8

The Islamist Imaginary

They (the hypocrites) have made their oaths a screen (for their misdeeds):

Thus they obstruct (men) from the path of God: truly evil are their deeds.

QUR’AN 63:2

WHEN AN IDEA is elusive, it is appropriate to give it an ambiguous label. The ambiguity avoids misleading concreteness and suggests something of the complexities that can be blamed for the clarity not quite achieved. Such is the character of the “Islamist Imaginary,” the core analytical concept deployed here to characterize the intimate connection between Islam and empire. “Imaginary” refers to something imagined, in this case the powerful conjured Islam of the American imperial project. The challenge is to make such a hyper-real conception of Islam tangible. The Islam of empire must be powerful. Its usefulness resides in its capacity to screen from view the real-world influence that Islam as a faith and way of life has on the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. The Islamist Imaginary must overshadow these experienced realities to project the imagined Islam that empire requires. How can one distinguish between the usefully imagined and the simply real?

At Trinity College, a small and very old New England liberal arts college where I teach, a measure of clarity was given to me, in a quite unexpected way. During graduation week in the spring of 2006 at Trinity, a small drama in two acts unfolded. A Muslim student of mixed Indian-European parentage, whose thesis I supervised, boarded an evening bus provided by the college for attendance at senior week activities. He would graduate the next day with honors in international studies and as the recipient of a distinguished Japanese prize for fostering international understanding. The student next to him noticed only his “Middle Eastern” looks and announced in a loud voice his anxiety at “sitting next to Osama bin Laden who might have a bomb.” At graduation the next day, the same student heard the cautionary words of our president, addressed at the end of the ceremony to all graduating seniors about the dangerous world they were entering. To illustrate the dangers, the president singled out “those Muslims who danced in the streets on 9/11/2001 when the twin towers collapsed and the Pentagon burned.” What makes this scene noteworthy is not just the presence of our small contingent of Muslim students, including my honors student, but on the stage, seated right next to our president, of Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Nobel laureate. Ebadi is one of the best-known Muslim women in the world today. She is an honored champion of human rights in Iran and worldwide. She had just been awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by our president. Yet the imagined Islam of terror and violence that justifies the War on Terror obscured the very real Muslim, committed to peace and justice, there in flesh and blood within arm’s reach.

The Islamist Imaginary is that compelling.¹ It is that powerful. When this glaring and hurtful contradiction was pointed out, our president responded with genuine surprise. After some reflection, he apologized to our distinguished guest and others offended by the unintended hurt of his remarks. The Islamist Imaginary has deeply penetrated the American psyche. There should be no cause for surprise that the American media firmly believed that, just behind the people’s movement that swept through the Islamic world in the spring of 2011, there lurked a terrible Islamic menace.

Understanding the conjured Islam of empire has nothing at all to do with the religion of the world’s multitude of Muslims. Nor does it originate in a psychological malady of those who guide the American empire. The extensive work by Western scholars and journalists on Islamophobia is well intentioned.² However, it obscures more than it illuminates. It is ultimately distracting. The notion of Islamophobia asks that we think of the Islam of empire as the result of a failure of understanding. The misrepresentations of Islam are presumed to result from ignorance compounded by psychological imbalances, parallel to other instances of phobic behavior. The approach has two negative consequences. First, Islam itself, the faith of some 1.6 billion persons, is put in a defensive and apologetic position. Articles and books pour forth to counter the “misunderstandings” about Islam’s attitude toward such issues as democracy, women, or violence. The Islam that emerges in such studies is an Islam in the dock, defined and distorted by the necessity to respond to the false charges made against it by the “Islamophobes.” A second consequence of the Islamophobia approach is to point to educative and psychological remedies for the phobia. In fact, America has imperial interests rather than a knowledge deficit or a psychological problem. Neither education nor psychology has much to do with the generation of the Islamist Imaginary.

The Islam of empire must be confronted on the rough political terrain from which it emerges. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that the American empire had no real adversary. An imperial project cannot tolerate such a void. The War on Terror filled the void and continues to do so today. Ridding the world of terror is a metaphysical notion. Terror is just another word for evil. President George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan before him, did in fact use them interchangeably. Those formulations cast the net so widely that both are essentially meaningless. Yet there is a difference. A war against evil makes no intuitive sense. Terror, on the other hand, can be rendered more particular and less metaphysical. The Islamist Imaginary gives evil Muslim features.

Evil with Islamic Features

Against the background of the Islamist Imaginary, a War on Terror becomes plausible. The existence of networks of dangerous Islamic extremists, and their deadly criminal actions, contributes in invaluable ways to make the formula work. The beheadings of Western captives stage-managed by ISIS provide an instructive instance. Violent extremists do pose a threat, most of all to the Muslims whom they oppress. The march toward Baghdad and Erbil of the militants of ISIS in the summer of 2015 is a particularly ominous example. They are undoubtedly also a deadly challenge for America and the West. However, the threat they pose is very far from an existential one for the United States or Europe. A perfectly reasonable strategy of surveillance and targeted police and security action is available to deal with infiltrators. Should extremists succeed in consolidating a state, then containment represents a proven strategy for managing even that risk.³ The War on Terror represents a policy decision to reject these measured and modest alternatives in favor of an imperial American foreign policy. Such a policy is driven by the standard imperial interest in dominance and control of vital global resources. Unlike other justifications for intervention abroad, such as the abstract notion of protecting human rights, “terrorism” allows for violent intervention against a militarized enemy, personalized by ominous-looking men with long beards and guns over their shoulders, flying black flags.

The approach to exposing the Islamist Imaginary must be blunt and direct. Neither accurate information about Islam nor psychological therapy to counter a phobia will be of much use. Islam itself needs no defense because the Islamist Imaginary has nothing to do with it. Let us recognize at the outset that the imagined Islam of empire is conjured from a tissue of outright lies, endlessly and deliberately repeated. Big lies are the most difficult to identify as such, especially when they are repeated by great powers with all the media resources at their command. The Egyptian journalist Fahmi Huwaidi describes himself as mystified by the spectacle of the American leaders reacting to the 9/11 attacks in what can only be described as highly irrational ways. Huwaidi fails to find an explanation for the American “fondness for the process of simplifying that focuses on the process of describing rather than the description itself that aims to personify the reality of evil and not the evil reality.” He pronounces himself unable to understand how an advanced and highly complex society with “great minds, great institutions, and a record of achievements in science and technology can accept unreasonable matters that can’t be accepted by human reason such as relating evil to one person and fundamentalism and terrorism to one religion or ethnic group.”⁴

The terrible crime of 9/11 committed by Islamic extremists created an opportunity to advance the imperial project. President George W. Bush launched the American War on Terror. In fact, at issue was control over oil and the advancement of Israeli aims, not the containment of terror. The battle to control the oil of that great Arab people was launched and the blood, overwhelmingly Iraqi blood, flowed. All key decision makers, from the president on down, avoided mention of Israel. They insisted that the war had nothing at all to do with oil. They lied. To screen the lies, one alternative rationale after the other was trotted out to justify the unjustified and unprovoked war. The war aimed to rid the Iraqi people of a terrible tyrant on a par with Hitler. Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. A nuclear-armed Iraqi regime would inevitably pass those weapons on to al Qaeda, to which the regime was linked.

Even before the assault began, the common sense of ordinary people in key Western cities refused one false justification after another. The lies could not have been more obvious, ridiculous, and easy to refute. Millions filled the streets with the astute demand of “no more blood for oil.” They knew the truth. With so many of the key American decision makers linked directly to the oil giants and their subsidiaries, it was really not that hard to see through the lies. We now have the documents that reveal in excruciating detail the official planning that had targeted Iraq and control of its oil long before 9/11. It is important to add that secondary gains would flow from this primary objective. Advocates for Israeli interests would secure their goal of “ending” a major Arab state and dividing it into continuously fighting religious and ethnic factions. The United States would have a wonderful stage to put on display its terrifying technologies of war. To secure Iraqi oil the United States would establish military bases right in the heart of the Middle East. The bases would immeasurably enhance American economic, political, and cultural leverage in the region. The question that hangs over this criminal violation of international law is less “why we did it” than what made the American architects of war believe they could pull it off and keep their citizens in line.

Arrogance of power and inordinate confidence in military means to secure imperial ends set the course to war. The invasion would be a “cakewalk” and Iraq itself would be remade without great difficulty. Still, there remained the problem of ordinary citizens who saw through the lies. They were willing to put their bodies on the streets to disrupt the plans of the war-makers. The war-makers had a solution. Manipulated apprehensions would overcome this dilemma. Fear would silence truth.

War requires a fearsome adversary. Enter the Islamist Imaginary. The level of Western hostility to Islam reaches extraordinary proportions. It generates anxieties to match. From Europe, America inherited and fostered a rich vein of animus toward all things Islamic. Falsehoods about Islam lace the Western civilization heritage. They are dangerous and distressing. They are also useful for imperial purposes. They feed the Islamist Imaginary. At times, they do so in indirect ways. Westerners through the centuries have heard that Muslims do not worship “God.” Rather, they worship a quite different, alien “Allah.” Yet Allah is simply the Arabic word for “God.” The Arabic term is related to the word for God, Alaha, in Aramaic. It is the language that Jesus spoke. It is still spoken today.

More often, the calumnies are less subtle, more direct, and far more aggressive. The American public is subjected to particularly vulgar variants. Jerry Vines, former head of the Southern Baptist Convention, has described the Prophet Muhammad as a “demon-obsessed pedophile.” Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and the minister who gave the invocation at President Bush’s inauguration, describes Islam as “a very evil and false religion.” Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority pronounced Islam “a terrorist religion.”⁵

Muslims do not trade in such degrading insults. Both Moses and Jesus are revered as prophets in Islam. The Qur’an refers to Jesus quite simply as the Messiah. In Islam, Jesus is born of Mary “purified above all women.” Reverential descriptions of Mary in the Qur’an exceed the space accorded to her in the New Testament. An entire surah entitled “Mariam” tells the story of Mary and Jesus. Muslims simply cannot denigrate Moses or Jesus without repudiating core beliefs of their own faith and most sacred teachings. In the almost five decades I have lived and traveled among Muslims on four continents, I have not one single time heard a practicing Muslim insult Jesus, not even in the wake of the most virulent and degrading attacks on the Prophet Muhammad.

The endlessly repeated allegation that Islam fosters violence and war is the most vile and damaging of the lies out of which the Islamist Imaginary is spun. It should be a fact of great interest and importance that the more than a billion and a half Muslims believe that they are divinely ordained both to refrain from aggression themselves and to resist attacks and oppression by others.⁶ The Muslim daily greeting is “as salamu ‘alaikum,” or peace be upon you. Such understanding has yet to make its way into public consciousness and discussion of Islam.

On war, Islam takes a middle position. Judaism preaches an eye for an eye. Christianity instructs its adherents to turn the other cheek, although Christians “marching as to war” have historically paid little attention to that pacifist injunction. Islam condemns aggression but defends rightful resistance. It is a moral view. It seem eminently reasonable to me and echoes the words I heard as a child on how to deal with violence in a rough neighborhood. The first Islamic community suffered assaults by its enemies. Revelations addressed this peril directly. In the Qur’an failure to resist when attacked is tantamount to supporting oppression, and oppression is something God hates. “And fight in the way of God those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Surely God loves not the aggressors.”⁷ In Islam, the permissible resort to force is also sharply circumscribed. A threatened community is authorized to strike its enemies when religion itself is endangered. “If God did not repel some people by others, then monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques wherein God’s name is abundantly remembered, would have been destroyed. God will certainly aid those who aid his cause for surely God is strong and mighty.”⁸ The Qur’an urges confrontation of those who deliberately break their pacts and treaties and attack religion and the culture it generates. An important verse cautions against “those with whom you make an agreement, who then break their agreement every time, and honor not their word …” The verse continues “if they break their oaths after their agreements and revile your religion, then fight the leaders of unbelief because surely their oaths mean nothing and will not restrain them.”⁹ Resort to force is also not only permissible but fully expected when Muslims suffer oppression: “And why would you not fight in the way of God and of those who because they are weak are ill-treated and oppressed? Men, women, and children whose cry is: Our Lord, rescue us from this city whose people are oppressors and raise for us from Thee one who will protect; raise for us from Thee one who will assist.”¹⁰ In particular, the Qur’an clearly spells out the right of defense when Muslims are driven from their lands. At the same time, the Qur’an warns against excesses and urges that responses be proportional. A verse quite clearly states that “whoever retaliates with the like of that with which they are injured and are again oppressed, God will surely help him.”¹¹ It is important to remember that, in modern times, Muslims have fought in defense of their own lands and on their own territory, such as the Algerians in Algeria and the Palestinians in Palestine. Muslim armies were not sent thousands of miles away to invade Western lands.

It requires no great effort of the moral imagination to understand that many Muslims—Algerians in an earlier age; Palestinians, Afghans, and Iraqis today—believe themselves to have been placed in a situation where they must resist, most often against overwhelming odds and even at the cost of forfeiting their own lives. Islam does not condone suicide; it is, in fact, rare in Islamic societies. However, the sacrifice of one’s own life to safeguard the faith and free others from terrible repression is regarded in most religions as heroic action. Epidemics of collective embrace of death swept through early Christian communities faced with persecution and the forced renunciation of their faith. Martyrs occupy a large space in the Christian religious imagination.

Judaism, too, has its history and myths of martyrdom. In the story of Masada the Jewish people have contributed perhaps their most dramatic story of self-inflicted death as a form of resistance. To those with a sense of history, to visit Israel today is to go first to the old city of Jerusalem and then to the ancient fortress of Masada. The fortress sits atop a cliff at the western end of the Judean Desert, overlooking the Dead Sea. It is a place of stark and majestic beauty. It is also the site of what many regard as one of the greatest stories of collective resistance unto death in Jewish history. At Masada hundreds of Jews fought in the year 73 the last, losing battles against Roman invasion. After three years, they could no longer keep the Romans at bay. Elazar ben Yair, the leader of the fighters, argued for death rather than capture. Elazar’s final speech provided a clear and eloquent defense of these acts as a form of honorable resistance:

Since we long ago resolved never to be servants to the Romans, nor to any other than to God Himself, Who alone is the true and just Lord of mankind, the time is now come that obliges us to make that resolution true in practice … We were the very first that revolted, and we are the last to fight against them; and I cannot but esteem it as a favor that God has granted us, that it is still in our power to die bravely, and in a state of freedom.¹²

Historians, archaeologists, sociologists, and anthropologists, led by Israeli scholars, have all chipped away at important elements of the Masada story, questioning some of the elaborate details that have been woven into Masada to enhance its utility as an Israeli national myth.¹³ Yet, for all the shadings, there seems to be no doubt that of the hundreds of Jews who died at Masada, substantial numbers did so at the hands of their families or themselves. Christians and Jews have both had a worldly experience that provides abundant materials to reflect seriously on questions of suicide and resistance. It is puzzling, therefore, that so many in the West find it difficult to understand the reasoning of Islamic martyrs, and to recognize the moral complexities of acts of suicide that have both religious and political significance for those who commit them.

There is in the Qur’an no celebration of violence, per se, as a cleansing force. However, the Qur’an is clear about regarding just struggles as a religious obligation. In a knowing way, God asks, “Did you suppose that you would enter Paradise without God knowing who among you have striven and are patient?”¹⁴ However, Muslims are instructed that all acts of war by them must cease immediately if their enemies sue for peace, pledge to end persecution and oppression, and sincerely undertake to abide by their oaths and covenants. A verse clearly admonishes that “if they incline to peace, then incline thou also to it, and trust in God. Surely He is All-Hearing, All-Knowing.”¹⁵ The Qur’an also discusses the issue of deterrence as a preferred way to circumvent war. “And make ready for them whatever force you can, and [have] horses tied at the frontier, to frighten thereby the enemy of God, and your enemy, and others beside them, whom you know not. God knows them.”¹⁶ Muslims are ordered to be ready for war, not in order to start it but to deter their enemies. The widely accepted Western notion of Islam as a religion of the sword has made it easy for Westerners to imagine that war is enjoined in Islam for the propagation of the faith, but nowhere in the Qur’an is such an idea to be found.

The Entanglements of Islam and Empire

The United States is at war with a very different, mythic Islam of its own making that has nothing at all to do with this Islam of the Qur’an. To make sense of that conjured threat, scholarly studies of Islam or Islamic movements are of no help at all. Even the examination of the real-world history and practice of empire has limited value, unless the perceived Islamic dimension is considered. The American imperial project cannot be brought into clear view without assessment of the distinctive rationale that the Islamist Imaginary provides. The task is not an easy one. The Islamist Imaginary has no simple and unitary existence. Rather, it is a complex amalgam that shapes both the delusions of empire and a conjured threat to imperial power into a co-evolving composite. It is a “difficult whole,” in the helpful language of complexity theory. The Islamist Imaginary, unlike Islam itself and political movements of Islamic inspiration, does not exist outside of the imperial interests that shape it. It has no independent cultural or historical reality, outside its role as predatory threat to Western global interests. The American empire, in turn, requires a hostile and threatening enemy, which today takes the form of Islam of its imagination, to realize and rationalize its expansionist project that must remain unacknowledged and unspoken. The two elements of the imaginary and empire co-evolve. The needs of a threatened empire as vulnerable victim change over time. The Islamist Imaginary transforms itself to meet those needs. Imaginary and empire circle one another in a dance of predator and prey. Their roles are interchangeable, a clear sign that they are not entirely real. The predator is prey; the prey is predator. They develop in tandem in a complex process of mutual adaptation. Boundaries give way between the real and the imagined. In the end it is the imagined that haunts our imaginations and drives our policies.¹⁷

The idea of the co-evolution of Islam and empire in the Islamist Imaginary is not as strange as it might at first seem. Scholars know that the entanglement of Islam and empire has an intricate chain of precedents. Edward Said provided a useful starting point for analyzing these complex linkages with his frequently quoted assertion that ours is an age of “many Islams.” It is also the time of the singular American empire. He pointed out that Islam and empire have an intricate history of connections.¹⁸

The dominant notion of civilizational conflict between the Islamic world and the West rightly highlights the Islamic ideological roots of the most persistent resistances to American global dominance, provided that we recognize that the conflict has political and economic causes. However, this same notion obscures an important history of instrumental cooperation between Islam and the United States. American assertions of imperial power have had a consistent and often compliant Islamic dimension. It is now rarely acknowledged, though, that the cooperative dimension is at least as important for understanding the relationship today of the Islamic world and the West as the contrary record of oppositions to American hegemony of Islamic inspiration.

Of the “many Islams,” America has for decades actively fostered and manipulated its own useful preferences. These “preferred Islams” of earlier periods are part of the story of the Islamist Imaginary of our own. The consequences of the manipulations of these preferred Islams have not always been those intended, at least not in the long run. They have often entailed violence that in the end was turned back first on U.S. clients and then on the United States itself. Yet, for all these qualifications, it remains true that the preferred Islams, cultivated and shaped by the United States, have been critical to the post–World War II projections of American power.

At the end of World War II, President Roosevelt made an historic agreement with the house of Saud in Saudi Arabia. In exchange for privileged access to oil, the United States guaranteed the royal family’s hold on power, declaring the defense of Saudi Arabia a vital U.S. interest. The eighteenth-century origins of the current Saudi regime in the alliance between Muhammad Ibn Sa’ud, a local chieftain, and Ibn Abdul Wahhab, a puritanical and ultraconservative Islamic reformer, proved no obstacle. U.S. material support for all the usual instruments of repression enabled the Saudi royals to impose themselves on “their” people, despite Islam’s deeply rooted antipathy to monarchy. It also allowed the interpretation of Islam to take firm hold in Saudi Arabia and, through Saudi oil revenue funding, make itself felt worldwide as a powerful reactionary tradition. The royal family’s self-appointed role as guardian of Islam’s most holy sites, Mecca and Medina, provided the requisite religious cover for the U.S.-backed repression that secured their hold on power. This critical Saudi connection ensured American triumph over its European rivals for control of Middle Eastern oil. It also ensured a linkage between American empire and one of the most reactionary forces in the Islamic world, if not the world at large.

Complicit Saudi Islam played a critical role in the subsequent geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s. The United States knowingly used the retrograde Wahhabi Islam of the Saudis as a counterweight to progressive Arab nationalisms. These nationalisms had shown themselves willing to open doors to the Soviets in exchange for support for their projects of independent national development. By doing so, they threatened to challenge American hegemony over the Middle East and its precious oil resources.

Personified most effectively by Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, Arab nationalists threatened to chart the kind of independent path of development that is intrinsically anathema to any imperial power. A combination of external blows and internal manipulations brought these nationalist assertions to an end by the late 1960s. In the wake of the collapse of the nationalist project, the United States saw no problems when a state-controlled Islam provided ideological cover for the compliant Egyptian successor military regimes. Egypt after Nasser was effectively brought within the American orbit and voided of all genuine nationalist content. For such regimes, the threat to their hold on power came from the left and the memories among the masses of the material and social advances registered under progressive Arab nationalist banners. Such successor regimes were no less repressive in pursuing their regressive aims than their predecessors had been in advancing more progressive objectives of autonomous development and improvement of mass welfare. Once again, Egypt provided the prototype, with Anwar al Sadat as the “believing President” who expelled the “Godless” Soviets, opened Egypt to American penetration, and welcomed disciplined Islamists back into public life as a counter to the “atheist left.” The Americans embraced both Sadat and the domesticated Islam in which he draped himself. In the end, however, Sadat’s cynical manipulation of Islamic symbols as a cover for policies of alignment with America and capitulation to Israel on the issue of Palestine incited the anger of Islamic extremists. Khalid al Islambouli assassinated Sadat on October 6, 1981, shouting “Death to Pharaoh!”

When an already weakened Soviet Union blundered into Afghanistan in 1979, the United States turned to yet another variety of politicized Islam to hasten Soviet defeat. U.S. intelligence services, with assistance from their regional counterparts, actively and effectively mobilized the resources of Islamic militants, drawn from all over the Islamic world and including the Saudi Osama bin Laden. Enormous levels of funding were provided from American and Saudi sources, variously estimated but certainly in the billions. They aimed to take advantage of Soviet vulnerability in occupied Afghanistan. The strategy worked: Defeat in Afghanistan helped precipitate the demise of the Soviet Union.

That direct contribution to unchallenged American hegemony was neither the last nor the most significant by the violent transnational Islamic networks the United States helped finance and train for work in Afghanistan. As a result of the successful American-sponsored guerrilla war against the Soviet Union, violent extremist groups proliferated. They created havoc, everywhere not least in New York City on September 11, 2001. These terrible events were reprisals for American Middle East policies and the work of assassins, whom the United States initially encouraged and even in some cases trained.

The crime against humanity committed on September 11, 2001, had the unintended consequence of serving the breathtaking expansionist plans of the neoconservatives who dominated the Bush administration. Only a plausible enemy was lacking to make their execution possible. From the storehouse of the Western historical imagination, age-old images of a hostile Islam were retrieved. Islamic terrorists conjured up in a believable form for a frightened America the “threat to civilization” that every empire requires to justify its own violent acts of domination.

The Islamist Imaginary in the service of the neoconservative version of empire was born. The administration used all the resources of media control at its disposal to make sure that no links were made between the 9/11 crime and unjust U.S. Middle Eastern policies and the bloody instrumentalities the United States forged to enforce them. Plans for the United States to topple the Taliban and occupy Iraq, and for the Israelis to “resolve” the Palestinian issue by force, were all in place before 9/11. The most expansive version of the neoconservative agenda to advance U.S. and Israeli interests found forthright expression in a position paper written for the newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud party in 1996. It is entitled “Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” and was published by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. The document calls for a “clean break from the peace process,” the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the elimination of Saddam’s regime in Iraq, as prelude to regime changes in Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. The authors all became influential players in the second Bush administration.

President Bush’s elaboration of a more comprehensive strategy of global hegemony came in the fall of 2002 in a document called “National Security Strategy of the United States.”¹⁹ The United States would never again allow a hostile power to approach parity with U.S. military capabilities. The United States would take the offensive to ensure its continued “full spectrum” dominance. Endlessly repeated images of 9/11 provided the backdrop for a doctrine of “preventive” wars that would give a defensive coloration to what were, in reality, projections of American imperial power. The president rallied a cowed Congress to a strategy of endless wars to ensure global hegemony under the cover of a worldwide War on Terrorism whose features, while murky, were still recognizably Islamic.

An innocent and wounded America recast its public role in the Middle East as the champion of democracy and the bulwark against the Islamic wellsprings of irrationalism that ostensibly fed global terrorism. The stage was set for the full-blown evocation of the Islamist Imaginary. There was already an established American practice of manipulating Islam, including the most backward-looking and violent versions, for imperial ends. This time, however, strategic planners for the Bush administration departed from the established pattern with a breathtaking innovation.

At each prior critical strategic moment, America had made use of an existing form of Islam that could be reshaped to serve its needs. The Saudi connection yielded a royal, reactionary, and repressive Islam with which America cooperated without complaints for decades. The American-backed jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, in contrast, called forth an assertively violent rather than simply repressive Islam. America enthusiastically assembled, funded, and trained its transnational advocates. At the same time, the subservient successor regime in Egypt needed a domesticated “house Islam” that would support the right-leaning, authoritarian government. The Sadat regime would preside over the deindustrialization of Egypt and facilitate the ruthless pacification of the Palestinians. The United States had little good to say about Nasser and his Arab socialist policies. It did, however, welcome his efforts to “modernize” the venerable mosque-university of al Azhar. Nasser pursued a strategy of enhancing the role of Islam in Egyptian life while at the same time bringing al Azhar under firm state control.²⁰ The number of mosques doubled and Islamic broadcasts from Cairo, supported by the government, reached to countries across Dar al Islam. Sadat, for his part, sought to manipulate official Islamic figures and institutions to support his right-wing domestic policies and global realignment into the American orbit. The Americans welcomed Sadat’s self-interested efforts to wrap his pro-American policies with whatever legitimacy a domesticated Islam could provide.

In each of these instances, the Islamic dimension derives from a “found Islam” that originated to meet the needs of local actors. It had its own independent roots in the soil of the Islamic world and served, in the first instance, identifiable aims of already existing regimes or movements. The Bush administration sought to pioneer a distinctive variant on this general pattern, in ways that would clarify the new cultural and intellectual dimensions of its exercise of global power. Iraq was made the case in point.

The Islamist Imaginary: America’s Preferred Islam

The preferred Islam of the Bush administration comes into view most clearly and authoritatively in a Rand Corporation study. For that reason, rather than any scholarly value, Cheryl Benard’s work merits very close attention. I know of no other source as revealing about the way Islam was understood by the circle of neoconservative intellectuals to which Benard belonged in these critical years of assertions of American imperial power. The book carries the engaging title Civil, Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies. It was prepared with the imprimatur of Rand’s National Security Research Division in 2003. Benard’s assessment of the Islamic world quiets the apprehensions that resistance in the name of Islam raised for America’s neoconservative strategic planners.

The worries of the Bush team were not entirely misplaced. There was an Islamic threat, not to America per se but rather to American empire. There still is. To be sure, American propaganda exaggerates both the power and moral depravity of the Islamic enemy. The idea that hostility toward America in the Islamic world springs from frustration with the obvious and inherent failings of the Islamic world and envy at the equally obvious success and innate superiority of the West is sheer nonsense, no matter how frequently and portentously repeated. It parrots the message of every expansionist imperial power that history has known. It does so for all the obvious reasons. The colonized are at fault and their failings invite, even demand, colonization. There is no better way to exculpate the West for the consequences of its historical record of violent occupation and exploitation of Islamic lands. Attention is shifted from any serious evaluation of American dominance of the Middle East and its destructive policies in Palestine, Afghanistan, and most dramatically Iraq.

Benard takes the reality of an Islamic threat as a premise of her argument. Her analysis begins with a presentation of the self-imposed predicaments of the Arab Islamic world that threaten to spill over and endanger others. In Benard’s formulation the entire world, and not just the United States, is the innocent and vulnerable witness to the tumultuous internal disorders in the Islamic world. “What role,” she asks, “can the rest of the world, threatened and affected as it is by this struggle, play in bringing about a more peaceful and positive outcome?” Benard states clearly that these dangerous predicaments of the Islamic world are entirely self-imposed. She writes that “Islam’s current crisis has two main components: a failure to thrive and a loss of connection to the global mainstream. The Islamic world has been marked by a long period of backwardness and comparative powerlessness; many different solutions, such as nationalism, pan-Arabism, Arab socialism, and Islamic revolution, have been attempted without success, and this has led to frustration and anger.” To conclude, Benard gravely notes that “at the same time, the Islamic world has fallen out of step with contemporary global culture, an uncomfortable situation for both sides.”²¹

Benard’s assessment eliminates any reference to the West’s colonization of the Islamic world, and of the physical and psychological damage those violent assaults caused. There are no hints at all of an American imperial presence in the Islamic world through an impressive and constantly expanding network of bases. There is no consideration of the ways that presence constrains autonomous development. There are no references to the awkward facts of consistent American political and economic interventions, often violent and consistently aimed at undermining economic and political autonomy. Israel, heavily armed with all forms of weapons of mass destruction, a cruel occupying force, and the regional superpower, mysteriously disappears from view. These awkward realities are overshadowed by the Islamist Imaginary.

Only with these erasures can Benard take for granted the irrational grounding of the Islamic threat. Her analysis highlights the ways that the usual state-based threats to the national security exemplified by the Soviet Union in the era of the Cold War have been replaced by the challenge of nonstate actors, operating below the nation-state horizon. To face this threat, she argues that American strategic planners must make Islam itself a resource. In short, like her predecessors Benard is in the business of strategic manipulations of Islam to serve American economic and political ends. She evokes a malleable Islam that can be turned into an instrument to confront the Islams of resistance, while obediently serving America’s ends. However, Benard does so with a difference.

The Challenge of Religion-Building

What is new in Benard’s work is abandonment of the old strategy of reliance on a “found” Islam that can be turned to American ends. It may well be that Benard is right to urge this radical departure. The American invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 represented the first direct American assault on an Islamic country and its Muslim citizens. In the wake of the devastation and appalling loss of civilian lives in that shattered land, America may indeed no longer be capable of finding effective allies on Islamic ground, especially given subsequent depredations in Palestine and Iraq. In place of an Islam that can be reshaped, Benard counsels that imperial America should create de novo the Islam it requires. What is needed, she implicitly argues, is an Islam made in America and then exported to the Islamic world. The language to describe the remaking of one of humanity’s greatest religious and cultural traditions is particularly blunt and vulgar. “It is no easy matter to transform a major world religion,” writes Benard. “If ‘nation-building’ is a daunting task, ‘religion-building’ is immeasurably more perilous and complex.”²² For such a project of remaking Islam, almost unbearable in its arrogance and cultural disdain, Benard recognizes that the intellectual resources will have to be imported from the West.

Surveying Western scholarship and media coverage periodically throughout his career, Edward Said at times came close to despair that humanistic knowledge of Islam was even possible.²³ Benard has no such misgivings about her own quest to know Islam. The kind of knowledge she seeks is within easy reach. Benard is untroubled by any barriers at all to understanding Islam for the purposes of empire. Muslims themselves may be confused by their internal struggles to determine their own nature and values. They are, nevertheless, transparently available to Benard for “sorting out” along a spectrum defined by “critical markers” that make it possible to “locate them correctly.” “It is then possible,” Benard continues confidently, “to see which part of the spectrum is generally compatible with our values, and which is fundamentally inimical. On this basis,” she concludes, “this report identifies components of a specific strategy.”²⁴

Benard’s confident methodology as an analyst of Islam merits a closer look, before considering the strategy she proposes. In fairness, it should be noted upfront that she herself puts forward no claims of disinterested scholarship for her work. She has written a policy paper, and the policy to be served is unapologetically American, as befits a Rand Corporation study. Nevertheless, even in the Bush era, it was still considered good form to wrap those interests in soothing lies, although the effort to do so here is casual and not sustained for long. Benard does describe American aims in the terms required for public consumption, detached as usual from the actual historical record. Benard explains that “the United States has three goals in regard to politicized Islam. First, it wants to prevent the spread of extremism and violence. Second, in doing so, it needs to avoid the impression that the United States is ‘opposed to Islam.’ And third, in the longer run, it must find ways to help address the deeper economic, social, and political causes feeding Islamic radicalism and to encourage a move toward development and democratization.”²⁵

At critical points in her essay, however, Benard does go beyond these hollow formulations with a candor befitting thinking intended to guide an assertive imperial power. When describing the “positive changes” America seeks in the Islamic world, Benard invokes not only “greater democracy and modernity” but also “compatibility with the contemporary international world order.”²⁶ The wording is revealing. The accommodation urged is not with international law or international organizations. Such an argument would be difficult for intellectuals tied to the Bush administration to make, given the prevailing contempt for both that is characteristic of American foreign policy. Rather, compliance is to be fostered with the contemporary world order—in other words, a global system of American hegemony.

The magic in Benard’s scheme clearly does not reside in the categories themselves. What she proposes is a rather mundane typology of secularists, fundamentalists, traditionalists, and modernists, loosely defined in terms that do not depart much from standard categories in the literature. Nor is there anything particularly inventive about the markers that define each of these slots. In line with the strand of Orientalist scholarship represented by Bernard Lewis and the late Fouad Ajami with which she explicitly identifies, Benard derives her distinguishing markers essentially from cultural and lifestyle issues.

What makes Benard’s typology appear so comprehensive and effective is that it has nothing at all to do with the realities on the ground in the Islamic world. Everything falls so neatly into place, precisely because recalcitrant realities impose no constraints. The typology is self-consciously and triumphantly part of an effort not to understand the messy complexities of the Islamic world but rather to replace those undesirable realities with new ones, more in line with American interests. Benard’s book is about power and its rightful exercise to remake Islam. It has nothing at all to do with the scholar’s quest for knowledge of Islam itself.

Benard’s typology aims to identify which partners and what resources exist among Islamic actors to serve American interests. Benard’s answer is: None. She is not quite that direct, of course. However, in the end the boxes her typology identifies as containing potential allies and helpful assets are empty. Once this determination is made, the logic is inexorable: America, she counsels forthrightly, will have to manufacture the Islam it needs. It will be necessary to formulate the preferred Islam in the West and then export it to the Middle East.

Benard’s analysis has prepared the ground for the execution of her strategy in two ways. First, all traces of the historical record of previous American manipulations of Islamic regimes and movements have been obscured. Second, her analysis reverses the power relationship between the weak and vulnerable Islamic world and a globally dominant America. The United States is presented as threatened by a virulent Islam that is inherently opposed to the most cherished American values. Benard accomplished these linked objectives by arguing that cultural factors, rather than politics or economics, are at the heart of the American conflict with the Islamic world. To understand Muslims, she reasons, primary attention must be given to cultural issues. Benard patiently explains that only the cultural categories she identifies will allow the analyst to differentiate among Islamic actors and place them in the appropriate boxes, as fundamentalists, traditionalists, modernists, or secularists. The lifestyles approach has clear advantages for Benard’s purposes. If the questions asked are who is occupying whose land, who has appropriated whose resources, and who has inflicted massive violence on whom, the notion of a vulnerable America would be hard to sustain. Yet, since Benard’s entire argument is premised on the alleged threat that Islam represents to the West, particularly the United States, these awkward questions must be avoided. The move to culture and away from economics and politics makes this possible.

Using the cultural prism, Benard can argue that Islamists of all kinds threaten American values and principles, notably democracy and freedom. Their animus has nothing to do with American economic and political policies. Rather, their own self-inflicted failures, Benard explains, have produced an explosion of irrational rage among Muslims that targets the United States out of envy for its success and rage at the democracy and freedom that have made it possible. Magically, this perspective directs attention to issues of women’s dress and polygamy that, in cultural terms, trump such matters as whose resources have been appropriated, whose economies crippled, and whose politics violently manipulated. There is a message in the silenced questions. What Benard is really saying here is that all Islamists, whether moderate or extremist, now oppose the economic and political depredations of the United States, when those are brought into view. This judgment is exactly right. She recognizes that it extends to most secularists as well. This conclusion guides the strategy Benard proposes, although for obvious reasons she leaves it unstated.

To fill the void created by her erasures of actual U.S. economic and political policies, Benard invokes a mythic quest for democracy that the Bush administration aims to revitalize. This high-minded quest “covers” the historical record of U.S. manipulations of retrograde and violent Islamic movements. What is brought into view is a purely imaginary project to foster democracy in the face of unpromising and recalcitrant Islamic realities. “The notion that the outside world should try to encourage a moderate, democratic interpretation and presentation of Islam,” Benard comments, “has been in circulation some decades but gained greater urgency after September 11, 2001.” In line with this vision and in view of the dangers to global stability that certain Islamic ideologies and actions represent, she suggests that “it therefore seems sensible to foster the strains within it that call for a more moderate, democratic, peaceful, and tolerant social order.” Benard casts her own work as part of this quest. “The question,” she remarks, “is how best to do this. This report,” she concludes, “proposes a strategy.”²⁷

In fact, Benard offers more than a strategy. Most importantly, she has defined the nature of the problem, and the problem is ultimately Islam. What requires attention to alleviate the terrible violence that scars our world is nothing short of remaking Islam. Benard’s remaking has nothing at all to do with efforts under way by centrist Islamic intellectuals and activists, who argue that midstream Islam and democracy are fully compatible and that Islam poses no intrinsic barriers to social and economic development. Thinkers such as the Egyptian Tareq al Bishri, the Tunisian Rashid al Ghannouchi, and the Qatar-based Yusuf al Qaradawi have laid the intellectual groundwork for such an elaboration. They have done so in bold and creative interpretive and historical studies that are read widely throughout the Islamic world but almost never engaged in the West. Benard, too, pays no attention at all to such works of the Islamic midstream and the significant advance in Islamic thinking they represent. They are not among the thinkers she considers.

The use to which Benard puts her typology explains how she could “miss” such important developments. At first glance, Benard appears to have created a classification that takes for granted a diverse, even vibrant universe of Islamic thinkers and activists. Indeed, some in the Islamic world have misread the report precisely in this way. The Islamic thinker and journalist Fahmi Huwaidi in al Ahram of August 10, 2004, for example, writes approvingly of Benard’s report to the extent that it recognizes the diversity of Islamic actors and does not place them all, moderates as well as extremists, in the same basket, as many secular intellectuals do. In fact, Benard has made no such advance, as becomes clear when close attention is paid to the examples she uses to people each of her categories.

Huwaidi, for example, would most likely see his own work and the work of the New Islamic trend to which he belongs as closest to the Islamic modernism to which one of Benard’s categories refers. To be sure, his school uses the culturally authentic and more accurate term Wassatteyya as a self-description. Nevertheless, the general outlines of the modernist position that Benard describes would not be alien to him. Unfortunately, Benard’s version of the required understanding of the ongoing ideological struggle within Islam misses Huwaidi’s own work on democracy and development, as well as equally important contributions of such figures as the late Shaikh Muhammad al Ghazzali, Kamal Abul Magd, Muhammad Selim al Awa, and Tareq al Bishri. The only figure from the New Islamist school mentioned by Benard is Yusuf al Qaradawi.

Benard’s treatment of Qaradawi is instructive. First, he is classified as a traditionalist despite his consistent and well-documented opposition to traditionalist positions on a whole range of social issues, notably the role of women. To be fair, Benard does recognize those progressive elements in Qaradawi’s work, placing him in a “reform traditionalist” subcategory. But then, in a rare instance of complete candor, she comments forthrightly that Qaradawi is ineligible as a partner because he is, as Benard puts it, “aggressive on the issue of an Islamic foreign policy.”²⁸ The logical contradiction passes unnoticed. Despite an explicit insistence that her categories are generated on the basis of cultural and lifestyle considerations, politics has found its way back into her analysis when the issue is a political orientation that does not serve American interests.

In Benard’s scheme, fundamentalists are of course hopelessly beyond the pale. They are judged without hesitation to be incapable of producing partners for the United States. The traditionalists present the greatest dilemmas for Benard. For one thing, her definition produces unacceptable absurdities in classification, as we find al Azhar and the oppositional Muslim Brothers in the same box. Even more problematic are the close interactions across categories. To the degree that the distinctions do hold, Benard urges that they be used to foster conflict between the two groups, particularly highlighting traditionalist criticisms of the more virulent fundamentalist positions. However, the distinctions between the fundamentalists and the traditionalists, as Benard understands them, prove so fluid and the interactions so frequent that the categories collapse. In the end, all differentiations blur and all the Islamic thinkers and activists are in one box. Moreover, it is a box with which real cooperation is impossible.

Thus, for Benard fundamentalists and traditionalists not only overlap significantly but, more to her point, are both beyond the pale. At the same time, the modernist category, as Benard understands it, contains none of the important mainstream Islamic figures who actually are at work for reform. Who, then, does occupy that place in Benard’s scheme? All of the figures she mentions are émigrés living abroad, who have settled outside the Islamic world. They have no discernible connection to Islamic activists on the ground, nor has their work generated any significant following in the Islamic world. So, when we take a closer look at those in that box of potential partners, they turn out to be individuals working as lone scholars in the West. Their task is a difficult and essentially textual one. They start from scratch. They go back to the sacred texts to “uncover” neglected truths. The clear implication is that Islamic intellectuals on the ground in the Arab Islamic world have uniformly gotten it wrong. By this calculus, there is a great deal of work to be done to remake Islam, and in Benard’s view, it can only be done by émigré scholars, rooted in Western culture.

Some important secularist thinkers, their heads apparently turned by the notion that Benard describes secularists as the natural partners for the project of civil and democratic Islam, have missed the essential point of Benard’s analysis. In the end, for Benard the Arab Islamic world contains no suitable partners for the American project. Sayyid Yassine, the Egyptian political analyst who is a major voice for secularism, praises Benard’s study for its “comprehensive methodology.” He characterizes her typology as “attuned to the current era in ways that improve on more traditional approaches.”²⁹ Yassine’s own views echo Benard’s introductory remark that the secularists should be America’s logical partners in any effort to encourage a civil and democratic Islam. However, Yassine fails to notice that Benard in the end quite explicitly rejects such a partnership.³⁰ Despite her recognition of the theoretical compatibility of the secularists with such a project, Benard categorically refuses such a partnership. She raises two objections to the secularists as partners for America’s transformation of the Middle East. First, the secularists have in her view a checkered relationship with the democratic ideal, presumably unlike such “moderate” allies as the Saudis. But, more to the point, Benard says bluntly that the increasingly apparent opposition of the secularists to American foreign policy makes them ineligible for any collaborative role. Once again, although Benard ostensibly builds her classification scheme on cultural issues, political considerations prove decisive in identifying U.S. allies rather than the compatibility of their views on issues like the headscarf. Benard’s study points to the inescapable conclusion that there are no natural partners to be found in Islamic lands to carry out the required remaking of Islam.

Although bereft of partners, American policy should not abandon its sweeping objectives. Benard argues that a major policy aim should be the fostering of distracting conflict among Muslim thinkers and activists. In her view, it will be most useful to heighten the conflicts between secularists and Islamic activists. American policy, Benard is arguing, should actively work to enlarge the secular–Islamic divide. However, the Islamic camp itself should be divided, by drawing attention to the differences between fundamentalists and traditionalists. Benard announces bluntly “the aim of weakening them all and preventing their unification since none are suitable partners for the U.S. project.” She continues that “under the guise of democratic reform,” it will be essential to “propagate notions of a ‘modernist’ Islam, developed by émigré Muslim scholars living in the West, politically neutered and effectively divorced from all social and intellectual trends active in the Islamic world.”

At this point Benard brings the most sweeping goal of her study into view. The objective of American policy, she argues, should be nothing short of weakening and diluting Islamic identity “so that it has little or nothing to contribute to a unifying politics of identity.” In the end Islam itself is the target. Benard understands that indirection will be necessary. She quotes with approval Ibn Warraq, perhaps best known for his essay “Why I Am Not a Muslim.” In a footnote, Benard remarks that “in my interview with him, Mr. Warraq conceded that a frontal critique of Islam was not realistic at this time” and that “efforts to promote a kinder, gentler, ‘defanged’ Islam were likely to achieve better results.”³¹ As a complementary strategy Benard urges that assistance be given to those who represent non-Islamic identities. She seeks backing to heighten awareness of pre- and non-Islamic history and culture in the media, and in government-imposed school curricula. Finally, Benard calls for media and educational efforts to win popular support for the politically neutered Islam that is envisioned. She concludes by recommending encouragement of Sufism, presumably because of what she mistakenly takes to be its inherently apolitical character.³²

The project Benard outlines necessitates, as she puts it, America’s lead role in nothing less than “religion-building.” Her work represents currently existing Islam as no longer amenable to the kinds of manipulations that had been possible at U.S. hands in the past. Islamic movements are now in the forefront of active revolt against the projections of American power. More daunting still from an imperial perspective, the moderate midstream of the world’s Muslims also stands for resistance to American empire, as peaceful as conditions allow. Remaking Islam, Benard concedes, will not be an “easy matter” in that “many extraneous issues and problems have become entangled with Islam.”³³ While Benard refrains from naming them, the thrust of her “cultural” focus indicates that she is delicately alluding to such intrusive and unmentionable political and economic questions as American domination of the Middle East through its network of bases and client regimes, Israel’s systematic appropriation of Palestinian land and water, and the U.S. use of military force to secure its interests in Islamic lands.

To counter the troublesome Islamic inspiration for resistance to these depredations, Islam must be remade. Benard’s study makes it clear that the neoconservative intellectuals who played so large a role in the Bush administration’s Middle East policy believed that American imperial objectives required Islam to be effectively remade. Islam was understood to be the enemy of empire, and it still is. American support for the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the wake of the coup of July 3, 2013, makes that clear. Efforts by the new military regime to exert near-total control over mosques and generally to discipline all Islamic institutions also make it clear that the notion of a remade Islam still has a role to play. The Egyptian generals are fully engaged in their own project of manufacturing a “good” Islam. They are actively waging their own war on terror after declaring the Muslim Brothers to be a terrorist organization. Undoubtedly, these efforts are part of the explanation for the support the dictatorial regime has received from the United States.

Iraq and the Global Screening of the Islamist Imaginary

The binary opposition of a “good” Islam yet to be “made” and an established “recalcitrant” Islam that refused manipulations reflected perfectly the Manichaean ideological worldview of George W. Bush’s Washington, DC. What is surprising is just how resilient the formulation has proved to be.

Religion-building, as outlined by Benard, proved difficult to achieve. The “good” Islam that was envisioned never quite made it into the real world in the service of American imperial needs. Ironically, “bad” Islam precisely filled the bill. Perhaps even more than allies, a war on a global scale would require an implacable enemy against which the power of empire could be arrayed. For an expansionist, unilateral global project like the new American empire, the right enemy was indispensable to rally domestic support for the militarization of society and to justify worldwide assertions of imperial power. The Islamist Imaginary has also proved durable and a marker of the continuity between Bush and his successor. Today, as Barack Obama’s two-term presidency draws to a close, it is instructive that America is still fighting the War on Terror. Terrorist Islam, now in the form of a wildly exaggerated threat of ISIS, remains the implacable and threatening adversary that rationalizes the new forms that Obama has given the unending war.

Critics of the American imperial project have too easily settled into the argument that Islam, the green threat, has replaced communism, the red threat, as the requisite American enemy. In broad outline, the argument is correct, but the analogy can also obscure some of the distinctive features of the new definition of the enemy that came so clearly into view in the Bush years and remains in place to this day.

The Islam that is imagined as a threat to empire has only the most tenuous connection to realities on the ground. Its mythic character is far more pronounced than that of communism. Terrorist Islam has no fixed address. There is no single nation-state or even cluster of states that stand with any consistency as the analogue of the Soviet Union or other communist powers. The new threat has little in the way of actual history either of ideas or movements that can match the sophistication of Marxism as the seedbed for communist ideology. Nor has it engendered the same kind of mass movements of support, giving the United States greater flexibility in identifying its “terrorist” enemies.

Unbound by the realities of time or space, terrorism with vague but menacing Islamic features is the perfect enemy for an empire that itself has taken shape in the new age of globalization. The incarnations of the Islamist Imaginary take on a useful yet deceptive solidity. The terrible image of the turbaned Ayatollah Khomeini performed its task in screening a mass revolution from view. It then transformed itself into the mustached and even more threatening figure of Saddam Hussein, conjured first as an ally and then a mortal enemy poised to hand over nuclear weapons to Islamic extremists. Those images then dissolved and reform as the tentacled Muslim Brothers who not only hijacked Egypt’s revolution of January 25, 2011, but effortlessly infiltrated the highest reaches of the American government itself. On the horizon looms the refurbished threat of the Neo-Ottomans, personified by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who recaptures for the “Turk” the status of the threatening Muslim “other.” Most threatening of all is the caliphate declared by the extremist movement ISIS that has arisen from the wreckage of Iraq and the destruction that has spilled over into Syria. It is easy enough to exaggerate the menace they pose. The idea of an ISIS “caliphate,” capable of threatening Europe and America, is sheer fantasy. The brutality of the group has been very real and very graphic. The antidote may well be to remind ourselves that our Saudi “friend” regularly beheads criminals for such offenses as blasphemy, drug smuggling, sedition, and “sorcery.” Most recently four hapless brothers were beheaded for marijuana sales.

The horrific spectacle of American journalists murdered in such a cruel way is heart-wrenching, but it does not justify the launch of yet another war. It should now not be hard to see that each of our military interventions in the Islamic world has had more disastrous results than the last. Always the unintended consequences have been more destructive than the dangers of the precipitating condition. It is easy enough to exaggerate dangers and threats. It is always impossible to know what disasters will come next from efforts to counter such exaggerated threats with military power. Without the American military destruction of Iraq and the imposition of a sectarian government in Baghdad, there would be no ISIS.

The Islamist Imaginary is always about manufactured and manipulated fears and is quite impervious to facts on the ground; the American experience in Iraq should have taught us that much. Iraq, led with unspeakable tyranny by Saddam Hussein, presented itself as the perfect screen for the global projection of the Islamist Imaginary as the preeminent rationale for American empire. The screening of the Islamist Imaginary in Iraq had a dual function. First, it allowed projection of this image of the enemy of the American empire in the most terrifying way in order to present it as a threat to civilization itself. As is often the case with such projections, there was an element of truth, greatly distorted, to the projection. Saddam, an absolute secularist, had nevertheless portrayed himself as an Islamic leader, likening his struggle with the West to the legendary 636 Islamic battle of Qadisayyah in which the Muslims faced Sassanid Persia. Equally important to the American imperial project was the opportunity provided to use the horrific image of Saddam Hussein poised to hand over nuclear weapons to Islamist extremists as a way to screen from view the actual sources of legitimate resistance in Islam to foreign occupation.

Battered by decades of domestic tyranny, war, and the brutal regime of sanctions, the Iraqi regime on the eve of invasion was little more than a hollow shell. Yet it was a shell that retained considerable importance. As a regional Arab actor, Iraq lent support to the Palestinian resistance and in other ways represented an obstacle to total Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. Moreover, Iraq was an Arab state with cultural and historical weight, unlike the emerging new Arab centers of influence in the Gulf. Finally, Iraq was the site of impressive oil resources. In global perspective, American control of Iraqi oil was judged critical to the potential great power rivals just over the horizon, notably China with its disturbing economic vitality and Russia with its resurgent nationalism. Should the American economy continue its decline, it was judged that Iraqi oil in American hands would be an extremely helpful lever in facing the Chinese, Russians, and other threats to American dominance.

For all it had suffered, Iraq still mattered. The Bush team understood that on this important Iraqi screen could be projected both the conjured Islamist Imaginary and “the shock and awe” of U.S. military power to contain it and protect Western civilization. Neither serious military opposition nor any real media attention to the wanton destruction of infrastructure and the catastrophic loss of civilian life marred the display. The destruction carried the message of just how unforgiving American displeasure could be. The message was especially pointed since Iraq had once been a compliant American ally. Day after day, night after night, the world watched as America displayed its impressive arsenal with the appreciative commentary of security experts and breathless “embedded” journalists. The intended message was clear: America’s power was beyond challenge. The Islamic threat would be buried once and for all in the rubble of a shattered country. Only American power could rise to the challenge of remaking the Middle East and the world beyond as the cleansing sword of the civilized world.

There were, of course, obstinate realities on the ground that would have called into question the relevance of the Islamist Imaginary to the Iraqi situation. Saddam, at the end of the day, was essentially a secular ruler who brutally repressed Iraqi Islamic movements and systematically opposed those abroad. Iraq, in Saddam’s day, was hardly an extremist playground. These inconsistencies mattered little: The neoconservatives were really uninterested in existing or historical Iraqi realities that were, in the end, irrelevant to their overt project of state-ending in Iraq. Media manipulation, bullying, and all manner of pressures made power, rather than logic or reason or even common sense, the driving force of policy. The mechanisms are now well known: Executive pressures on the intelligence community, the sidelining of the State Department, the concentration of power in the Department of Defense, and the abdication of responsibility by Congress all helped to generate the stream of “secrets and lies” that generated a succession of phony rationales, from the Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction to direct links to al Qaeda.³⁴ Iraq would turn over its weapons of mass destruction to the terrorists. By the end of the day, Americans came to believe that the Iraqi regime had a hand in September 11 and Saddam Hussein was really Osama bin Laden in disguise. Unintended consequences also played a role. The destruction of a dictatorship and the failure to replace it with any viable system left Iraq open to infiltration by militants across the Islamic world. The poisonous viruses of sectarianism and corruption moved easily into devastated Iraq. Shadowy figures inevitably emerged to exploit the new possibilities that the chaos in the wake of the American invasions created. Reality was transformed, but not in line with the fantasies of unimpeded access to oil and the transformation of Iraq as a whole into a base of imperial operations. Iraq was transformed instead into a factory for producing new extremists and a magnet for those already in the field.

The Islamist Imaginary and the Needs of Empire

Neither the study of language and culture nor decades of experience living in Islamic countries has any great relevance to the imagined Islam of American empire. The Islamist Imaginary as a subject of inquiry belongs in American rather than Islamic studies. If anything, humanistic knowledge of the lives of Muslims and of Islam is an obstacle and a diversion. Certain assumptions are in place when the subject of inquiry is the Islamist Imaginary. It is quite simply a waste of time to learn Arabic or Farsi or Turkish or any of the myriad of other languages spoken by Muslims when we already know what Islamic actors say is mostly an expression of irrational hatred and envy. Moreover, it makes little sense to pay careful attention to their words when we know that those words do not convey what they really mean. Since we anticipate that Islamic religion and culture are destined to be remade by models derived from our own history, there is little point to their study.

Barack Obama has struggled to distance himself from the militarization of foreign policy that he inherited from his predecessor, although without success. At the same time, he has retained and even enhanced the messianic sense of American exceptionalism. Obama, with a more believable professorial tone, projected the very clear attitude that there is little incentive to observe and listen when you have so much to teach the rest of the world. Just below the surface of this projected educative attitude lies the totalitarian impulse, still very much intact, to remake Dar al Islam in the West’s own image. Through a string of recent presidents, the sense of the United States as “the indispensable nation” lives on.³⁵ These inherited and deeply entrenched attitudes provide the backdrop against which the Islamist Imaginary makes its appearance, in endlessly renewed forms.

America of selfless goodness requires a contrasting pole of predatory evil. That pole must not be fixed. It must be flexible and malleable in the details of its features, although always an existential threat, ready to engulf us and overwhelm our improbable goodness. What we have in the Islamist Imaginary is a moving swarm of hostile, disembodied particulates. They are all products of the Western imagination. They are generated not only by hostile contemporary misrepresentations of Islam but also from centuries-old religious and cultural hostility to Islam. The particulates are all in constant formation and reformation. Any specific incarnation of the Islamist Imaginary draws on these elements to project a plausible enemy that meets the needs at that moment. The swarm of particulates shapes itself as a mirror of imperial needs. It can deconstruct and reform in an instant. It did so with the death of Khomeini and again with the assassination of bin Laden. When those images lost their usefulness, the swarm moved on. It reconfigured itself to meet the ever-changing imperatives of empire.

New incarnations are always taking shape right before our eyes. None of these new incarnations, like those that preceded them, have much to do with sober reality. Yet, intuitively, for Western publics the successive incarnations do seem real. The constituent particulates are familiar. Each mirrors unacknowledged, but dimly understood, traits of empire. They are recognizable on a subconscious level. Jungian “projection” explains how these toxic elements are generated. The qualities of the dark side of empire are attributed to a threatening Islamic enemy that can appear in a variety of nightmarish guises. The American empire wraps its actions in high-minded campaigns for freedom and democracy. In its practices, however, empire is undeterred by moral scruples, legal restraints, or the opinion of mankind. Preventive war, torture, black holes, and kill lists: The Islamist Imaginary feeds on them all. Profits were not the only product of the criminal invasion, of course. The supreme war crime has also been a producer of violent extremists, coming to life out of the death, destruction, and disorder brought on by the invasion and the “creative chaos” deliberately cultivated by the invaders. The terrorist yield ensures that the process of criminal war-making is transformed into an autocatalytic one. More extremists fuel more wars on terror, with each group of violent militants worse than the last.

Terrible in themselves, the successive waves of extremists are projections as well of the evil of the American war-makers and the greed and brutalities of the successor sectarian Iraqi regime the invaders put in place. They are, as Chris Hedges has explained, “the ghoulish face of empire.” Of ISIS, he explains that “they are the specters of the hundreds of thousands of people we murdered in our deluded quest to remake the Middle East. They are ghosts from the innumerable roadsides and villages where U.S. soldiers and Marines, jolted by explosions of improvised explosive devices, responded with indiscriminate fire.” Hedges continues that “they are the risen remains of the dismembered Iraqis left behind by blasts of Hellfire and cruise missiles, howitzers, grenade launchers and drone strikes. They are the avengers of the gruesome torture and the sexual debasement that often came with being detained by American troops.” Hedges concludes that “they are the final answer to the collective humiliation of an occupied country, the logical outcome of Shock and Awe, the Frankenstein monster stitched together from the body parts we left scattered on the ground.”³⁶

Mirroring these traits, the Islamist Imaginary emerges as a strangely familiar incarnation of absolute evil that takes on new forms, in response to the needs of empire. In the fall of 2014 the Imaginary briefly took center stage in yet another guise. As President Obama geared up for entry into the Syrian civil war, justification for the extension of the air war to Syria was needed. The president’s problem arose when U.S. intelligence reported that ISIS focused its violent energies on expansion in the Levant and did not pose a threat to the United States. Enter the Khorasan Group. Suddenly the name, previously completely unknown, was everywhere in the media. Unlike ISIS, this new embodiment of the Islamist Imaginary was poised to strike America with “sleeper cells” already at work and planning terror strikes. The president had his threat to the homeland, and the bombs began to rain down on both Syria and Iraq. Miraculously, or so it seemed to those unacquainted with the strange but persistent history of the Islamist Imaginary, the Khorasan Group simply vanished, even more rapidly than it appeared.³⁷

In all such incarnations, the Imaginary acts at once as prey and predator. As prey, it justifies massive American military spending, so crucial for the American military machine. All manner of surveillance at home and abroad is required to hunt and keep the Islamist Imaginary at bay. As predator, the Islamist Imaginary lies in wait around every corner of the globe and at our borders to make our fears real.

The tight embrace of prey and predator imparts to the Imaginary a stunning generative power. Any incident of violence or threatened violence against empire takes on exaggerated importance as the product of the predatory Islamist Imaginary. It is not that real threats do not exist; they do, but, framed by the Imaginary, they are systematically blown out of proportion. The Islamist Imaginary lurks behind them all. Against such an outsized predator, all manner of retaliatory actions are justified. Those punishing actions, which include invasions, occupations, and drone attacks, in turn inspire reprisals. They help immeasurably to populate the violent networks of extremists who challenge the imperial presence and the threat to Islam it is judged to pose. The excesses of empire in this way provide the primary recruitment agency for the most violent and extreme of the anti-imperialist militants.

These real-world militants do make the imagined real, although never on the scale projected. In turn, the Islamist Imaginary continues to provide the most compelling justification for empire and the most useful screen for its misdeeds. Even the terrible cruelties and criminalities of empire pale before the absolute evil of the Islamist Imaginary. The violence of empire is always purely defensive and always fully justified. The death of half-a-million children is a price worth paying in wars with an illusion. Entire cities must be demolished to be saved. An Afghan wedding party, massacred by a drone strike, just might have been a band of terrorists.

The Islamist Imaginary and the intense fears it evokes, unconstrained by reason or logic and quite unrelated to facts on the ground, are now more important to empire than ever before. Ours is an age when the American assertion of global hegemony relies on an empire of roughly a thousand bases that dot the globe. From these bases, terrible new technologies of war, symbolized by the pilotless drones, enable both surveillance and the projection of deadly and often indiscriminate violence to all corners of the globe. Astronomical American military budgets that routinely surpass the next ten highest country defense budgets combined must be justified. We should expect that the Islam imagined by empire will be with us for some time to come, haunting, among other things, our graduation ceremonies. Americans, especially young Americans whose futures have been mortgaged to the military–industrial–congressional complex, must be told on all such occasions just how dangerous the Islamist Imaginary has made their world.