India’s neighbour Pakistan had turned more consciously to Islamic tradition and so soon found itself sharing in a movement of renewal which was visible across much of the Muslim world. Not for the first time, western politicians had again to recall that Islam was strong in lands stretching from Morocco in the west to China in the east. Indonesia, the largest south-east Asian country, Pakistan, Malaysia and Bangladesh between them contained nearly half the world’s Muslims. Beyond those countries and the lands of the Arabic culture, both the Soviet Union and Nigeria, the most populous African country, also had large numbers of Muslim subjects (as long ago as 1906, the Tsarist government of Russia had been alarmed by revolution in Iran because of its possibly disturbing effect on its own Muslim peoples). But new perceptions of the Islamic world took time to appear. Well into the 1970s the rest of the world tended to be obsessed by the Arab countries of the Middle East, and especially the oil-rich among them, when it thought of Islam much at all.
This limited perception was also for a long time obscured and confused by the Cold War. The shape of that conflict sometimes blurred into older frameworks, too; to some observers a traditional Russian desire for influence in the area seemed to be a strand in Soviet policy now nearer satisfaction than at any time in the past. The Soviet Union had by 1970 a worldwide naval presence rivalling that of the United States and established even in the Indian Ocean. Following British withdrawal from Aden in 1967, that base had been used by the Russians with the concurrence of the South Yemen government. All this was taking place at a time when further south, too, there had been strategic setbacks for the Americans. The coming of the Cold War to the Horn of Africa and the former Portuguese colonies had added significance to events taking place further north.
Yet Soviet policy, in a longer perspective, does not appear to have benefited much within the Muslim world from the notable disarray of American policy in the mid-1970s in the Middle East. Egypt had by then fallen out with Syria and had turned to the United States in the hope of making a face-saving peace with Israel. When in 1975 the General Assembly of the United Nations denounced Zionism as a form of racism and granted the PLO ‘observer’ status in the Assembly, Egypt was inevitably more isolated from other Arab states. By this time, the PLO ’s activity across the northern border was not only harassing Israel, but also driving Lebanon, once a bastion of western values and now a PLO sanctuary, into ruin and disintegration. In 1978 Israel invaded southern Lebanon in the hope of ending the PLO raids. Although the non-Islamic world applauded when the Israeli and Egyptian prime ministers met in Washington the following year to agree a peace providing for Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai, the Egyptian three years later paid the price of assassination by those who felt he had betrayed the Palestinian cause.
The limited settlement between Israel and Egypt owed much to President Jimmy Carter, the Democratic candidate who had won the American presidential election of 1976. American morale was by then suffering from other setbacks than those in the Middle East. The Vietnam War had destroyed one president and his successor’s presidency had been built on the management of American defeat and the peace settlement (and it was soon clear how little that settlement was worth). There was in the background, too, the fear many Americans shared of the rising strength of the USSR in ballistic missiles. All this affected American reactions to an almost wholly unforeseen event, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. This not only dealt a damaging blow to the United States, but also revealed a potentially huge new dimension to the troubles of the Middle East and the volatility of Islam.
Long the recipient of American favour as a reliable ally, in January 1979 the Shah was driven from his throne and country by a coalition of outraged liberals and Islamic conservatives. An attempt to secure constitutional government soon collapsed as popular support rallied to the Islamic faction. Iran’s traditional ways and social structure had been dislocated by a policy of modernization in which the Shah had followed - with less caution - his father Reza Khan. Almost at once, there emerged a Sh’ite Islamic Republic, led by an elderly and fanatical cleric. The United States quickly recognized the new regime, but unavailingly. It was tarred with guilt by association as the patron of the former Shah and the outstanding embodiment of capitalism and western materialism. It was small consolation that the Soviet Union was soon undergoing similar vilification by the Iranian religious leaders, as a second ‘Satan’ threatening the purity of Islam. Some Americans were encouraged, though, when the particularly ferocious Ba’ath regime in Iraq, already viewed with favour for its ruthless execution and pursuit of Iraqi communists, fell out with the new Iran in a conflict inflamed (in spite of Ba’athist secularism) by the traditional animosity of Mesopotamian Sunni and Persian Sh’ite Muslims. When in July 1979 Saddam Hussein took over as president in Baghdad, it looked encouraging to the CIA: it was thought that he was likely to offset the Iranian danger in the Gulf.
This was the more welcome because the Iranian revolution implied more than just the American loss of a client state. Even though a coalition of grievances had made possible the overthrow of the Shah, a speedy reversion to archaic tradition (strikingly, in the treatment of women) showed that more than a ruler had been repudiated. The new Iranian Islamic republic, although specifically Sh’ite, made universal claims; it was a theocracy where right rule stemmed from right belief, somewhat in the style of Calvin’s Geneva. It was also an expression of a rage shared by many Muslims worldwide (especially in Arab lands) at the onset of secular westernization and the failure of the promise of modernization. In the Middle East, as nowhere else, nationalism, socialism and capitalism had failed to solve the region’s problems - or at least to satisfy passions and appetites they had aroused. Muslim ‘fundamentalists’ thought that Ataturk, Reza Khan and Nasser had all led their peoples down the wrong road. Islamic societies had successfully resisted the contagion of atheistic communism, but to many Muslims the contagion of western culture to which so many of their leaders had looked for a century or more now seemed even more threatening. Paradoxically, the western revolutionary notion of capitalist exploitation helped to feed this revulsion of feeling.
The roots of Islamic fundamentalism (to use that unsatisfactory blanket term) were varied and very deep. They could tap centuries of struggle against Christianity. They were refreshed from the 1960s onwards by the obviously growing difficulties of outsiders (including the USSR) in imposing their will on the Middle East and Persian Gulf, given their Cold War divisions. There was the mounting evidence for many Muslim Arabs that the western principle of nationality, advocated since the 1880s as an organizational remedy for the instability that followed Turkish decline, had not worked; only too evidently, the wars of the Ottoman succession were not over. A favourable conjunction of embarrassments for the West was made more promising still by the recent revelation of the potency of the oil factor. But then there was also, since 1945, the growing awareness of pious Muslims that western commerce, communications and the simple temptations offered to those rich with oil were more dangerous to Islamic societies than any earlier (let alone purely military) threat had been. This made for strain and uneasiness.
But this was not all that fostered division. Sunni and Sh’ite hostility went back centuries. In the post-1945 period, the Ba’ath socialist movement, which inspired many Muslims and which was nominally entrenched in Iraq, had become anathema to the Muslim Brotherhood, which deplored the ‘godlessness’ of both sides even in the Palestinian quarrel. Popular sovereignty was a goal fundamentalists rejected; they sought Islamic control of society in all its aspects, so that, before long, the world began to be used to hearing that Pakistan forbade mixed hockey, that Saudi Arabia punished crime by stoning to death and amputation of limbs, that Oman was building a university in which men and women students were to be segregated during lectures - and much, much more. By 1980 radical Islamists were powerful enough to secure their goals in some countries. Even students in a comparatively ‘westernized’ Egypt had already by 1978 been voting for them in their own elections, while some of the girls in medical school were refusing to dissect male corpses and demanded a segregated, dual system of instruction.
To put such attitudes in perspective, moreover (and at first sight it is curious to western eyes that student radicals should happily espouse such obviously reactionary causes), they have to be understood in the context of a long absence within Islam of any state or institutional theory such as that of the West. Even in orthodox hands, and even if it delivered some desirable goods, the state as such is not self-evidently a legitimate authority in Islamic thought - and, on top of that, the very introduction of state structures in Arab lands since the nineteenth century had been in imitation, conscious or unconscious, of the West. Youthful radicalism, which had tried and found wanting the politics of socialism (or what was thought to be that, and was in any case another western import) felt that no intrinsic value resided in states or nations; they looked elsewhere, and that, in part, explains the efforts shown first in Libya, and then in Iran and Algeria, to promote new ways of legitimating authority. Whether the age-old Islamic bias against public institutions and towards tribalism and the brotherhood of Islam can be sustained remains to be seen. Even that brotherhood, after all, has to recognize that most Muslims in the world do not understand Arabic.
The potential for disorder and even internecine conflict in parts of the Islamic world makes it too tempting to simplify. The Islamic world is not culturally homogeneous. No more than the mythological ‘West’ denounced in the 1980s by popular preachers in the mosques can Islam be identified convincingly as a coherent, discrete, neatly bordered civilization. Like the ‘West’ it is an abstraction, occasionally a useful shorthand for expository purposes. Many Muslims, including some of a religious cast of mind, seek a footing in two worlds, committed in a measure to both western and Islamic ideals. Each world represents a historical centre of dynamism, a source of energies, but this looks truer of western civilization, however defined, than of any possible reading of Islam.
As for the disturbing violence of Islamic politics in many Arab states, it is often the outcome of a simple polarization between repressive authoritarianism on the one hand and the radical wave on the other. In the 1980s both Morocco and Algeria were to find their domestic order thus troubled. The situation was made the more dangerous and explosive by demography. The average age of most Islamic societies is said to be between fifteen and eighteen, and they are growing at very fast rates. There is just too much youthful energy and frustration about for the outlook to be promising for peace. This helps to explain why, soon after the Iranian revolution, students in Tehran worked off some of their exasperation by storming the American embassy and seizing diplomats and others as hostages. A startled world suddenly found the Iranian government supporting them, taking custody of the hostages and endorsing the students’ demands for the return of the Shah to face trial. President Carter could hardly have faced a more awkward situation, for at that moment American policy in the Islamic world was above all preoccupied with a Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. A severance of diplomatic relations with Iran and the imposition of economic sanctions were the first responses. Then came an attempted rescue operation, which failed dismally. The unhappy hostages were in the end to be recovered by negotiation (and, in effect, a ransom: the return of Iranian assets in the United States, which had been frozen at the time of the revolution), but the humiliation of the Americans was by no means the sole or even the major importance of the episode.
Besides its wide policy repercussions, the retention of the hostages was in another way symbolic. It was a shock (registered in a unanimous vote of condemnation at the UN) to the convention, evolved first in Europe and then developed over more than three centuries throughout the civilized world, that diplomatic envoys should be immune from interference. The Iranian government’s action announced that it was not playing by the accepted rules. That was a blatant rejection of ‘civilized’ assumptions, which forced some in the West to wonder for the first time what else Islamic revolution might imply.