Sassanid Empire,’ had bequeathed a judgement of auspicious esteem for the near future of the Middle East in the wake of the prophetic presciences of Abraham and Moses.
‘Wisdom and good works have been brought in perfect succession from age to age by the messengers of God. They come in one age through the prophet called Buddha in the region of India, in another through Zoroaster in the land of Persia, and in yet another through Jesus in the lands of the West.’ Mani asserted that his own wisdom and prescience had never before existed, and foretold of another messenger yet to come (7).
That messenger, however, was not the foretold Jewish Messiah of the Torah, but was a middle aged Arab who received the word of God in a revelation while in a cave outside Mecca; a man persecuted and cast out for the clarity of God’s given revelations, yet a man destined to change, not only the Middle East, but the whole history of mankind.
Prophecy is a risky, dangerous business, and such things rarely work out as expected. Current events in the Middle East are also being augured as the birth pangs of the Messiah, and perhaps only time will show the wisdom and veracity of such prophecies this time round.
Others, like Tony Judt, rely just on the intelligence of their insight to offer a window into the future, but when correct, such predictions can also have a ring of prophetic foresight about them.
So, one might say, as if seeing through a crystal ball at the time, Judt followed up with uncanny foresight in the same piece giving a more typical world view without any transcendent frills:
To all intents and purposes, ‘(Israel) is in control of its fate,’ he wrote, ‘but the victims are someone else. It is strong, very strong, but its behavior is making everyone else vulnerable. And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This — the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic — is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel’s trump card.’
And yet, people consistently say to me when I express support for Palestinian’s right for self-determination under international law that I am being antisemitic; that Jews in New York, in L.A., and elsewhere are being abused, as if my support for the recognition of basic human rights for Palestinians is somehow the cause of their woes.
My support for the rights of Chinese Uyghurs doesn’t make me anti-Chinese any more than support for Palestinians rights makes me antisemitic; the one is completely distinct from the other, and conflating support for the rights of a people with a form of racism is not only only wrong, it is utterly illogical and absurdly ridiculous, and serves only to show how brittle the alleged morality and righteousness of the Israeli state truly is.
And irony of ironies; there is never a single line anywhere about the rising tide of Islamophobia in the U.S. and elsewhere following October 7. Why? Because to be Islamophobic is the acceptable face of racism today all across the West.
Yet Israel, the U.S., and the West more widely, persist in the twisted notion that Jews remain the perennial victim, when, if anything at all, Muslims should now be seen as the twenty first century’s Jews; widely denounced and persecuted for their faith.
The Jew as the eternal victim is, however, so ingrained in the minds of well-meaning people everywhere that they cannot separate one issue from the other; the narrative of the Jewish victim is so comfortable and unseen that it is like a tattoo on the subconscious, one that overwrites all other arguments, such that antisemitic behaviour on an American campus is overwhelmingly seen as a by-product of Palestinian support or activism, and never as a consequence of Israel’s actions in the Middle East.
Whilst antisemitism, like all forms of racism, is abhorrent and should be condemned, it is not going to be solved on campuses or anywhere else by turning a blind eye to Israel’s many crimes, or by turning anti-Jew hatred into anti-Muslim hatred and policies, which for all the wondrous answers provided by some supporters of Israel, would seem to be the go to (non-?) solution.
As Judt asserts again, it is Israel’s behaviour that is the major factor in antisemitic behaviour the world over; the one thing Israel never does is alter its own behaviour. If it stopped attacking its neighbours; if it stopped the genocide in Gaza; if it stopped the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, so many good things might happen.
Yet, this option is always dismissed in favour of ‘the habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism (that) is (so) deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts…(that) Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel’s misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized — but then responds to its critics with loud cries of “anti-Semitism” — it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don’t like these things it is because you don’t like Jews.’
And I sigh resignedly, because this emotionally, and logically truncated train of thought I hear again, and again, and again…
And this, as both Israeli and American government officials make repeated fundamentalist, often extremist claims on behalf of their respective God’s that subvert and contort their respective religions into ugly caricatures of themselves; a hollow vessel named ‘righteousness,’ or more correctly, ‘might makes right,’ to be filled with the blood of their treacherous enemies. For them, invoking their God’s will to do their nations bidding is only right and moral and correct, whereas for the enemy to do the same, it is wrong, immoral and evil.
But the Christian God, and the Jewish God, though they may be, arguably, one and the same, is a white man’s God, with a white man’s face, and as such has righteousness on its side. The Islamic God, in contrast, is a brown-faced God; one who lacks any moral backbone or righteous fortitude, as witnessed by the feebleness of their resistance, the ineffectual nature of their weapons, by the poverty of their people, by the immorality of their claims and actions.
Yet religious affiliation is dropping among both Jewish and Christian populations as secularisation and religious apathy take over, whilst Islam remains, for Westerners at least, incongruously and most scarily, the fastest growing religion in the world.
And here’s brave, fearless Israel; a democratic state (allegedly); a bold, pioneering Western enclave on the edge of civilisation, afloat in a sea of violent, fire breathing heathens, beset on all sides by antisemitic, Islamic terrorists desperate for their heads, yet Israel endures anchored only by its strong moral character, the force of God’s will, and the brute strength of modern, Western armaments and technology.
And yet Judaism, Christianity and Islam were all conceived in these same beautiful, yet wild, violent lands; lands that birthed Elijah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, as well as The Prophet Muhammad; in so doing giving religious voice and zeal and courage to adherents of all three of the Abrahamic religions.
Yet for Christians, the ultimate doctrinal irony endures; whilst Rome, and its putative Orthodox heirs in Constantinople, and then Moscow, might be the capitals of Christianity, it is Palestine that can literally be said to be the font of Western Christian civilisation, far outside of what we now recognise as the legitimate, geographic and cultural boundaries of Europe, deep in lands swarming with the unshod, soiled feet of the children of Islam.
Yet, as David Levering Lewis (7) writes:‘…to know something of Islam’s remarkable seven hundred year presence in Europe is to contemplate a slice of history that might seem too remote in time to speak to the concerns of our postmodern present — even though much of the Muslim world stands in relationship to Europe and the United States today as much of a ramshackle Christian world once stood in relationship to a highly advanced Islamic one. Yet, it is in this long, fraught saga of cultural roles reversed and political hegemonies upended that we can discern many of the causes for the troubled history being in the twenty-first century.’
Indeed, the first sentences of Lewis’s book read thus:
‘Islam rose when Rome fell. Why and how that happened is the necessary beginning of ‘God’s Crucible:’ why in the early years of the seventh century of the Common Era, the road opened wide to Islam for world conquest; how in a time frame that passed in the blinking of an eye, the Arabs accomplished the greatest revolution in power, religion, culture and wealth in history — all of which, made Europe Europe,’ and the West the West.
As a Muslim army, under the Umayyad Caliphate, conquered the Visigothic Kingdom of the Iberian peninsula in 711 AD, Islam took its first giant strides into the European heartland. The Muslim tidal wave engulfing southern Europe was finally turned back north of the Pyrenees at the Battle of Poitiers in 732 in Western France, and then again a half-century later at Roncevaux where Roland and his peers gave their lives to not only consolidate, but ensure the survival of ‘the emerging identity of the ‘Europenses;’’ a prescient observation made at the time by an obscure Spanish priest (7).
Indeed, in reference to the immense and lasting consequence of these two seismic victories Edward Gibbon later wrote: ‘Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet (8).’
And it is within the tangled roots of the centuries of the tenuous, often strained engagement between Islamic Spain and Christian Europe where the buds of the Zionist idea first broke ground, to scatter the first fertile seeds of European/Arabic antagonism, within both the Christian and Jewish communities, who by virtue of their collective resistance, became centred in the formation of a growing sense of a Judaeo-Christianised European/Western identity.
More than two centuries later, as Pope Urban II christened the First Crusade with an electrifying call to arms made in a field just outside Clermont in central France; the dramatic backdrop, a chain of dormant volcanoes, ‘the mightiest of the lava domes, the Puy-De-Dôme, clearly visible’ behind him, a growing sense of what it meant to be a European was coalescing (9).
It was a cold, bitter, but clear day on the 27th November 1095, and the waiting crowd strained to hear him as began to speak:
‘Dearest brethren, I, Urban, Supreme Pontiff, and by the permission of God, prelate of the whole world, have come in this time of urgent necessity to you, the servants of God in these regions, as a messenger for divine admonition…/…We want you to know what sad cause has brought us to your land and what emergency of yours and all the faithful it is that has brought us here.’
Peter Frankopan (9) takes up the tale thus: ‘Disturbing news had reached him, (Urban) said, both from Jerusalem and from the city of Constantinople: the Muslims, “a foreign people and a people rejected by God, had invaded lands belonging to Christians, destroying them and plundering the local population.” Many had been brutally murdered; others had been taken prisoner and carried off into captivity.’
Describing in graphic detail the atrocities committed, in scenes that may well strike a traumatic chord with many today following the October 7 attacks, Urban exhorted the crowd to galvanise themselves and their peers to action. ‘Not I, but God exhorts you as heralds of Christ to repeatedly urge men of all ranks whatsoever, knights as well as foot soldiers, rich and poor, to hasten to exterminate this vile race from our lands and to aid the Christian inhabitants in time.’
Those who took up the challenge would be hailed as ‘soldiers of Christ,’ Urban said, and would be eternally blessed, thereby ushering in religious war, or Crusade, as a new method of attaining eternal salvation, setting a trend that has led every war since, religious or not, to be in God’s name.
In so doing Urban laid the way for the racialisation of the Muslim/Arab as an existential foe, giving rise to the ongoing war of a unified Christendom at war with a similarly unified Islam. Herein we find the first convulsions of ‘Christian Zionism, a theology that embeds the killing and erasure of the Arab body within its vision, continues to influence modern liberal ideologies and their engagement with Palestine.’
As Islam fell and retreated, and then rose again as Mehmet the Conqueror used the most modern heavy weaponry available to destroy the allegedly impregnable Theodosian Wall that had protected Constantinople for more than a thousand years, and against which countless Muslim armies had floundered and broken, Christendom was itself undergoing a revolution.
As the Reformation and subsequently, the Enlightenment took hold, ironically, building on the knowledge and learning gleaned from Islamic scholars, Hanine Shehadeh explains, Protestant reformers ‘would intensify theologies about “Jewish restoration” as the imperial potentiality gradually came to the foreground. This reinterpretation gave rise to a novel theo-political messianic vision whose importance for political life today cannot be overstated.’
As bureaucratic rot, intransigence and corruption seeped into the ruling classes of the Ottoman Empire towards the end of Suleiman’s reign in 973–4/1566*, a slow decline began that coincided with rise of Western European states, particularly Great Britain and France, who filled the power vacuum left by the retreating Ottomans.
The limits of Ottoman military power were being increasingly exposed, as demonstrated most clearly during a devastating fourteen year war with much of Europe that ended badly with in the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1100/1699, where territory won almost two hundred years earlier by Suleiman, was ceded to the Austrian Hapsburgs, to Poland, and to the city state of Venice (10).
But perhaps most damaging of all was the victorious European powers’ insistence that the Sultan, Mustafa II, agree to recognise and protect all Christians in the empire (under Islamic law they were protected anyway but with reduced rights compared to Muslims), just as the first riches from European colonial expansion, particularly from the Americas, were making their way into the coffers of the Sultan’s Christians, giving them a huge commercial and monetary advantage over most of their Muslim competitors, who, by comparison, were seeing their trading opportunities and possibilities shrinking as their empire withered and contracted beneath their feet (10).
Over the next two hundred years economic and intellectual stagnation gradually set in. Islamic scholars, wary of European advances in the sciences and arts, summarily dismissed most breakthroughs as ‘heathen innovations,’ as the Enlightenment, and the Renaissance, ushered in a new Euro-centric intellectualism that had been spurred on by the translation and assimilation of many ancient Islamic texts and works.
With the treaty of Karlowitz, Ottoman military weakness and administrative fragility was seized upon by the rising European powers and the empire began to recede at an accelerated rate. By the time Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in the twilight tears of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman empire was in full retreat ahead of a soaring Christian centred Europe.
Shehadeh tells us when Bonaparte ‘made his first political statements about Zionism during his campaign in Palestine in the early 19th century, the ideological framework that had been built by Protestant Reformers …some four hundred years (earlier) was already in full effect.’
Thus, the Islamophobia that we recognise today as having arisen out of the rubble and dust of the 9/11 tragedy, framing Islamic violence as an existential threat to the West, was, in reality, nothing more than a rehashed, postmodernist version of existing colonial and Zionist narratives that had been around for centuries.
Thanks for reading.
*Dates given according to the hijri Islamic and Gregorian calendars.
- Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective; Dean C. Tipps, Comparative Studies in Science & History, Vol.15, no.2 (1973).
- Orientalism; Edward W. Said, 1978.
- The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason; Christopher de Ballaigue, 2017.
- The Colonizer and the Colonized; Albert Memmi, 1974. Republished 2016.
- The Wretched of the Earth; Franz Fanon, 1965.
- Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical; Shaul Magid, 2023.
- God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570–1215; David Levering Lewis, 2018.
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Edward Gibbon, 1776. Kindle Version, 2016.
- The First Crusade: The Call from the East; Peter Frankopan, 2012.
- Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past; Firas Alkhateeb, 2017.
