The Iraq War by John Keegan Read Free Book Online Page B

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    European imperialism did not extinguish the power of Muslim ideas; in the long run, indeed, by a process of reaction, it was to reenergize Islam and in a highly aggressive form. In the early twentieth century, however, the worldly behaviour of some young Muslims was decisively altered by exposure to European thought and practice. In the Ottoman empire, dissatisfaction at the failure of the Sultan-Caliph’s government to stem the encroachment of European powers prompted a group of army officers, the ‘Young Turks’, to set up a modernizing régime; its leaders were irreligious Turkish nationalists; their tendency to treat the Arabs of the empire as subjects rather than fellow-Muslims led to the beginnings of what has been called ‘the Arab awakening’. The awakening was accelerated by Turkey’s defeat in the First World War which led to the fall of the Sultanate, the abolition of the Caliphate and the attachment of the Ottomans’ Arab provinces to the French and British empires as League of Nations mandated territories. Cast adrift in a world where a supreme Muslim authority no longer existed, the Arabs within the mandates and in the British protectorate of Egypt began to respond to direct rule byEuropeans by emulating European political forms. One manifestation, the Muslim Brotherhood, which appeared in Egypt in 1928, was specifically Islamic in character but sought to preserve religious values by adopting such European practices as recruiting young people into a Scout movement, founding schools, hospitals and clinics and building factories, all run on Islamic principles. The Muslim Brotherhood, eventually to be persecuted by Arab régimes of specifically secular character, has survived into modern times; one of its adherents, Sayyid Qutb, conceived the theory of Islamic renewal which inspired the terrorists of 11 September.
    Another direction taken by the Arab awakening was the creation in Syria after the Second World War of a political party dedicated by title to ‘resurrection’. The Ba’ath Party, founded in 1944 by a Syrian Christian, Michel Aflaq, proclaimed the unity of all Arabic-speaking people and their right to live in a unitary state. It specifically denounced the boundaries imposed on the Arab lands by the empires – including the Ottoman. Aflaq went farther; Christian though he was, he invoked the idea of Islam, propounded by Muhammad, as the common inheritance of all Arabs, Muslim or not, and its rise as an historical experience which gave the Arabs a particular mission in the world. The Arabs were to transform themselves first by spiritual renewal and then their political and social systems. Paradoxically, Aflaq was politically a secularist and the Ba’ath was to become the first secular party in the Arab world. It gave no place as leaders to traditional religious figures and emphasized Western rather than Islamic social values: the importance of scientific and technical education and the equality of the sexes. Nevertheless the roots of Ba’athism were metaphysical, which perhaps explains its appeal to the Arab mind. Aflaq was also rigidly anti-Communist, regarding Communism as another form of foreign imperialism.
    Ba’athism’s influence was geographically limited. It did not flourish in Egypt where during the 1950s another movement, loosely known as Arab socialism, achieved dominance through a revolution led by young army officers, notably Abdul Nasser.Nasser adopted several of Aflaq’s ideas; he was an egalitarian and a secularist, fervently anti-imperialist and a champion of Arab unity, which he did much to advance by creating a United Arab Republic which briefly joined Egypt to Syria and established a presence in Yemen. Ba’athism’s most notable success was achieved elsewhere. During the 1950s it found followers in Iraq, several of whom were advanced to ministerial positions after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958.
    A junior Iraqi Ba’athist was Saddam Hussein, twenty-one in