(NOTE: This article is the second in a series of long-form, deep-dive investigations into the development of Islamic political thought during the 20th and 21st centuries. If you haven’t read the first, it may be worth your while doing so before continuing. You can find it here. The aim is to dig into these developments so that we can be much better equipped to face up to the reality of the struggle with Islamist dreams of world domination. We will, of course, get to ISIS and Al-Qaida eventually, but the first few episodes will explore earlier developments that directly fed into their rise. You may want to get a hot drink before tackling the pieces in this series, but hopefully it will be more than worth your valuable time! Also, please do not hesitate to let me know what you think of these articles)
It certainly made for great television. Masked men in black, using an excavator to demolish a border post between Syria and Iraq. This June 2014 action, orchestrated by the Islamic State (ISIS), was presented as destroying something much bigger than border markers. According to an ISIS spokesman this was nothing less than the ‘end of Sykes-Picot’. To which many non-Arabs probably responded with: “Sykes who!?”
Anyone even vaguely aware of the history of colonialism will be very familiar with the notion that ‘lines drawn on a map’ can have outsized consequences on the ground. In terms of the Arab world the Sykes-Picot Agreement, signed on 16 May 1916, was the moment when some of the most consequential lines in the sand were drawn. The two gentlemen after whom the agreement was named were Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot, representing the British and French governments respectively. They were tasked by their governments to work out the fate of the Ottoman territories after World War I.
As we saw in the previous article in the series, the Ottomans chose badly in terms of who to ally themselves with during the war. This choice eventually led to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the Caliphate. However, by mid-1916 it was not at all clear that the British-French led alliance would emerge victorious from the Great War. So, at the very least you have to admire the chutzpah of these powers to start the process of dividing the spoils of war while the outcome was still in the balance.
It is important to understand that the Ottoman Empire controlled territories that reached way beyond the borders of the modern state of Turkey. So as Sykes and Picot sat down to their negotiations, they were making decisions that would ultimately affect most of the Middle East because the negotiations involved all Ottoman provinces outside the Arabic Peninsula. Sykes and Picot ultimately drew a line that would separate areas of British and French influence and control.
The deal gave the British control of what is now southern Israel and Palestine, Jordan, and southern Iraq, as well as a tiny territory that contained the ports of Haifa and Acre for Mediterranean access. South-eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon were to be under French authority. The famous (in the Arab world at least) Sykes-Picot line starts at the Mediterranean on the coast of Israel and extends all the way into Iraq, with territories to the north of the line in the French sphere of influence and those to the south in the British sphere. As an aside, for complicated reasons that I’m not going to go into here, the current border between Iraq and Syria does not follow the Sykes-Picot line, so ISIS fired up their bulldozers at a spot several hundred kilometres from the line they claimed to be eradicating!
Given that the Ottomans ended up on the losing side of the war, the Sykes-Picot agreement did form a significant part of the post-war settlement in the Middle East, meaning that the British and French claims to control were largely recognised. Except that the Turkish Republic would end up re-conquering a large chunk of Ottoman territory, including a hoped-for future national home for the Armenians, that was supposed to go to France. The colonial powers could, therefore, look forward to a period of total control over the Middle East and its resources. We know, of course, that any notion of full colonial control of the Middle East soon evaporated, barely surviving World War II. However, no one knew that this would be the case in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Instead, it looked like the Arab World was settling down to decades of foreign domination.
That does not mean that there was no resistance to French and British hegemony in the region. The Sykes-Picot Agreement was drafted during meetings held in London and Paris during which maps were drawn and redrawn with very little reference to what was happening on the ground. In the process it became part of ironclad expectations of what the post-war world would look like with no recognition that contradictory commitments might have been made. Among these commitments two stand out. The first was the Balfour Declaration (2 November 1917) which states: “His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object…” On the other hand, there was the strong hints dropped by a British Officer, T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) that the British will support Arab Independence if Arab armies would ally with the British in fighting the Ottomans. Significant Arab forces were eventually associated with Lawrence’s efforts, with the understanding that they were engaged in a war of independence supported by the British. The promises made by Lawrence were, in some ways, incompatible with the Balfour Declaration and both commitments were incompatible with the Sykes-Picot Agreement. In short, the whole situation was a mess.
All of this meant that there was going to be significant opposition to British and French aspirations in the Arab World. Much of this opposition would be purely political, expressed in the language of Arab nationalism. Arab nationalists were drawn from all segments of society, with both Muslim and Christian Arabs becoming involved in largely secular Arab nationalist parties (e.g., the Baath party in Iraq and Syria). In most cases these parties would eventually carry the day politically and ride a post-WWII war wave to independence. There were, however, some Arabs for whom their opposition to colonialism was primarily motivated not by nationalism, but by Islam.
Arabs reaching for Islamic pathways towards escaping colonialism were not unique. In fact, there were far more non-Arab Muslims who entered the post-World War I period under colonialism than there were Arabs doing so. A few examples:
British India, which before 1947 included the territories now occupied by Pakistan and Bangladesh, was home to the world’s largest Muslim population.
Indonesia, the nation that would become the country with the largest Muslim population in the world after the breakup of India, was under Dutch control.
All African countries with a Muslim majority with the qualified exceptions of Morocco (where the French nevertheless exercise significant influence) and Egypt (a British ‘protectorate’), were ruled by European powers during the interwar period.
Why focus on colonialism when discussing the development of Islamic political thought? Simply because of the reality that the vast majority of early 20th century Muslims, especially in the period after World War I, were governed by non-Muslims. It is hard to overstate how unnatural and undesirable this situation is within an Islamic conceptual framework, but it is important to at least attempt to understand where some Muslim responses to colonialism came from. The following list is not an attempt to justify Muslim reactions to foreign rule, merely an attempt to understand these reactions on their own terms as based on some foundational Muslim convictions:
The Islamic Traditions View Non-Muslims Ruling Over Muslims as Unnatural. Islam does not have a well-developed set of principles, detailing how Muslims are to live in situations where they are not in control. In fact, Muhammad counselled emigration to a place where Islam was dominant rather than living under non-Muslim control. He put this into practice by migrating from pagan-dominated Mecca to Medina, where he would be the ruler. This event, the migration (or ‘hijra’) is seen as so important that the Muslim calendar starts at this point (AD 622). Muhammad’s own conduct and the sense of unease associated with living under a non-Muslim ruler led to the formulation of the Islamic ideal that it was undesirable for a Muslim to ever be ruled by a non-Muslim. The exception to this was when a Muslim was making his home in a non-Muslim territory for the sake of jihad (Sahih Bukhari 4:52:42). The realities of colonialism meant that millions of Muslims now found themselves in this highly undesirable, from an Islamic perspective at least, situation without having moved an inch. It is only logical that many would cast around for ways to rectify this situation.
The House of Islam vs. The House of the Sword. The traditional Islamic worldview includes a stark division between territories where Islam prevails (Dar al-Islam or the ‘House of Islam’) and those where it does not (Dar al-Harb or the ‘House of the Sword’). The implication cannot be clearer, non-Muslim entities should be subject to the sword until they are brought into the house of Islam. For much of Muslim history it seemed that this process was being worked out on the ground, with successive Islamic empires gaining significant chunks of territory for the faith. It was the firm belief of Muslim leaders and theologians that these territories would remain Islamic in perpetuity. Up to the rise of European colonialism there was little to shake this belief (except for the loss of Spain in 1492). However, colonial rule would fundamentally challenge the idea of the inexorable and inevitable growth of the ‘House of Islam’. True most people in the Arab world were still Muslim but since the rulers were now non-Muslim, they were unlikely to do anything to promote the growth and expansion of Islam. In the minds of many, the only way to rectify this situation would be to ensure that the faithful regain the levers of power.
The Intolerable Reality of ‘Rule by Dhimmis’. The Qur’an is very clear as to the relative status of those who do not accept its message: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” (Qur’an 9:29) In other words, non-Muslims in a Muslim society should constantly be reminded of their subjugation to their Muslim overlords. This principle is enshrined in the so-called ‘Code of Umar’, a document that to-be-conquered Jewish and Christian cities, towns and villages had to sign before surrendering to the forces of Umar (the second Caliph after Muhammad). It contains a long list of petty humiliations and restrictions of freedom that the defeated population had to agree to. The list obviously included the payment of the special tax (jizya) mentioned in the Qur’an. All of this, in addition to the fact that their testimony in court was worth less than that of Muslims, left the non-Muslims with no illusions as to who held the whip-hand in society. In exchange for this they could rely on the ‘protection’ of the Muslims (although it was often of the kind offered by the Mafia). Such protected people were called ‘dhimmis’ and the most important thing that any Muslim knew about dhimmis was that they were inferior to the Muslim part of society. Imagine then, the massive inversion represented by colonialism! Instead of ruling over the dhimmis, the vast majority of Muslims were ruled by them. Instead of collecting taxes from them, they had to pay up. In the minds of the pious this represented nothing less than a world that was totally out of kilter. Many of them, no doubt, pined for a restoration of the old order and were ready to take steps to bring that about.
Opening the Doors to ‘The Enemy’. I mentioned above that rulers who were from ‘The House of the Sword’ could not be expected to work for the expansion of ‘The House of Islam’. What was worse in the eyes of many colonised Muslims was the fact that, in their view, colonial powers often actively undermined Islam. A particular bugbear in this regard was the fact that the coming of the colonial era led to an influx of Christian missionaries into the Muslim world. While these missionaries did not, for the most part, enjoy spectacular success their very presence was seen as a significant provocation and as an attempt to weaken Islam by drawing people away from it. Some Muslim leaders even went as far as asserting that opening doors for missionaries was the ultimate motivation behind colonisation. Even those who did not go that far would still assert that widespread missionary activity would never be allowed under a Muslim government that stuck to the principles of shari’a and the ‘Code of Umar’. In the eyes of many, who felt that the ascendancy of Islam was threatened by missionary activity, this was enough to work for the reinstatement of a properly Islamic government with every fibre in their beings.
It should be clear from the above that colonial domination of the Muslim world after World War I, of which the Sykes-Picot line was the most visible expression, provided plenty of incentives to reach into the Qur’an and Islamic traditions for answers. This search for answers would necessarily be unmoored from guidance and input by incumbent Islamic political leaders, since there were not many of those around and the seat at the top was empty (see the previous article in this series on the fall of the caliphate).
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the anti-colonial struggle in the Muslim world would eventually provide a rich breeding ground for revivalist movements, seeking to apply ‘pure’ Islamic principles to political realities. The rediscovery of key Islamic political themes, and the application of these themes to the desire for liberation from non-Muslim domination, would resonate right into our own times.
It would even reach the ears of those who fired up that excavator to obliterate the Sykes-Picot line (even if they did so in the wrong spot!)
For a much more comprehensive discussion on Islam’s relationship with unbelievers and the implications of this for the possibility of peaceful coexistence please see my book ‘Nothing to do with Islam? - Investigating the West’s Most Dangerous Blind Spot’
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