CHAPTER 17
The Muslim World in World War II
The French and British sought to draw Turkey into their camp by providing it with major benefits. France completely ceded the sanjak of Alexandretta, part of its mandate in the Levant, leading to lasting resentment among the Syrians. The German- Soviet Nonaggression Pact changed the situation. Moscow called on the Ankara regime to remain neutral. It complied, even after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In 1943–1944, the English- speaking countries tried to persuade Turkey to join the war on their side, but Ankara quietly refused, using as a pretext the weakness of its army, which lacked modern materiel, and the geographical vulnerability of its territory. (The Axis powers controlled all of Greece, the Balkans, and the islands in the Aegean Sea.)
Turkey was the chief Muslim country to be spared by the new war that had begun in Europe. The populations of the French and British colonial empires were not consulted when the European countries joined the war in September 1939. The Indian nationalists protested the decision, which called into question the dyarchy of the previous years. With the Japanese invasion of 1942, military operations reached the borders of India. The Congress Party actively opposed the war and was subjected to harsh repression. The Indian Muslims, by contrast, were patently “loyal.” In a context where the British were compelled to draw on India’s resources to the maximum extent, and to promise the status of Dominion or even complete independence after the war, the Muslims obtained a true veto right over the future. In those terrible years, the idea developed of constituting a “Pakistan,” a “Muslim nation” uniting northern India into a federation with rather loose ties to the rest of the subcontinent.
The war in North Africa began in June 1940. The French possessions fell under the provisions of the Armistice agreement, later constituting, under Maxime Weygand’s command, the sole instance of unified management of the Maghreb. In 1943, the “Western Desert,” covering Libya and Egypt, became one of the main battlefields. For a year, the British Empire fought the Axis Powers with almost absurdly inadequate means, but also with unflagging resolve. The conquest of the Balkans, then of Crete, by the German forces in spring 1941 brought the threat dangerously close. The Arab nationalists in Iraq staged a coup d’état and made contact with the Germans. The British counterattack was swift. With rough- and- ready forces, they reoccupied Iraq in May 1941. Because Vichy France had authorized the Germans to use the Levantine airports to bring aid to the Iraqis, the British imperial troops, while they were at it, penetrated the French Mandate, with the cooperation of the Free French Forces and a contingent of Zionists. That miniwar, which on the French side took on the aspect of a civil war, also created the oddity of Arab nationalists fighting on Vichy’s side. In mid- July, the Vichy forces obtained an armistice that allowed them to return to metropolitan France on a voluntary basis.
To calm tensions, on May 29, 1941, Anthony Eden, British secretary of state for foreign affairs, made a declaration expressing his country’s sympathy for the cause of Arab unity, without mentioning Zionism. On June 8, 1941, the French general Georges Catroux announced, in General de Gaulle’s name, the principle of independence for Syria and Lebanon, based on treaties to be concluded.
The German invasion of the Soviet Union changed the strategic game. The Iran of Reza Shah seemed to have moved too close to Germany. The Soviets and the British called on Tehran to expel the Germans present in Iran and jointly invaded the country in late August 1941. Reza Shah was deposed and replaced by his son. The imperial regime seemed on the point of collapse, but above all, the country was for the first time under complete occupation.
In early 1941, the Italo- German threat to Egypt became more acute. King Farouk and his entourage attempted to make contact with the enemies of the British. On February 4, 1942, the British staged a true coup d’état, which forced Farouk to recall the Wafd to power. The Egyptian public felt a real national humiliation. On June 27, 1942, the Italo- German forces entered Egyptian territory. They arrived on July 1 in El Alamein, sixty kilometers from Alexandria. Simultaneously in Russia, the Germans took Crimea and proceeded toward the Caucasus. With the Japanese advance in the Pacific, the Middle East seemed to be the point of convergence for the three major offensives of the Axis Powers.
The British mobilized the entire economic potential of the Middle East to sustain the rising power of their war machine in the Western Desert. They would soon have at their disposal more than a million soldiers, from Iran to Libya, restoring the illusion of power that had existed in 1918. That war effort was financed on credit and favored the industrialization of the region as a whole. Great Britain rapidly went into debt, with hundreds of millions of pounds sterling owed to every country between India and Egypt . Inflation was high, which worked to the advantage of all debtors. Rural debt, the traditional scourge of the Arab countryside, was practically liquidated. Although, overall, the Middle East enriched itself during these war years, food rationing was imposed. It was substantially less restrictive than that existing in Europe at the same time and far from the famine conditions experienced during World War I.
Caught up in a fight to the death with Nazism, Great Britain proved steadfast in its opposition to all forms of nationalism (Zionism included) suspected of serving German interests, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The British violated all the political compromises of the interwar period. For the time being, they seemed to have an overpowering force at their disposal, but in practice they destroyed any possibility for political collaboration in the following period. They did try to conduct an ideological war of propaganda against Fascism, but any discourse promoting the defense of human freedoms could only turn against their colonial practices.
With the fall of France, emotion ran high in North Africa. A real feeling of unity briefly brought together Europeans and Muslims. But the Vichy regime abolished democratic freedoms and proved particularly paternalistic toward the indigenous Arabs. It applied the anti- Semitic laws with particular rigor (the Algerian Jews lost their status as French citizens), without even the excuse of pressure from the Occupation forces. In Algeria as in the two protectorates, the Muslims had a rather negative view of that state- sponsored anti- Semitism.
Nazi Germany had no political ambitions in the Muslim world. The Mediterranean was supposed to be an Italian zone of influence. Germany was tempted to support Arab nationalist movements in Iraq. Paradoxically, the existence of the Vichy regime paralyzed the Nazis’ actions in that direction. If German support of the Muslims were too overt, it would risk pushing all of North Africa into the camp of de Gaulle and the Allies (the United Nations, as of 1942). The Arab nationalists who had taken refuge in Nazi- dominated Europe attempted to obtain a clearer declaration than that of the Allies in World War I, but Hitler and Mussolini equivocated. The best they could offer was a secret declaration, dated April 28, 1942, recognizing the sovereignty and independence of the Arab countries of the Near East and accepting their union, insofar as it was desired by the countries concerned, and the destruction of the Jewish national homeland in Palestine.
Fascist and especially Nazi propaganda broadcast over the radio waves elaborated anti- Semitic themes and pointed out the contradiction between the proclaimed doctrine of the United Nations and their colonial policy. It had a clear impact in the Middle East but did not lead to political mobilization. The Muslim countries from Iran to Egypt, legally independent or under mandate, did not take part in combat. Their military potential was low and their loyalty dubious. Some volunteered, but they primarily served in logistical positions for the Allied forces. (A few Syrians and Lebanese joined the French Free Forces.)
The Americans’ Arrival on the Scene
The nationalists had primarily seen the Axis Powers as the means to liquidate Franco- British domination, though they had also been receptive to the nationalist radicalism of their discourses. Gradually, the Americans took the place of the Italo- Germans.
It was the British who, during the crucial year of 1941, made the United States aware of the strategic importance of the Middle East. Desperately lacking in means, they insisted on the direct delivery of American war materiel to the forces engaged in the Western Desert. When Saudi Arabia appeared at risk of collapse because of the drop in its revenues (resulting from the de facto suspension of the Muslim pilgrimage), Great Britain asked the U.S. government to grant the kingdom financial aid. After the Soviet Union entered the war, the Americans took direct control of the “Persian corridor,” supplying materiel to the Red Army from the Gulf ports. More than twenty thousand American soldiers participated in that vast logistical operation, which in September 1942 became the Persian Gulf Command. The Americans became involved in the overall economic management of the Middle East.
In summer 1942, the American military realized that if the Egyptian and Caucasian fronts collapsed, the deciding battle would unfold in southern Iraq, near Basra, and the U.S. army would be part of it. The Allies made the decision to proceed to a North African rear landing. This was Operation Torch, which took place on November 8, 1942.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was firmly opposed to European colonialism. In his view, the aim of the war for the United States was not only the liberation of the European peoples from Nazi domination but the general application of the right to self- determination. He recognized that the colonized peoples were not immediately ready for independence and considered setting in place a system of international trusteeship for the interim period. Its application was supposed to be more rapid for peoples of the “brown” or “yellow” races than for those of the black race. Roosevelt had to take into account the exigencies of the war, to the point of accepting the “temporary expedient” of maintaining the Vichy regime in North Africa under the leadership of Jean- Louis Darlan and then Henri Giraud. The war spread to Tunisia until the surrender of the German forces on May 13, 1943. Once French reunification had occurred, with the constitution of the “government of Algiers” and de Gaulle’s victory, the Americans did not interfere in North African affairs, but their show of force had been overwhelming.
Once the war had shifted away from the Muslim world, politics returned. The Americans pushed for the rapid independence of Syria and Lebanon, despite the resistance of the Free French Forces and then of the Provisional Government of the French Republic.
The war demonstrated the strategic importance of Middle Eastern oil, especially since the reserves on the American continent were expected to be exhausted over the medium term. Saudi Arabia, defined as an American “national interest,” became the privileged partner of the United States in the Middle East. The kingdom took the opportunity to emancipate itself from British influence. Everywhere, the Americans opposed maintaining the economic and honorific privileges of the British in the Middle East. American- Arab relations were defined in terms of cooperation and fraternity, in contrast to the hierarchical view held by the British.
But the Palestine question was still not settled. The British had in mind a new partitioning, with an Arab part based in a future “Greater Syria.” They gave up that idea in late 1944. In the United States, the question had become an internal policy issue. Roosevelt envisioned making Palestine the testing ground for the new policy of trusteeship, but his premature death kept him from carrying out his intentions.
In 1945, all the Middle Eastern states declared war on the Axis Powers, the price of admission for participating in the constitution of the United Nations. The prestige of the United States was at its height in the Muslim world, whereas the European powers seemed to belong to the past.
The End of the “British Moment”
The tensions sparked by World War II definitively bankrupted British domination in India. The British had neither the means nor the will to reestablish their authority. Their aim was to leave India in a peaceful and honorable manner. For the most part, the Muslims in the north were leaning toward the constitution of Pakistan, whereas the Congress Party wanted to hold onto one strong state. Agreement was impossible, and the country slipped into bloody conflict between communities. The last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, expedited matters and effected the shift to two states within an atmosphere of massacres and forced population transfers.
The departure of the British was the conclusion of the administration’s Indianization policy. British taxpayers had assumed the army’s costs, and Great Britain found it owed India 1.3 billion pounds sterling. The Indian market ceased to be significant. In the wake of World War I, Great Britain had provided two- thirds of Indian imports; by the 1940s, it was only 8 percent.
The British legacy in India proper had been positive, allowing for the establishment of the “largest democracy in the world.” The essential problem was that, by its very nature, the colonial state had no inclination to become a national state, since nationalism had arisen in opposition to colonialism. The British Empire therefore left to its successors a linguistic and ethnic pluralism that they would have a great deal of trouble managing. That was particularly true of Pakistan, a belated and poorly planned project for a kind of Muslim national homeland. Although its identity as a religious community was self- evident, its principle of organization was undetermined. Would it become a less secular Republic of Turkey of a sort, or, on the contrary, the testing ground for a political Islam stemming from the reformist and fundamentalist discourses of the previous period?
Although the Indian route disappeared with the British Raj, Middle Eastern oil played an essential role in the economic reconstruction of Europe. The architects of the Marshall Plan made it the substitute for coal energy. The Labour government, which came to power in 1945, wanted to inaugurate a new period of relations with the peoples of the Middle East. They would no longer interfere in internal affairs but would establish a partnership in the service of economic and social development.
Although they aspired to be generous, their outlook collided with the sad reality that Great Britain, economically exhausted by the war and heavily in debt to its former dominions, did not have the means for such a policy. A good share of the region was in the sterling area, but the metropolis was unable to provide them with the commodities demanded or with the dollars indispensable for procuring them on the outside, and that became a new source of frustration.
The cold war looked like a way to maintain the British system. To be sure, it required heavy economic sacrifices in order to maintain the military apparatus from World War II, but it also led the United States to finance in large part that deployment, since the Americans did not have forces capable of replacing it.
For Western strategists at the time, the Middle East seemed to be the rear base indispensable for reconquering Europe in the event of a Soviet invasion. (They were replaying the game plan of the previous war.) The deciding battle would take place in Sinai, then in Palestine, Syria, and finally Turkey.
In fact, the Republic of Turkey found itself directly threatened by the Soviets, who were making territorial claims, thus reigniting nineteenth- century conflicts. Turkey obtained American protection in 1947 (the Truman Doctrine and the creation of the U.S. Sixth Fleet). It negotiated its role in Western defense in exchange for recognition that it belonged entirely to Europe, which made it a full member of NATO, a status refused every other Muslim state. With the Western rearmament in the early 1950s, the deciding battle would take place directly on its borders.
Elsewhere, Great Britain met with the obstinate refusal of the nationalists to maintain the empire by treaty. What had appeared in the 1930s as an advance on the path toward liberation was now resented as an intolerable foreign presence. Egypt and Iraq demanded that the treaties be renegotiated, so as to move Britain toward evacuation. Public pressure was exerted in that direction. The negotiations of 1946– 1948 failed. Great Britain tried to find a solution by opting for multilateralism, making the Middle Eastern states equal partners in alliances with the Western countries. The nationalists would not hear of that false equality. The crisis culminated in violence in Egypt in 1951 and was a major factor in the Free Officers Revolution of July 1952.
The Labour government, however, was faithful to its pledge of nonintervention. It was rather averse to the Hashemites’ plans for Arab unity (Greater Syria, the Fertile Crescent), which would have risked contaminating its Arab allies with Syrian Francophonism. But it could not publicly disavow its most faithful allies (Jordan and Iraq). The adversaries of the Hashemites took the opportunity to discredit their unification plans by portraying them as the instrument of British imperialist policy.
The Palestinian tragedy followed the Indian pattern. Despite the presence of a hundred thousand British soldiers, the mandatory power was unable to impose a solution. The Zionists had the support of American public opinion and of President Harry Truman, and the Arabs were opposed to any partitioning. The British made the decision to leave Palestine, transferring the matter to the United Nations. Great Britain, a member of the Security Council, refused to apply the partitioning plan of November 29, 1947, because the plan did not have the agreement of the Arabs. There was nothing left to do but evacuate the country, which was sinking into civil war. During the Arab- Israeli War, London’s support of Jordan was limited, because of the constraints imposed by the Americans. In observing the armaments embargo passed by the United Nations, Great Britain further undermined what remained of its military commitments to the Arabs.
In Iran, the nationalists decided to nationalize the petroleum industry. Still refusing to intervene in any way, the British had to evacuate the country in 1951. Winston Churchill’s Conservative government attempted to return to a policy of force, but it was the Americans who staged the coup d’état in Iran reestablishing the shah’s authority. Anthony Eden, secretary of state for foreign affairs and then prime minister, attempted to reinstate a policy of cooperation, as indicated by the treaty of 1954 with Gamal Nasser’s Egypt. But Nasser turned out not to be an accommodating partner. The Suez Crisis of 1956 led to a Franco- British military intervention in association with Israel and was a further political setback.
In the following years, the British struggled to hold onto what remained of their positions. They “lost” Iraq during the revolution of July 1958. In the 1960s, they were subjected to an exhausting guerrilla war in south Yemen and had to abandon Aden in 1967. In the Gulf, Kuwait became independent in 1961. In January 1968, after the devaluation of the pound sterling, Great Britain announced its definitive withdrawal from the Gulf by 1971 and took action in December of that year.
Empire by treaty was thus at an end. London nonetheless managed to maintain advantageous relations with the countries of the Gulf.
North Africa on the Road to Independence
World War II had put an end to Italian domination in Libya. After hesitations about who should be granted the trusteeship of that country, occupied in part by French and British forces, international constraints led to the recognition of its independence.
French rule was no longer accepted in North Africa. In the protectorates, the elites were ready to take over for the colonial state. They managed to oversee a powerful popular movement intent on driving out the foreigners. Bourguiba and Muhammad V threatened the use of force to successfully negotiate an orderly colonial withdrawal. They were fortunate to have French interlocutors who were resolved to avoid the worst outcome. There was, of course, no dearth of violent episodes. The general pattern consisted of a first period of reforms immediately following the postwar period, then their failure in the face of reaction from the conservative colonial circles. A violent test of strength between pro- independence forces and colonials would follow. It would culminate in the compromise of “internal” autonomy for Tunisia in July 1954 and the “independence within a framework of interdependence” for Morocco in November 1955. In March 1956, agreements put an end to the two protectorates and led to the international recognition of independence for both states.
Developments were much more tragic in Algeria, which was considered part of metropolitan French territory. The Sétif riots, followed by a repression that turned to massacre in May 1945, isolated the European and Arab communities from each other. The administration repeatedly engaged in electoral fraud against the nationalists. That ended up favoring the most radical element emerging from the Messalist movement. Recruits came largely from the working class, even the proletariat. That movement led to the insurrection of 1954, followed by the terrible war of independence, which lasted until 1962 and culminated in the departure of the European population. The violence claimed countless civilian casualties. The French army’s reign of terror faced off against the terrorism of the pro- independence forces, who rejected any pluralism in their ranks. The war between “Europeans” and “Arabs” was coupled with a civil war among the French and another, much bloodier one among the Algerians.
Although the French army felt that it had won the war militarily, creating an inner turmoil, in practice it was politically doomed from the early years. Charles de Gaulle, in accepting the inevitable, reshaped French destiny.
The three successor states, with significant nuances among them, launched a prodevelopment program of an authoritarian nature, while maintaining a special relationship with the former colonial power. The Fifth Republic made that relationship a major political issue through “cooperation in substitution,” whose aim was to train the postcolonial state cadres and promote the spread of Francophonism. As that cooperation came to an end, the Arabization plan became a competing model. A poorly conducted plan promoting Arab identity, it also opposed claims to a Berber identity. At the end of the twentieth century, the result was a conflict between “Arabophones” and “Francophones” within the educated classes. One side embraced their authenticity, the other their proficiency.
Decolonization, Imperial Citizenship, and the Birth of a European Islam
Decolonization restored the collective dignity of the dominated peoples. It left development, as envisioned in the late colonial era, an open question for the new ruling groups. One of the factors at the end of external rule was the irresistible population growth, which made it necessary to redefine the state’s missions, with continuous expansion of social services (education, medicine, employment) to provide for the people. The distinction between the “metropolis” and “dependencies” made it difficult to effect massive financial transfers to the former colonies. In France, the view favoring separation was called “Cartierism,” and its watchword was “plutôt la Corrèze que le Zambèze” (Corrèze rather than the Zambeze).
During the transitional phase toward independence, the colonial power attempted to modify imperial relations by defining the empire as a “community”: Overseas France, the French Community, the Commonwealth, which was opened to nonwhites when India and Pakistan joined. France’s ambition was to build a new relationship by relying on the existence of a more or less long common history and a shared language. The former ruler saw that as the means to maintain an influence that would carry weight in world affairs. The former ruled discovered therein access to different forms of cooperation and the transfer of technical skills.
Paradoxically, the result was that, at a time when the independent states were defining their new borders, the circulation of people had never been so intense. The hope for a better life impelled a portion of the indigenous peoples to leave, in what was called a “labor” migration but that usually culminated in permanent settlement. That migration was facilitated by the existence of the so- called community structures, which gave the former colonized, now aliens, a privileged status in what actually became a metropolis for them. There was a kind of “imperial citizenship,” maintained after the existence of the empire itself. The need for labor power associated with the rapid economic growth during the thirty years following World War II (the trente glorieuses) accounts for that phenomenon in terms of both supply and demand. (The availability of immigrants from within Europe, especially Italy, Spain, and Portugal, gradually declined.) During the 1970s and 1980s, growing restrictions were imposed on that migration, which was theoretically limited to family groups and “regularization” measures.
The French census of 1975 counted 710,000 Algerians, 260,000 Moroccans, and 139,000 Tunisians, not to mention those who had obtained French nationality. Because of the absence of statistics on ethnicity and intermarriage, it is impossible to determine the real size of the so- called Muslim population in France. In Great Britain, the 2001 census, which included details on declared religious identity, indicated the existence of 1.6 million Muslims, most of them from the successor states to the British Indian Empire. Turkish immigration to Europe came later and assumed a massive dimension only in the 1960s, when West Germany played the role of metropolis. In 1983, 1,552,000 Turks were counted in the Federal Republic of Germany, 154,000 in the Netherlands, 144,000 in France, and 63,000 in Belgium. The Iranian revolution of 1979 also created a large Iranian diaspora in Europe as a whole.
To these figures from the Middle East and from Europe must be added the growing share of Muslims from sub- Saharan Africa. In the 1990s– 2000s, Spain and Italy became by turns destination countries for Muslim immigration.
That inversion of the migratory flow within the context of decolonization allowed for intensifying human relationships between Europe and the Muslim world within the framework of the new transportation and communication revolutions. Although the first migrants intended to stay only temporarily, the move eventually became permanent. The process of “metropolitanization” differed from one European country to the next, as a function of anthropological realities.
What is most noteworthy is that the disappearance of colonialism was accompanied by the end of the personal status associated with it. Settlement and naturalization entailed accepting the general civil status of the European populations; but the social and political practices of the states concerned were directly shaped by the anthropological views held by the metropolises. Hence the old French mission of civilization became the problematic of integration/ assimilation, and British differentialism became multiculturalism, whereas Germany long maintained the fiction of a foreign status perpetuated over several generations.
The Muslim migration to Europe affected in the first place rural and urban proletarians, but at the same time, and increasingly, college graduates also participated in it. Although the economic motivation was foremost, some groups rejected as accomplices in imperialism also migrated, and other individuals sought in Europe (and also in North America) possibilities for professional and personal fulfillment impossible in their own societies. Those of the “first generation” tended to keep their distance from the host society, because of its very foreignness and the myth of return. The problem of acculturation began with the “second generation”: a social process of differentiation occurred, along with an economic evolution tending to obliterate the working class as the standard model, and the “ethnicization” of a number of social behaviors. Within the atmosphere of persistent economic difficulties, the descendants of immigrants were linked to an original identity, which they were simultaneously invited to leave behind. The many kinds of discrimination they suffered locked them dangerously into fixed identities. The risk is that “ethnoclasses” will arise, a mix between social determination and ethnic or even religious determination. The solution will entail accepting multiple identities within each individual (ethnic and religious origin, regional, national, and European identity), fighting discrimination, and promoting upward mobility (the emergence of a middle class of immigrants and their descendants). Although some of the contemporary conflicts borrow the vocabulary of colonization, the fundamental difference lies in the absence of laws applied on the basis of personal status, which allows for real social mixing, particularly in marriage. The first mixing entails that of Muslims from various regions and backgrounds.
The “metropolitanization” of Muslims culminates in an infrastructure of religious worship, which can prove difficult to establish. The affirmation of an Islam specific to Europe will depend on social demand itself. The diversity of origins implies a de facto pluralism similar to that of the Protestant churches.
Nationalism, the Third World, and Access to Universality
The Muslim state, emancipated from direct European domination, ran up against the problem of development, which it had to take completely in hand. Its approach aspired to be voluntarist and usually entailed authoritarianism. The new groups in power also used development to eliminate the economic base of the old elites, who were accused of compromising with imperialism. An essential phase was the nationalization of foreign economic interests, usually European. That voluntarist process most often involved state control of the economy, sometimes with the beginnings of a welfare state. Adoption of a socialist vocabulary has been common.
In contradistinction to the First and Second Worlds, the so- called Third World states have a shared sense of identity, because of their common experience of colonialism and their common needs for development. The Bandung Conference in 1955, at which all the independent Muslim states were represented, proclaimed the principles of nonintervention in internal affairs and neutralism. The aim was both to make the independent state a sacred privilege and to demand aid from the industrialized countries— as much aid as possible but provided unconditionally. The cold war context lent itself to that policy, inasmuch as a certain number of states possessed geostrategic importance.
Neutralism evolved into nonalignment. The independent states demanded development aid from the industrialized countries as their due, especially since it was supposed to make up for a “deterioration in the terms of trade” between manufactured products and raw materials from the Third World countries. Anti- imperialism was seen as cementing that “tricontinental” coalition of more and more openly “progressive” countries.
Progressivism and developmentalism accompanied the nationalist approach toward achieving true independence, allowing the new states to participate fully in world affairs and on an equal footing. Emancipation allowed for a form of modernization and Westernization that was well accepted, especially since it broke away from the old European ruler and was therefore liberating. In choosing a path inspired by socialism, a certain number of Muslim states could therefore affirm their modernity and their access to universality without being accused of betrayal.
In the face of that progressivism, with which many Europeans could sympathize, the Franco- British governments attempted in 1956 to “demonize” their adversary, Nasser, by portraying him as the emulator of Mussolini or even Hitler. Antifascism was being used to contest the anti- imperialism that had succeeded it. In the same way, the North African independence movements were accused simultaneously of being antisecular Muslims, Fascists, and Communists. The completion of decolonization led to the disappearance of these discourses in favor of an accommodating view of the realities resulting from independence. In the field of Arabic and Islamic studies, the writings of Jacques Berque, and, within a more critical perspective, Maxime Rodinson, express that way of conceiving the historical moment of decolonization.
Once the decolonization of the Muslim world was completed in practical terms, the question of Israel remained the principal sore point. For the Arab nationalists, “the Zionist entity” was the “citadel” or “base” of imperialism in the Arab world. It was a replay of the Crusades, that earlier attempt on the part of an empire to establish itself in the region. The Jewish state was an artificial reality that drew its strength from the outside but constituted a dangerous threat by virtue of its “expansionism.” In the 1950s, Israel was in large part viewed as a European colonial state, a reality demonstrated by the “tripartite collusion of 1957” and the United States’ role in resolving the Suez crisis.
But between 1965 and 1967, the European countries stopped providing armaments to Israel, making the United States the principal supplier of the Jewish state. The 1967 war accelerated that shift. On the question of the occupied territories and the application of resolution 242, the European countries began to mark their distance from American policy. The progress of the European construct in Israel was accompanied by the difficult elaboration of a joint position by the Common Market countries. During the 1973 war, Europe more clearly distinguished itself from the United States, and it appeared more vulnerable to the pressures of the oil- producing Arab states.
The joint foreign policy of European politics, particularly regarding the Arab- Israeli conflict and the question of Palestine, aspired to be “declaratory” in nature, that is, to arrive at a definition of a joint position on the basis of a political settlement. That policy required, prior to any active diplomacy in the Near East, an intensive political coordination among the Europeans themselves, which accounts for its vagueness and relative ineffectiveness. Nevertheless, the Europeans took a secret pleasure in turning back against the United States the accusations of imperialism that had been directed at them during decolonization.
Beyond the “Arab policy” inaugurated by Charles de Gaulle in the last years of his presidency and elaborated by his successors, a sort of third way was desired, according to foreign policy theorists. It consisted of proposing to the Arab countries that they move beyond the alternative between the United States and the Soviet Union and of offering them potential access to modern— including military— technology developed in France, in exchange for a portion of their oil revenues. Since 1968, Ba’athist Iraq had shown particular interest. The other partners tended to use the French advances to provide themselves with a wider margin for maneuvering vis- à- vis the two superpowers. Arab policy was not conducted only by France. Italy took a similar approach. Spain and Greece, destined to join the Common Market after their democratization, adopted the same perspective. All of Mediterranean Europe proved favorable to a rapprochement with the Arab countries. But though a Euro- Arab dialogue was attempted at the institutional level after the 1973 war, the Arab- Israeli conflict was too grave a matter for the talks to end in concrete results.
Islamism, the Culture of Resentment, and Human Rights
The institutional success of the progressive approach toward European unity stands in contrast to the repeated failures of a unified Arab nationalism. Beginning in the 1970s, the Common Market set up a practical model, but the Arab states did not succeed in following it.
When Nasser took power, he engaged in a frontal attack on the Muslim Brotherhood, which was accused of not having a concrete political plan. Forcibly eliminated in 1954, the brothers were called “reactionary forces in the service of imperialism.” In the Arab cold war against Saudi Arabia in the 1960s, Nasser made constant use of that argument. His enormous prestige and his capacity to unify the masses allowed him to marginalize the Islamist movement. By contrast, the United States tended to display a certain sympathy for these anti- Communist forces opposed to the Soviet Union. For their part, the Europeans ignored them, believing they belonged to the past.
During that entire period, the Islamists refined their body of doctrine, shaping it into the radical expression of a nationalism based on authenticity. Western domination was not only economic and military, it was above all cultural, a permanent cultural aggression that contaminated Muslim societies. Islamism aspired to be a global response on the part of the endogenous, who were expelling the exogenous imposed on them. That allowed the movement to discredit modernizing nationalism, defined as an instrument of Westernization. Ironically, independence became the “ultimate phase of imperialism.” Islam was defined as an inalterable essence to which it was necessary to return, since it could provide the solution to all problems. Every Western action from the start was merely an evil plot.
Paradoxically, progressive, even postmodern thought contributed to that viewpoint. In his seminal 1978 book, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Edward Said condemned the Western discourse on the Arab and Muslim worlds as an essentialist, derogatory, and domineering definition. In doing so, he in turn constructed a Western essence very close to that of the Islamists, while considering any critical approach to the Muslim world a venture of domination. True, he sought to place his perspective within all the battles of the Third World against imperialism, and many of his arguments hit the mark. Nevertheless, his was an effort to discredit the West, the dangers of which Maxime Rodinson pointed out in his time.
Among certain of Said’s epigones, the critique of Orientalism veered toward the constitution of a vast catalogue of resentment, even though, in the last years of his life, Said argued rather for the constitution of a scientific Occidentalism in the Muslim countries.
Beginning in the 1980s, when Islamism— as a result of the impact of the Iranian Islamic revolution— became a prominent discourse in Muslim societies, Europeans saw it as a “return of the religious,” or even a “revenge of God.” It was assimilated to other forms of religious fundamentalism, such as colonialist messianism in Israel, Protestant fundamentalism in the United States, and fundamentalist forms of dissident Catholicism. The radicalization of Hinduism based on a notion of authenticity could be added to that list. In a Europe in the process of de- Christianization, which has domesticated the religious phenomenon without suppressing various forms of religiosity, Islamism inspired great fear, especially since it was expressed as a justification for jihad. When that jihad was waged in Afghanistan against the Soviets, it was of course attributed to “freedom fighters,” but when it spread to Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 1982, then to Palestine in the 1990s, it assumed the role of the enemy.
The state apparatus of the Muslim countries were defined as “moderate” and in need of support against the Islamists, who replaced the Soviet Union in decline. The states knew how to play that card to obtain various assistance, including cooperation in maintaining security. In their armed confrontations with the Islamists, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1970s and Algeria during the civil war of the 1990s enjoyed general support from European and other Western powers.
At the same time, the protective mechanism arising from the Bandung Conference had ceased to function. Third- Worldism had been part of the general paradigm of those liberation struggles that accepted the necessity of the use of violence and of authoritarianism. But as of the late 1970s, that paradigm was replaced by that of human rights, which placed the emphasis on the defense of victims. Various European and Western human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) challenged the dictatorial aspect of the regimes in place in Muslim countries. European governments were obliged to defend their support policies based on the exigencies of reason of state.
Subject to different forms of protest transmitted to Europe via the diasporas, the political regimes of the Muslim countries saw their images constantly deteriorating. These protests returned to the cultural question, an ironic reprise of the question raised by Islamists. Might modern and emancipatory democracy be incompatible with the nature of Muslim societies? At the time, the perspective of Western believers in the “clash of civilizations” converged with that of the different Islamist movements.
Europe: Preoccupations with Power and Security
The logic of expansion gradually led the European Union to cover the entire north bank of the Mediterranean, with the exception, for the moment, of Croatia, Albania, and Turkey. Within that framework, in 1995 the EU launched what was known as the Barcelona Process of Euro- Mediterranean partnership. Association agreements were reached with most of the so- called south- bank countries. Reform programs moving toward free trade were financed by the European Union, with efforts to develop relations between civil societies on the two banks. On its tenth anniversary in 2005, the EU defined the Mediterranean as a strategic priority for the union as a whole.
At the same time, within the context of the peace process, the European Union took over a large share of the financing of the Palestinian Authority, thus moving beyond the purely declaratory framework of its previous policy. It was also a member of the Quartet, along with the United States, Russia, and the United Nations, charged with finding a political solution to the Palestine question.
There is no denying that the most important concern of the European Union and its member states is security. The farther the EU expands geographically, the more Muslim its neighbors become. Although it speaks of necessary reforms, its first priority is conservative in nature: to assure stability in its immediate vicinity, since conflicts internal to the Muslim world have repercussions on its own soil. In the 1980s and 1990s, for example, terrorism linked to the Iraq- Iran conflict and to the Lebanese and Algerian civil wars cast its shadow over France. The security aspect requires a stronger collaboration with the Muslim states.
The same issue can also be found in the migration question. The Muslim world provides a good share of the undocumented workers trying to reach Europe, and most of the rest of them pass through those same countries. There again, the Muslim states have made the emigrants an instrument for exerting pressure on a new Fortress Europe seeking to build impenetrable walls around itself. Drug trafficking of various kinds and terrorism are also pertinent issues.
After September 11, 2001, Europe was the victim of jihadist terrorism on its own soil, in Madrid and London especially. The antiterrorist struggle requires constant cooperation in the field of intelligence between Europeans and the law forces of the Muslim countries.
All these constraints are pushing the European countries to take a rather conservative view of their relations with the Muslim world. They claim to be adopting a long- term perspective. In favoring reform processes, in financing them and providing technical assistance, Europe is working for a transition toward a more democratic Arab world. Nevertheless, the Europeans’ Arab and Muslim interlocutors have only an instrumental view of their relations with Europe. Europe is there to contribute toward improving the performance of the state apparatus and of the economy, in order, precisely, to perpetuate the status quo. Only the future will tell which of the two parties will prevail.
The cultural question remains essential, however, at least in discourse. European leaders, particularly the French, are committed to rejecting the trap of the clash of civilizations. Dialogue between cultures is the order of the day. But the question of whether Turkey will join the European Union is rousing violent passions.
Those who have a culturalist interpretation of the European construct deny that Turkey belongs to Europe as a whole. They do not want to see that, if there was ever any cultural and religious reality in Europe, it was when it was composed of countries embracing the Catholic or Protestant tradition. But when Greece entered the Common Market in 1981, a Balkan, Orthodox, and formerly Ottoman country that had become part of European culture only in the nineteenth century— despite its claim that it was the heir to classical antiquity— joined the European group. The same was true for the successive expansions following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Practically all the former Ottoman Balkan countries, with the exception of Albania, Serbia, and Macedonia, are or will become part of the European Union.
In its history and culture, the Republic of Turkey belongs in large part to the Balkans, which include many Muslims. The question of religion is more complex. Hostility toward Turkey feeds on an Islamophobia incited in great part by the manifestations of various forms of Islamic radicalism (jihadist terrorism, hypersensitivity to anything that could be considered an attack or even a critique of Islam).
The real problems raised by the question of Turkey’s membership in the European Union are more on the order of politics: Turkish ultranationalism in its mythified continuity with Kemalism; its complex entanglements in Middle Eastern affairs (the Kurdish problem; the use of water from the Euphrates; proximity to Iran and Iraq; the settlement of the Cyprus question; Armenian affairs). Demographics play a significant role as well: Turkey may be destined to become the most populous country in the EU. That will entail, at minimum, a redefinition of European institutions. Yet the European Union seems incapable of reforming its institutions.
But Turkey is not a population bomb. Its synthetic fertility rate (the number of children per woman) was 1.92 in 2006, that is, lower than that of Ireland or France. A good part of the south bank of the Mediterranean has already achieved most of its demographic transition (Tunisia: 1.74; Algeria: 1.89). Iran is at 1.8 (but Egypt is at 2.83, Syria at 3.4, and Morocco at 2.68). These indications show that, over the medium term, Europe will not be able to find in the nearby Muslim countries the immigrant labor force it will need as its population ages. It is even possible that these countries will become in turn destinations for emigration from farther away.
Shared Interiority
The violent acts of the early twenty- first century must not conceal the shared destiny that has been built up between the Muslim world and Europe over two and a half centuries. From the second half of the eighteenth century on, Europe, because of its extreme power, defined the shifting rules of a new universality that accompanied the expansion of its domination. In the twentieth century, Europe was replaced in part by North America. Despite the vicissitudes of politics, the elaboration of new norms with universalist aspirations has continued. These include women’s emancipation and the legitimation of homosexuality. Muslim countries find themselves constantly subjected to pressure to put into practice these new norms, which are causing upheaval in their fundamental anthropological structures.
Modernization is at once propelled by Europe or the West and produced by the evolutions internal to Muslim societies. Such was the case for the disappearance of hierarchized Old Regime societies, for the establishment of equal status as the norm, for the redefinitions of identity leading to the emergence of nationalism and the modern state. Moment by moment, it is impossible to determine what is borrowed from the outside and what is an internal recomposition.
Creative destruction, which originated in Europe but has taken on autonomy in the Muslim world, relies on multiple inventions of tradition, as also occurred in Europe. At every moment, it was necessary to justify innovation by linking it to a religious and cultural heritage. Contemporary Muslim discourse in its identity- and authenticity- based phase had its counterpart in twentieth- century Europe, including its darkest side, such as anti- Semitism.
Within present- day globalization, the Muslim world occupies a middle position between industrialized societies, old and new, and the least developed countries, as defined by the human development index. Its performance is mediocre but not disgraceful and does not imply an overall failure of the culture of its societies.
In producing the universal, Europe has itself become universalized. Its material culture has been imbued with contributions from the entire world, as indicated by its everyday cuisine. Its arts are incomprehensible without reference to other cultures. Its literature became universal with the translation of the Thousand and One Nights in the early eighteenth century. Its human composition has changed, its religious constitution has been transformed. It would be as pointless to define a European identity without taking into account the multiplicity of its components as to define a Muslim personality closed off from the rest of the world. The trap of authenticity, which excludes the other as a foreigner, is probably the most widespread danger in the world as a whole.