Christopher Phillips: The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

 

From the jihadi organizations Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, Middle-East politics has seen struggles over regimes, state forms, and geopolitics for more than a century. Syria’s civil war has combined all of these kinds of conflict in one cauldron. Civil wars are often the worst kind, as our own civil war demonstrated, inflicting more deaths on Americans that World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. In Syria, estimates are that as of the beginning of 2017, 470,000 had been killed, approximately five million exiled, and nearly seven million displaced within their country—a nation of 21 million before the war began. As I write this review in July 2017, no respite from this suffering can be seen, or anticipated.

The ancient Greeks called the Assyrians the Syrioi, and the name became attached to their place, although they were neither the first nor the last to occupy it. The long list of its conquerors comprises most of the nations of the Bible: Amorites, Hittites, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Arameans, Egyptians, Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans—all have ruled it. The Israelites got as far as the port city of Tyre, now in Lebanon. Most famously for us, Saul of Tarsus met God on the road to Damascus, regaining his sight when he finally arrived there. Damascus has been called the oldest inhabited city in the world, with its origins in ‘pre-history’: its violent past and present suggest that human beings progress technologically but not so much morally or politically. Saul’s new-found inner light found some who attended to it, but not enough to bring peace to Syria. And even if he had found more converts there, men being what they are, they would have been just as likely to make war with one another over the legacy of the Prince of Peace.

The map tells why men always fight over Syria. Not only does it form the northwest corner of the Fertile Crescent, but its coastline along the Mediterranean afforded access to one of the richest trading networks in the ancient world. Syria has much to love, but love is exclusive and the jealousy of rival lovers fosters hatred. And because each new band of loving and hating conquerors has left a remnant in this place, Syria encompasses dozens of tribal, ethnic, and religious groups—a kaleidoscope of factions some centuries old, many inclined to tear at one another. We need therefore to think about what it takes humanly to govern such a place, to make peace in it.

To govern its factions, a community needs some overarching understanding of right; it also needs ruling institutions which derive their authority from that standard of right. This is to say that enemy factions need to find some common sphere of moral agreement. The United States of America (for example) has in it far more ethnic and religious groups than Syria does. It has lived in relative peace with itself for more than two centuries by acknowledging the laws of nature and of nature’s God as its overarching understanding of right. When too many Americans denied those laws, our one civil war resulted. This understanding has been instantiated in a set of ruling institutions approved by the American people—again, denied by a critical mass among us only that once. The American regime of federal and commercial republicanism was founded upon a source of right that does not require its citizens to adhere to any particular religious confession, or to belong to any particular ethnic group, in order to enjoy the rights of citizens.

Another, and historically more common solution to the problem of factionalism has been (and to some degree remains) monarchic empire. Paul the Apostle’s mission was much helped by his status as a subject within the Roman Empire, wherein Syria stood as an important province. A monarch-emperor stations himself above the erstwhile warring factions and rules them by keeping them divided but balanced among themselves. He takes care to redress any imbalances that arise, rather like a parent governs a set of unruly children. And like such a parent, he also takes care that his subjects do not find common cause to unite against him. And so, traditionally, such monarchs have allowed each ethnic and religious community within their empires a substantial degree of self-governance in exchange for tribute and for loyalty in war.

When in 640 A.D. Muslims arrived in Syria, they found a set of peoples that had found peace, when they found it, under imperial rule. The Muslim rulers changed nothing in that respect, and Damascus became the capital of the caliphate ruled by the Umayyid Dynasty, the largest empire in history to that point, spanning 5.8 million square miles from today’s Spain to today’s Pakistan. Enforcing the principle of dhimmitude or subordination, the caliph allowed the various religious groups to manage their own affairs insofar as these did not impinge upon tax collection and other activities reserved to the emperor. Among those subject to dhimmitude were the Alawite Muslims, a Shi’ite Muslim sect, founded in the 9th century. The Alawites are “Twelver” Muslims who especially revere Ali, whom they believe to have been the first of the Twelve Imams. Today, they number approximately three million, half of them in Syria, clustered along the coastline, but also in Lebanon (200,000), Turkey (500,000), and Germany (70,000).

Syria’s longest time of peace in recent centuries came under the empire of the Ottoman Turks, who expelled the Egyptian empire of the Mamluks in 1516 and stayed for the next four centuries, making Damascus part of the pilgrimage route to Mecca. France replaced the Ottomans in the wake of the First World War, withdrawing finally in 1946. While there, the French had allied with the minority Allawites, using them as a counter to the majority Sunnis. The borders of Syria set by France in the 1920s had no regard for pre-existing social-political patterns; emperors, whether monarchic or republican, want to rule by dividing, and national unity in their provinces is anathema to them. Although France made some efforts to bring its mission civilisitrice to Syria, a young army officer named Charles de Gaulle was unimpressed; “I don’t think we are making much of an impression here,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, in the early 1930s.

Thus, when finally independent, more than 70 years ago, Syria became a sovereign state without having a real nation—the peoples of the region never having existed as a single ethnic or religious entity. What kind of regime could hold it together, let alone bring Syrians some modicum of justice?

For a brief time Syrians attempted republicanism. That regime collapsed after it and its allies failed to destroy Israel in the 1948 war. In their ‘civilizing mission,’ French imperial rulers had proved better at training the Syrian military officers than at preparing Syrians for self-government. A series of military dictatorships followed, with eight successful coups between 1949 and 1970. After aligning with the Soviet bloc in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez Canal War, Syrians soon found themselves more and more at the mercy of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, which was funded and advised by Moscow. In neighboring Iraq, the Ba’ath Party was headed by Saddam Hussein; after another defeat by Israel in 1967, in which it lost the Golan Heights, Syrian was ripe for yet another strongman. The Assad family, long prominent among the Alawites, took charge of the Syrian Ba’athists and the government in 1970. Hafez al-Assad ruled until his death in 2000, providing some stability along with much tyranny. He was succeeded by his son, Bashar al-Assad, who continues to rule the Alawite ‘rump state’ to this day.

Syria as a nation-state reproduced (on a smaller scale) the sort of regime it had under imperialism—a monarchy—but without the advantages that imperial monarchs had enjoyed: military and economic power with resources drawn from beyond the borders of Syria itself. The Assads have attempted to rule like imperialists, taking the already-divided groups in the country and keep them both divided from one another and dependent upon the regime. This works, except when it doesn’t: the current civil war isn’t the first one. In the 1970s, thousands of Syrians died in a revolt organized by the Muslim Brotherhood, the international Sunni Islamist organization that now rules in Turkey and also, briefly, in Egypt. In 1982, Hafez al-Assad had 10,000 of them slaughtered when they tried to seize the city of Hama.

Syria is Iraq in reverse. In Iraq, Ba’athists who were Sunni Muslims ruled a much larger group of Shi’as and Sunni Kurds. In Syria, Alawite Ba’athists who are Shi’a Muslims constitute a minority who rule a majority of Sunni Muslims, including Kurds (who are about 10% of the population), among numerous other ethnic groups. To complicate matters still further, unlike Iraq there is a substantial Christian population (also about 10%, before the war), themselves divided into several sects and ethnicities.

Whenever a state ruling such a heterogeneous population weakens, foreign states start circling, looking for advantage, and usually finding one or more factions eager for foreign backing. In the Middle East this is especially true in any conflict involving Sunnis and Shi’ites. Iran has close political and financial ties to the Syrian Alawites in addition to their other regional allies—Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. As U. S. troops began to withdraw from Iran’s eastern border, Afghanistan, and its western border, Iraq, the Iranian regime saw an opportunity to build an arc of influence throughout the region, encircling the great prizes of Mecca and the Arabian oil fields. This alarmed the region’s Sunnis, including the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, and the Turks—the latter two longtime imperial rulers of Syria. What is more, the Russians have retained their interests in the region and their ties to the Ba’athist Party, their Cold-War ally. Israel, with its concerns about Hezbollah, its interest in the Golan Heights, and its own worries about the Iranians, remains vigilant. Also regarding Iran, it is important to remark that the Iranian economy is heavily dependent upon Russia and China, to the point where it is regarded by those greater powers as a source of military support for their interests in dominating the ‘World Island’ described by Halford Mackinder, more than a hundred years ago.

The League of Nations and then the United Nations were designed to control such interventions by providing a non-imperial, even commercial-republican, force in world politics. In the Middle East, this mean that the defunct Ottoman Empire would be divided into colonies controlled by the remaining commercial-republic European empires, which were to prepare the populations there for independence as responsible sovereign states in the dreamed-of ‘world community.’ As we know, the League of Nations collapsed under the pressure of political regimes whose moral principles were antithetical to those of President Wilson and his colleagues at Versailles. The United Nations has survived the regime incoherence of its members, but can rarely summon the firepower to do much. The exception was the First Gulf War in the early 1990s, when the United States stood dominant in a world newly free of the Soviet empire. President George H. W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ didn’t survive that decade, and both Russia and China have blocked U.N. military action throughout the course of the Syrian war. Although a smaller, regional organization might in principle act where the U.N. cannot, and although the Arab League has sanctioned Syria, its main action has been to send weapons to its Sunna Arab allies in the country. Members states also have happily allowed their home-grown jihadis to join the fight; after all, if the jihadis win the Sunnis will be rid of a Shi’a regime, to the disadvantage of Iran, and if they lose many will not live to return to their homelands to disturb the peace there.

Had the Alawite/Ba’athist regime collapsed, we might have seen removal of many elements of Syrian military personnel and some equipment to their brother Shi’a in Lebanon, Hezbollah. That is, Shi’a power in the region would have regrouped, re-concentrated nearer Israel, but it would not have disappeared. Both Israel and Iran would have regarded their circumstances as diminished, a point that would not have improved the temper of either of these antagonists, although the Sunnis would have been content.

But that’s not what happened. The Alawites hung on, and the war took a different direction. Why?

After taking over from his late father, Bashar al-Assad did what new tyrants very often do: he moved to consolidate his power. He narrowed his support base to those he knew to be loyal. In doing so, he excluded some tribal networks he didn’t fully trust. Among those he didn’t fully trust were the Kurds, who have ties with Kurdish populations in Turkey and in Iraq, where they had achieved a substantial degree of self-government following the Second Gulf War. This exclusion understandably led to feelings of estrangement among these elements, making the newly-excluded groups more inclined to rebel, if the opportunity arose.

It did, thanks to several converging factors. Between 1950 and 2010, the Syrian population increased six-fold. This brought urbanization, as young men sought jobs. But they weren’t finding them. High unemployment of military-age men is seldom wholesome in a religious culture which valorizes war. A severe drought in the years 2006-10 brought discontent to the countryside, as well. Added to corruption and increased nepotism in the regime (part of that regime-purging strategy of Assad), along the perennially factitious character of Syrian society itself, a volatile mixture was ready for a spark. That was the 2011 Arab Spring, which raised hopes of overthrowing tyrannical regimes throughout Muslim North Africa and the Arab Peninsula.

Assad’s consolidation of power turned out to be the proverbial double-edged sword. It did give excluded groups incentive to abandon the regime. But it also made the core of that regime stronger. Tyrannies and oligarchies typically collapse when the ruling group or groups themselves start to factionalize, as seen in the Syria of the Fifties and Sixties, with its succession of coups. But Assad had (in Phillips’s word) ‘coup-proofed’ his regime. It was, in Lenin’s famous phrase when he purged the Bolshevik Party, “smaller but better”—better for the tyrant. Although some army units deserted early in the conflict, most stood firm, including the army officers and the Mukhabarat—the intelligence agencies which had been set up by the East German Stasi during the Cold War. The Stasi were the most feared (because the most ruthlessly efficient) of all the Soviet-era intelligence and security services, superior even to the KGB itself. No Syrian tyrant would want to be without an intelligence agency trained by them.

As a result, during the Arab Spring, as other, less tightly-controlled tyrannical state apparatuses in northern Africa collapsed, the Syrian regime survived. Once Russia’s premier, Vladimir Putin, decided to increase his support for the regime in 2014, three years after the war began, he could tip the balance of forces in favor of Assad’s survival.

Looking at the geopolitical dimension of the struggle, Phillips emphasizes that no one in or outside of the Middle East adequately understood Syria; no one had adequate ‘intel.’ Not the Americans or the Russians, but also not the Turks, the Saudis, or the Iranians. (Evidently also not the Assad regime or its enemies, for that matter, all of whom miscalculated when assessing the others). At the same time, ‘everyone’ wanted to jump in, perceiving risks if they did not and opportunities if they did. This ignorance was understandable. The tyrannical character of the Syrian regime made it hard to understand the conditions prevailing in the country; to this day, for example, estimates of the Alawite population are just that: estimates. Also, the foreign regimes had been preoccupied with other crises: the Chinese naval buildup in the South China Sea; the war in Iraq; a series of crises in Eastern Europe; the Iranian nuclear weapons program. The list was long, and no government has the ability to concentrate effectively on more than a few ‘issues’ at once.

Begin with the United States. The Obama Administration assumed that Syria would be another flower to bloom in the Arab Spring. This assumption prevailed especially among those called the ‘idealist’ members of the administration—human-rights advocates like UN delegate Samantha Powers and National Security Adviser Susan Rice, who argued with the ‘realists,’ including Defense Secretary William Gates and, yes, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who took a somewhat less optimistic view of any proposed American intervention. In Phillips’s account, only our ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, saw that Assad’s fall was not imminent, but his on-the-ground counsel was dismissed. Therefore, when Obama called for Assad’s ouster in August 2011, his administration embarked on a policy without a strategy. Just as the Bush Administration had intervened in Iraq in 2003 without a serious strategy for guiding the regime change it had begun, so the Obama Administration officials supposed that the political side of things would take care of themselves, and that the result would be democracy, or at least some more benevolent thing than Ba’athism. Phillips does praise Obama for rejecting any major military involvement, unlike Bush.

Meanwhile, almost all of the regional forces, from the Syrian rebel groups to the Qataris to the Turks to the Saudis, overestimated U. S. power in the region and also overestimated President Obama’s willingness to use it, once the 2012 elections were out of the way. They had been profoundly impressed by the Americans’ capacity to overthrow that other Ba’athist, Saddam Hussein, while cynically underestimated Obama’s reluctance to repeat such an action in Syria. When no intervention materialized, they charged Obama with ‘betrayal,’ even if they only thing he betrayed was their own wishful thinking.

Turning next to America’s regional allies, Saudi Arabia had viewed the U. S. intervention in Iraq as a setback. It had increased the power of the Shi’a in Iraq, and therefore the power of Iran in the region. Further, the Ba’athist Party is secular-socialist, whereas the Saudis are neither, and the Alawites are Shi’as; the two intertwined elements of the Assad regime are the enemies of the Saudi regime, in principle. When Assad’s regime seemed strong, in 200-10, the Saudis had sought détente with it. But when the civil war began they backed non-jihadi Sunni rebels, including the surviving remnant of the Muslim Brotherhood. In this, they sought to prevent yet another Iranian advance in the region.

On the northern border of Syria, Turkey was by now itself a Muslim Brotherhood regime, thus aligned with that section of the Syrian population and the interests of the Saudis. On the other hand, no Turkish-Saudi alliance will ever be strong and lasting, inasmuch as the Saudis recall the Ottomans’ 400-year rule over their territory. The post-Ottoman Turkish regime of Mustafa Kemal had been secularist and Western-oriented, but the Muslim Brotherhood regime under Erdogan wanted to be more ‘Muslim,’ and consequently to redirect its geopolitical attention to the Middle East. They also wanted to keep a tight clamp on the Syrian Kurds, given the restive Kurdish population in their own country, and further to oppose the jihadi elements on the Syrian battlefield, including al-Qaeda. But the Turks had the same disadvantage as the Western countries and Russia: very few diplomats or other ‘operatives’ spoke Arab, and they generally had little knowledge of the country. Although the Arab Spring had on balance improved Turkey’s position in the region by eliminating secularist regimes, Turkish ability to exploit that position was limited by the same assumption shared by the U. S.—namely, that Assad was about to go away.

The first foreign country to send substantial financial aid to the Syrian opposition groups was Qatar. It sent more aid in the first two years of the war than any other foreign country, and they also established a training base on their soil for the rebel soldiers to be trained by Americans, who have a military base there. Although very small, Qatar is also very rich, and its rulers are ambitious for regional influence. It has the advantage of being less factionalized than many of the other states in the region, so it can pursue coherent policies over a long period of time. Being a Sunni country which nonetheless has ties with Iran (they share a huge natural gas field), they try to maintain their independence from all other countries in the region—much to the displeasure of their fellow Gulf-state Sunnis. Because Saudi Arabia eventually eclipsed them as the principal Sunni backer of the rebels, and because the Saudis take strong exception to Qatar’s dealings with the Iranians, the Syrian opposition groups worry that they will be whipsawed between the two. With two different countries backing different rebel groups, fighting among the rebels—already damaging—may intensify.

The two main foreign countries backing the Assad regime are Iran and Russia. Iran’s alliance with Hezbollah in Lebanon links them to the most effective Arab fighting force in the region. Iran sends money and weapons; Hezbollah fights. In the five years prior to the war, Syrian-Iranian trade grew four times. That level of economic benefit may never return, but they will continue to make serious sacrifices to keep Assad afloat, if only for sectarian and geopolitical reasons. Also, Syria was the conduit for Iranian supplies to Hezbollah, which aims at destroying Israel and getting rid of American and other Western powers in the Middle East—prime Iranian goals. In 2013-14, Phillips reports, the top Iranian military adviser, Hussein Suleiman of the Republican Guards, reorganized Syrian army forces, which he regarded as substandard. This accounts in part for the army’s improved battlefield performance in the last couple of years.

Getting the Western powers out of the Middle East would make Mr. Putin happy, as well. You will recall that the first term of the Obama Administration, through 2012, was the period of the attempted ‘reset’ of U. S.-Russian relations. The Russians adroitly took advantage of such wishful thinking, stringing the Americans along with empty negotiations over Assad’s removal, something they never intended to agree to.

Putin took the Arab Spring to be an Islamist, not a nationalist or democratic, phenomenon. As such, he disliked it, thinking of the 14% of the Russian population that is Muslim. He also rejected regime change as a policy, considering it impractical in the Middle East and potentially threatening to his own regime. Putin also saw that Assad and the Alawites were more unified than any other major group in Syria, whereas the opposition groups were not only torn by personal rivalries but lacking in political experience. Assad’s problem wasn’t that the Alawites were disunited in principle but that in ‘coup-proofing’ his government he had split up the military and security forces into several pieces, so as to prevent them from getting together to overthrow him. Nonetheless, Putin calculated that Assad was the better bet than any other group or combination of groups in the country; even in the worst case, the Alawites would likely retain control of the coast, where the Russians have a small but useful naval station. Finally, Putin correctly saw that the Western alliance was irresolute; unlike the Arabs, he took Obama’s reluctance to engage there to be real. He and the Iranian mullahs wanted victory more intensely.

Among the opposition groups themselves, the jihadis were the most effective: more committed, better trained, less easy to buy off. As mentioned various foreign countries backed different groups, exacerbating the already-existing factionalism among them. ISIS (Islamic State in Syria) began as an extension of ISIL (the Iraqi-based Islamic State in the Levant), itself formerly called AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq). The group split from al-Qaeda over a strategic dispute. The late Osama bin Laden had argued that modern states are much too powerful to permit the founding of a new caliphate. The modern states first need to be critically weakened and discouraged by a relentless campaign of terrorism and guerilla warfare. Islamic State leaders disagreed, claiming that the Iraqi state was sufficiently weak to enable the founding of the caliphate, which they proceeded to do with some initial success. Civil-war-torn Syria looked like another excellent opportunity for expanding the caliphate into another chaotic landscape.

As a result of all these forces and events, by summer 2014 the war was stalemated. It was a year later, in summer 2015, that Putin ordered a substantial Russian troop buildup in Syria, effectively mimicking the U. S. ‘surge’ in Iraq, a few years earlier. The Russian ‘surge’ successfully reinforced Assad’s regime, blocking any possibility of American-backed regime change while discouraging jihadist forces in Russia and boosting Russia’s drive for equal status with the United States (which he had signaled by his 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Not incidentally, he could now use his enhanced position in Syria as a bargaining chip with the West in Eastern Europe.

What does the future look like?

First, with the decline of ISIS, the al-Qaeda strategy stands as vindicated. The terror-and-guerilla-warfare approach will continue, not the caliphate strategy.

Second, the destruction of civil society gives young men nothing much to do but fight. According to the geopolitical analyst David Goldman, who writes under the pseudonym of “Spengler,” in intractable conflicts like the one in Syria, this typically continues until about 30% of the military-age men in the society are dead.

Third, Syria as we knew it may be gone, permanently. There is no single, legitimate authority there, none visible on the horizon, and hence no security. This means that the state will likely break up, with new borders. One estimate claims that to reconstitute the old Syria a force of 450,000 security personnel, probably under the prolonged supervision of about 150,000 foreigners, would be needed. That doesn’t seem likely. Woodrow Wilson had envisioned the League of Nations as enforcing peace with a military entity drawn from many nations representing “the major force of mankind.” The successor to the League, the UN, can’t muster that kind of force any more than the League did. Wilson supposed that the League would work because humanity had progressed, learning the horrifying lessons of the Great War. Evidently not. The several Muslim states and paramilitary organizations have supposed that Allah would side with them, reuniting the region. That hasn’t happened, either.

 

Fourth Lecture delivered at Lifelong Learning Seminar, “Islam and the West,” Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan.

 

No consideration of Islam and modern politics would be complete without attention to Iran and its regime, called by its founders an “Islamic republic.” It is more accurately described as an Islamic aristocracy or Islamic oligarchy, with an extremely powerful Islamic executive.

Larger than all the Western European countries combined, Iran’s population of some 78 million dwarfs that of its Arab rivals, including Saudi Arabia (30 million) and Iraq (32 million, if it survives as one country). Neighboring Afghanistan has 30 million. Iran is a natural fortress, rather like a giant Salt Lake City, with mountain ranges on all sides except along the border with Iraq, which accounts for the many wars fought in that area, and also for the Shi’ism of the population there. Whether they have called themselves Iranians or Persians, rulers have always wanted to dominate that section of what is now Iraq.

The population lives not in the interior, which consists mostly of uninhabitable marshes, but in those natural ramparts, the mountains. Iran has been conquered only once, and it took the Mongols to do it. Iran is fundamentally a land power, but the navy it has built wields disproportionate strength because Iran sits next to a key geopolitical and geo-economic chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz.

Economically, despite its substantial oil reserves, Iran is a poor country per capita because it lacks refining capacity. The last shah, Reza Pahlavi, cultivated Western oil refining firms, but the 1979 revolution detested such influences, and despised the kind of deal the enemy Saudis had worked out in the 1930s. As a result, the Islamic Republic has less money with which to pacify the many ethno-religious groups that live in the country, which is only about 55-to-60 percent Persian, and includes many Sunnis and even some non-Muslim sects, including Zoroastrians.

As a result, Iran’s rulers worry not about invasion but about subversion, about foreigners who stir up restive minorities. To guard against this, they deploy strict religious controls, a powerful security apparatus, intermediate-range missiles, and, perhaps some day, nuclear warheads. The United States being the only formidable foreign threat at this time, their policy aims at getting the Americans out of the Middle East.

It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that the sons of the Iranian royal and aristocratic families began attending to universities in Europe—almost always in Paris, which at the time laid claim to intellectual preeminence among the cities of the West. The political liberalism they brought back to their home country was perforce French republicanism of the sort seen in the Third Republic, not for example the republicanism of Britain or the United States. French republicanism had a strong anti-clerical and indeed anti-religious edge. (To put it another way, Anglo-American liberalism was Lockean; French liberalism was Voltairean, with a dash of Rousseau for piquancy). Young Persians often returned to their country thinking of Islam the way French intellectuals thought about the Catholic Church. Although some Islamic clerics attempted to integrate European liberalism with Islam (as had some French Catholics, prior to the French Revolution), most recognized an enemy when they saw one.

What interested the reigning monarch, Nasir al Din, was Western technology—specifically, military technology. The features of the modern West that made technological progress possible—property law, experimental science—did not seem very interesting to him. In an attempt to accelerate his country’s modernization, the Shah sold rights to minerals, railway lines, and banking to Europeans. Not only the clerics opposed this, but also the merchants, who wanted economic protection, and secularized young intellectuals, who had adopted the European ideology of nationalism.

This set up the factions seen in Iran to this day. Clerics opposed foreign modernism as a new form of infidelism. Overmatched by Western capital, merchants opposed modernism for business reasons. Secular intellectuals opposed one piece of the modern project—international capitalism—in the name of another piece of it—politically liberal nationalism. These groups could unite both against foreigners and the shah. But if they won, they could not stay united, having fundamental, principled disagreements with one another. Of the three groups, only the clerics had the mass of peasants on their side, and in the long run that proved decisive.

The first revolution on these terms came between 1905 and 1911, at the same time the Ottoman Empire faced similar convulsions. That is, both Sunni Islam and Shia Islam suffered the same sort of crisis at the same time. But in Iran, as we’ll see, no one of the stature of Mustafa Kemal would emerge.

The Constitutional Revolution of 1905 saw the establishment of a parliament or majlis. This represented a victory for the secular intellectuals. But they had no base of support among the Iranian people as a whole, who continued to follow the clerics. Furthermore, like so many French intellectuals of the 1790s, the Iranian secularists had more experience in writing and speaking than they had in governing. Thus the same situation that has prevailed in many Muslim countries in this century prevailed then: secular liberals supported republicanism, but the anti-liberal clerics commanded more votes. In Iran’s case, however, the clergy itself was factionalized between apolitical quietists called “Twelvers,” who told their followers to avoid politics and wait for the return of the Twelfth Imam, and the followers of the Ayatollah Nuri, who rejected constitutional republicanism and advocated a regime based on Shar’ia.

The British and Russian empires backed the accession of a new shah, Muhammad Ali, who came to power in 1908. In response to the coup, the clerics realigned themselves with the Constitutionalists (as the republicans were called), making the Europeans, ever calculating the balance of forces within the country desert the shah and back the Constitutionalists. Muhammad Ali fled and the parliament chose his twelve-year-old son to reign as a figurehead. This republican regime lasted until 1911, wracked immediately by the same factionalism which had contributed to the ruin of the previous republican regime. Now the British and the Russians tilted toward the monarchy. Unlike most of the other countries in the Middle East, Iranians were never conquered by European empires, but they were whipsawed by them.

Iran endured the First World War in the resulting condition of political weakness and confusion. Oil had been discovered in some of its provinces, but British oil interests simply bypassed the central government, such as it was, to cut deals for drilling rights with local tribes. Needless to say, little in the way of revenues from oil got as far as Tehran. By 1921, however, the Soviet Union was stirring the Iranian pot. The Bolshevik regime declared the Soviet Republic of Gilan on the Iranian side of the Caspian Sea. The British sought to drive them out by demanding control of a nearby division of the Iranian army. But an ambitious mid-lever named Reza Khan acted before the shah could agree, marching his troops toward Tehran and extracting the shah’s blessing for command of the division. He then turned around, crushed the Gilan Bolsheviks and went on to defeat rebellions in Azerbaijan and Khorasan, Iran’s richest provinces. He finally brought the rebellious Kurds to heel. By 1923 he had reunited all but one sheikdom in Iran.

Reza Khan briefly considered imitating Mustafa Kemal’s republican founding, but preferred monarchy. He also listened to the clerics, who called him to Qom and explained forcefully that they would have no part of republicanism. They offered a deal. They would back Reza Khan as the new shah in exchange for his rejection of republicanism and his endorsement of Shiism. This was essentially a Shi’a version of the alliance between the Wahhabis and the House of Saud. Reza Khan agreed, and became the new shah in 1925.

With this, secular nationalism in Iran passed from republicanism to monarchy, as Reza Khan gave lip service to Islam while embarking on a campaign of enforced modernization. In his first ten years he organized a standing army of 100,000 and a 90,000-strong modern bureaucracy. He attacked the ancient social structures of the tribes by conscripting the youths into his army and relocating their chiefs to Tehran. Whole tribes were resettled, often on lands that could not be cultivated, resulting in mass deaths. As for the aristocrats, Reza Khan (now Reza Shah) stripped them of lands and titles, while redistributing their lands not to the peasants but, in large measure, to himself. He renamed himself ‘Pahlavi’ (which means ‘Persian’), intending to found a new royal dynasty drawing its authority from nationalism and, he hoped, clerical compliance.

Attempting to overcome and co-opt clerical authority, he harkened to the glories of ancient Persia. Islam, he rightly proclaimed, had come not from the Persians but from the Arabs, Indeed, the term ‘Persian’ itself had been imposed upon the Iranians by the Greeks, and so the country should be renamed ‘Iran,’ a move he made in 1935, when he was allied with Nazi Germany. Iconography recalling Zorastrianism and Cyrus the Great began to appear throughout the country, but of course entirely at the service of modernization. He required every mullah to serve two years active duty in the national army, outlawed the veil, and extended secular education to women because “one-half of the country’s working force has been idle.” He attempted to make Shiite Islam a civil religion by putting the clerics on the state payroll and claiming most of the income of the shrines for the state. The clerics took care to maintain their financial support outside the state grid, retaining a degree of independence that proved crucial to their survival and, eventually, their revenge.

Resisting British interest, the Shah brought technicians from Germany, Italy, France, and other Europeans countries into Iran for assistance in his various development projects. What he did not foresee was the Second World War. Britain regarded the German technicians in Iran as spies intending to sabotage British-owned oil fields and demanded that the Germans be expelled. The Shah refused. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Britain, in collaboration with its newfound Bolshevik ally, invaded Iran, deposed the shah, replaced him with his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and took control of Iran’s railroad network, the key link between the Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf. Both powers agreed to withdraw their troops within six months of the war’s end, a commitment reaffirmed at the Tehran Conference, which included the United States as well as the British and Soviet governments. The Soviets dragged their feet, but eventually did leave in May 1946.

During the war, under the hesitant reign of the young shah, Iranian politics liberalized somewhat, with the parliament gaining some authority. The Soviets financed an Iranian communist party, the Tudeh, which organized quickly. By May Day 1946, the Tudeh could mobilize 80,000 marchers in Tehran. Like the young Persian intellectuals of the turn of the century, however, the communists’ secularism offended the clerics and therefore never sank roots in the countryside, where the clerics prevented that. In this, Iran differed from Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cuba, where the small proletarian communist parties received indispensable support from the peasants.

Frustrated by this lack of popular support, in 1946 the Tudeh made the mistake of attempting to take a short-cut to power; they tried to assassinate the Shah. He survived, and followed up by forging an anti-communist alliance with military and clerical factions. As the United States confronted the Soviet Union in the Cold War, it moved to strengthen the shah. U. S. Army Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, earlier the head of the New Jersey State Police during the Lindbergh baby kidnapping investigation, organized a national police force in Iran, fortifying the still-shaky modern Iranian state.

But the shah faced not so much a military or policing problem as a civil/political problem. The parliament had assumed significant power during the war. Nationalistic as ever, the parliamentarians resented the continued presence of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. For some years, the move to nationalize the oil companies stalled, but in March 1951 the parliament installed Mohammad Mosaddeqq as prime minister.

Mosadeqq was 69 years old, an old enemy of the Pahlavis. He had started in politics in 1914 as a provincial governor under the Qajar dynasty, and gained election to parliament in 1923. He had resigned after Reza Khan became the new shah, only returning to parliament in 1944 as a member of the National Front Party, whose platform called for the expulsion of foreigners. After becoming prime minister, Mosaddeq enforced legislation to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Unamused, the British blockaded the Persian Gulf. Additionally, as Mosaddeq had not quite grasped, Iran had no experts in either the oil extracting or oil financing businesses, which boded ill for nationalization. Nonetheless, the ensuing economic hardships only increased Mosaddeq’s popularity, and he requested emergency military powers from the shah. These the distrustful shah refused, and Mosaddeq resigned. When the new prime minister announced a return to the bargaining table with the British, nationalist, communist, and radical Muslim protestors filled the streets, prompting the shah to bring Mosaddeq back and granting him the military powers he had requested. This led to another alliance of convenience between the republics and the clerics, with the communists adding even more volatility to the mixture. Mosaddeq proceeded with the nationalization of the oil industry and also collectivized agriculture.

He then made what proved a politically fatal error. Seeking to bring the military further under his control, he fired officers who had been loyal to the shah. The disaffected officers approached the British and the Americans with plans to overthrow Mosaddeq. The United States envoy, Vernon Walters, had become increasingly out of patience with Mosaddeq, who inclined to an emotional rhetoric in public and private which played better with Iranians than it did with the business-is-business sensibilities cultivated in the American regime. Mosaddeq’s increasingly close alliance with the Tudeh Party, the possibilities of Iranian overtures to the Soviet Union, and his rash breakoff of diplomatic relations with Great Britain finally persuaded President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Churchill to remove him in 1953.

Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., Teddy’s grandson, ran the CIA’s Near East and Africa division. Roosevelt directed Operation Ajax, a joint CIA-British effort to get rid of Mosaddeq. He first tried to get the shah to dismiss Mosaddeqq from office, as he was constitutionally empowered to do. The shah refused. The CIA turned to fomenting distrust between the communist and Shiite elements of Mosaddeq’s political base. Increasingly suspicious, Mosaddeq called for a national referendum to dissolve parliament, then rigged the vote to win a nearly 100% approval for the move. This accomplished little, other than to give the American- and British-funded opposition newspapers a major talking point. Communists, clerics, and merchants all abandoned the coalition. This left the communists as the single most powerful organized political faction in Iran, although the main social power remained in the hands of the clerics, headed by the Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani. Kashani turned against Mosaddeq when Mosadeqq refused to implement government under sharia law. Kashani also feared the increasing power of the Soviet-backed Tudeh Party.

He tried to persuade the shah to leave the country, and the shah responded by firing him. When Mosaddeq refused and prepared to fight, the shah (by no means the military man his father had been) got out of the country. Civil war broke out. Backed financially by the CIA and British MI6, pro-shah military forces ousted Mosadeqq in August 1953. After the shah’s return, he negotiated an agreement with foreign oil companies in 1954. The shah and the clerics agreed to implement a two-year campaign to crush the Iranian communists, and the Ayatollah Kashani’s successor, Ayatollah Seyyed Hossein Borujerdi, remained in alliance with the Shah until the Ayatollah’s death in 1961. For this brief period, the shah and the clerics reconstituted something of the relationship the Persian shahs and clerics had forged during the centuries of the empire.

The alliance could not survive the ayatollah’s death because the shah persisted in the Pahlavi dynasty’s decades-long modernizing project. He rested his power squarely on the military, the police, and his internal intelligence organization, SAVAK. This tendency towards institutions supportive of absolutist monarchy or even tyranny alarmed the Kennedy administration, which pressured him to implement economic and social reforms in 1963. These proved cosmetic in most cases. Called, grandly, the White Revolution (in contrast to the black garb of the clerics), the movement was abandoned after President Kennedy’s murder, when the Johnson administration turned its attentions to southeast Asia.

Nonetheless, the White Revolution had consequences. Its basic strategy was a renewal of his father’s efforts to remove the economic foundations of both the landed aristocrats and the clerics by redistributing land. It is crucial to see that the leading clerics came from the aristocratic class—that is, the shah’s move would have put the axe to both the secular and religious enemies of the monarchic regime and the modern state at the same time. Further, the shah’s plan differed from his father’s plan in being much more populist; the peasants who worked the land—some 75% of the population—would actually get the land, not the shah. At the same time, because the shah had initiated the plan, he would prevent the communists from exploiting the destruction of the country-based aristocrats, as they had done in so many places earlier in the century. If the plan had worked, it would have been another example of a major strategy of modern state-builders in Europe and elsewhere: to centralize the government, ally with ‘the many’ against ‘the few’ who stand between yourself and ‘the many.’ Then replace the old regime’s political structures by extending your own, modern-statist bureaucratic structures, military and civilian.

The clerics divided between those who preferred to remain quiet and those who did not—exactly the division seen in the 1905-1911 period. The shah did his best to widen this division in a speech at Qom, the informal capital of Iranian Shiism, claiming that only supporters of land reform were truly “our religious leaders.” By ratcheting up the pressure on the clerics who had enjoyed a considerable measure of authority in Iranian civil society, the shah pushed modernization in their faces. To use the jargon of political sociologists, he wanted to ‘cage’ them. Generally speaking, when people are ‘caged’ by the modern state they act more and more like the citizens of the ancient ‘city-states’: they have incentive to start working hard to take control of the cage. In other words, by ‘caging’ the clerics, the shah helped to turn them more decisively toward Islamism, a re-politicized Islam which would attempt to take over the modern state or, alternatively, to break it and get rid of it.

Here is where the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini comes in. Born in 1902 to a middle-class family claiming descent from Mohammad, Khomeini followed the example of many of the men in his line, becoming a mullah in 1925, when Reza Khan founded his dynasty. A firm anti-modernist, he had followed both the activist Ayatollah Kashani and the quietist Ayatollah Borujerdi in the postwar years. But after Borujerdi’s death he emerged as an opponent of the regime, condemning the White Revolution as anti-Islamic. A year later, he denounced Iran’s Status of Forces Agreement with the U. S. military, which he regarded as a compromise of Iranian sovereignty. For his pains, the Ayatollah was exiled to Baghdad.

What was the substance of the Islamist political stance Khomeini developed?

Unlike many other prominent Islamists, Khomeini was a respected if controversial cleric, not a mere intellectual or political organizer. He had extensive formal training in Islamic theology, and enjoyed the authority of a learned man in a country where learning was thought to bring a man closer to God, and therefore to the highest authority. He intended to replace the modern state with something else, and he outlines what that is in his book, Islam and Revolution. There, Khomeini condemns the imperialists, notably the Americans who supported the shah. The Americans’ materialism makes them “even more satanic” than Jews. Against them stands Islam, a militant and revolutionary religion, now traduced by servile false Muslims who follow the imperialists by attempting to separate politics from religion—making the mosque into a mere church. Apostate clerics serve as mere tools of the imperialists, for whom an apolitical misreading of Islam is all-too-useful, as it renders their subjects docile. The imperialists, however, misread even their own nominal religion. Jesus could never have told His disciples to “turn the other cheek,” for example. Imperialists want people to believe such things, not prophets.

To those who fear the technological power of the imperialists, Khomeini replies, “Let them go all the way to Mars or beyond the Milky Way; they will still be deprived of true happiness, moral virtue, and spiritual advancement, and be unable to solve their social problems.” Technology itself is good, but imperialists use it only to drag civilization into “barbarism.” Barbarism results from what the West calls liberalism. “Government that do not base themselves on divine law conceive of justice only in the natural realm”—natural right. “You will find them concerned only with the prevention of disorder and not with the moral refinement of the people. Whatever a person does in his own home is of no importance, so long as he causes no disorder in the street…. Divine governments, however, set themselves the task of making man into what he should be. In his unredeemed state, man is like an animal, even worse than other animals…. And if a person were to conquer the entire globe, he would begin planning the conquest of the moon or Mars. Men’s passions and covetousness, then, are unlimited, and it was in order to limit men, to tame them, that the prophets were sent.”

Thus Khomeini sees several of the key elements of the modern project. He sees, and rejects, the modern attempt to conquer nature with a technologized science. He imputes to the conquest of nature exactly what Machiavelli and Francis Bacon had intended: the liberation of the human desire for acquisition from religious and rational restraints. He also sees and rejects the attempt to limit Machiavellianism with natural justice or natural right. To reduce government to the securing of natural rights is to give up the most important function of government, namely, to hold human souls to higher standards than those of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Political liberalism forgets or denies that ‘statecraft’ must be ‘soulcraft.’

How, then, to get rid of the modern project, both its statism and the modern liberalism that seeks both to establish and limit the state the modern project established? Every Muslim should be “a walking embodiment” of the divine law. Such men will eliminate the problem of faction—the problem the American founders addressed by founding an extended, commercial republic—as they “join together like the fingers of one hand.” This unity notwithstanding, after a law is established, it is necessary also to create an “executive power”; Muslims need a leader, an Imam, because men never “become angels”—Khomeini’s language closely parallels that of Publius, here. The leader is the most perfect embodiment of the divine law, and he becomes the leader through the consensus of other clerics, who can be depended upon to recognize such moral excellence. The leader rules a constitutional government whose constitution consists (as it does in Wahhabi-Sunni Saudi Arabia) of the Koran and the sayings of Muhammad, the Hadiths. “Islamic government may be defined as the rule of divine law over men.” Its difference from all other governments is its lack of human legislators. God alone is sovereign in the Islamic Republic. In practice, this means that the clerics are the sovereigns on earth.

Insofar as all individuals in the country consent to the sharia, the problem of faction that concerns Publius and all thoughtful writers on politics simply disappears, in principle. But given the non-angelic character even of Muslims, the law needs an enforcer. Faction will not be solved the American way, by the encouragement of liberty under a government that merely secures natural rights, but by the exercise of executive power by one virtuous man, selected by a ruling body of lesser but still virtuous men. Such a selection obviates the need for a wider election, which would involve giving people the executive, the leader, they want—satisfying mere desires, rather than God.

The Imam needs no bureaucracy—no “file-keeping and paper-shuffling.” The whole modern, statist apparatus will disappear. The Imam needs only judges. “When the judicial methods of Islam were applied, the sharia judge in each town, assisted only by two bailiffs and with only a pen and an inkpot at his disposal, would swiftly resolve disputes among people.” Such judges obviate the need for central bureaucracy and maintain local government without local legislation, as in the town meetings Tocqueville had admired in New England. Unlike those townships, in Muslim society the people must not rule. They are children with respect to their local judges and the nation’s Imam, who are the “trustees of the Prophet.”

Whereas the American founders defined tyranny as the consolidation of executive, legislative, and judicial power in one set of hands, and whereas Aristotle defines tyranny as monarchy in the service of the selfish interest of the monarch, Khomeini defines it as rebellion against God in the form of self-legislation, human-all-too-human legislation. The consolidation of executive and judicial power is not only in-tyrannical but just, as it gives action to law, requiring no separation of powers that would only pervert the law and excuse perverse or unlawful actions.

To oppose the tyranny of the imperialists and their puppet-shah, Khomeini writes, “We must create our own apparatus to refute whatever lies they issue.” Propagation of correct ideas and instruction “are our two most important fundamental activities,” activities which will “pave the way in society for the implementation of Islamic law and the establishment of Islamic institutions.” Muslims must sever relations with existing government agencies; refuse to cooperate with those agencies; refuse even to appear to aid them; and establish new judicial, financial, economic, cultural, and political institutions that will take over when the secular monarchy collapses. Thus Khomeini sees exactly what Gandhi had seen in India, and what Vaclav Havel would later see in Czechoslovakia: he sees that his followers can overthrow the modern state, get out from under a modern empire, by constructing their own independent, parallel set of institutions on the level of civil society, institutions that will undermine the official state offices and replace them. New rulers and new offices, animated by an Islamic rather than a modernist ethos and all developed in this time of “incubation,” will then effect regime change. Even more ambitiously, they will change the kind of political partnership which is emblematic of the modern world; they will eliminate the centralized state itself, replacing it with the Shi’ite version of the Islamic ummah or body of believers united under the sharia. The City of God will replace the City of Man.

Once established, this new regime and new political partnership will not survive if isolated and encircled by its enemies. “We must strive to export our Revolution throughout the world.” After the shah’s overthrow and the founding of the Islamic Republic, Khomeini exhorted Iranian youth to “defend your dignity and honor” with “the Koran in one hand and a gun in the other.” The “oppressed,” worldwide, “will inherit the earth and build the government of God.” It will do so in opposition to America, “the number one enemy of the deprived and oppressed people of the world,” a country whose actions are coordinated by “international Zionism.” “Iran,” he tells Iranians, “is a country effectively at war with America.”

In its rivalry with Iran, America will speak of the alleged virtues of democracy. But the Islamic Republic must never be a democratic republic. “To juxtapose ‘democratic’ and ‘Islam’ is an insult to Islam,” which is “superior to all forms of democracy.” At best, democracy might limit itself by respecting natural right. Khomeini insists that all persons must limit themselves by divine right, for which the only earthly source is the Koran and the sayings of Mohammad. In a larger sense, then, Khomeini is right to say that Iran is effectively at war with America—with the idea of America. He therefore calls for a return to the old empire of Islam, against the empire of modernity and, more specifically, against the American empire of liberty. The American empire of liberty is really the tyranny of Zionism and, ultimately, of Satan.

Khomeini offers a comprehensive critique of modernity, including the modern state, and of the commercial republican regime the Americans founded as an antidote to the bad features of statism. This critique parallels other Islamist critiques, but adds to them a key strategic dimension: an appeal to oppressed classes in Iran and oppressed peoples worldwide. In adopting and Islamically adapting the language of ‘Third Worldism,’ the language deployed most famously by the Marxist writer Franz Fanon in his book The Wretched of the Earth, he spoke to the radically democratic social circumstances of modernity. He brought the authority of Islam to a young, sometimes Marxist-oriented constituency, those who had read Fanon, Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the other leftist polemicists fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s. Combining their rhetoric with his own, he speaks “in the name of the God of the disinherited.” In Latin America, leftist Catholic clerics did this, too, crafting the ‘Liberation Theology’ that came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. But precisely because Khomeini needed and wanted almost nothing from Marxist doctrine itself, his Islamism easily withstood the crackup of communism in the years 1989-91. Islamism seemed the ‘last man standing’ against the empire of modern liberalism, led by the United States.

The regime Khomeini founded consists of an 88-member Assembly of Experts—initially, mullahs who backed Khomeini—empowered to select and remove the Supreme Leader or Grand Ayatollah. The Assembly also disqualifies candidates for the presidency whom it deems Islamically unfit; once elected by the people, the President’s portfolio consists of domestic policy only. The Supreme Leader may remove the President, and he also controls foreign and military policy, including the elite Revolutionary Guard and the police/intelligence services. The Parliament, consisting of 290 members serving in four-year terms introduces laws intended to supplement the Koran/Constitution. A six-member Guardian Council, appointed by the Supreme Leader, determines who may run for Parliament and governs the elections themselves. This already gave the Supreme Leader a fair amount of supremacy. When Khomeini died in 1989, his successor, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, set to work enhancing that supremacy by placing persons loyal to him throughout the bureaucracy. In this, he departed from Khomeini’s generally anti-bureaucratic inclinations, preferring to build the bureaucracy, taking care to keep it well-Islamified and subordinate to himself. The Islamic Republic remains as Islamic as ever, but it has never been a genuine republic, and is probably less so today than ever.

Now in its fourth decade after the revolution, the Islamic Republic has problems, though not regime-ending problems. Economically, it has declined since the shah’s ouster. Its per capita income is one-third since then; its oil production about two-thirds of what it was. Inflation has remained high and, with two-thirds of its population under the age of thirty, economic stagnation has resulted in high unemployment. In response, the clerical regime has announced that it will adopt the Chinese model, meaning economic growth via state-owned enterprises in exchange for continued political authority. This strategy might work. Most Iranians have returned to the political quietism they exhibited during the many Persian monarchies. It may not work as well as it has worked in China because Iran has no access to the U. S. market and offers a far less inviting picture to foreign investment. But, as the founder, the Ayatollah Khomeini, told an aid a few years before his death, the revolution is not about the price of watermelons. Its legitimacy derives from Shi’ism and nationalism, not the gross national product.

 

Further readings in original sources:

Ruhollah Khomeini: Islam and Revolution. Hamid Algar translation. Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1970.

_____. “The Prophetic Tradition of Thaqalain.” Available on the Internet.

 

Secondary readings:

Sandra Mackey: The Iranians: Persia, Islam, and the Soul of a Nation. Harmondworth: Dutton, 1996.

Keddie, Nikki R.: Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

For an informative recent account of the regime, see Sanam Vakil and Hossein Rassam: “Iran’s Next Supreme Leader: The Islamic Republic After Khamenei.” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2017.

 

Third Lecture delivered at Hillsdale Lifelong Learning Seminar, “Islam and the West.” Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan.

 

The eminent scholar Bernard Lewis tells the story of an official of the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth century who marveled at an English gunboat in Istanbul harbor. The ship symbolized Europe’s new military technology and commercial reach. That official could not foresee the implications of the modern political-philosophic project that the ship represented. By the end of the First World War—itself the debacle of the aristocratic and monarchic regimes of Europe–foreign, modern empires dominated Islamic civilization.

In some respects the Wahhabi movement in 18th-century Saudi Arabia was the first modern Islamist movement, thus one of the earliest responses of ‘fundamentalist’ Islam to modernity. The life of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahab spanned most of that century, the century in which the modern project began to take hold noticeably, beyond Europe. He called his followers muwahhadun, meaning unitarians—believers in the oneness of God, as distinguished from polytheists (including those Trinitarians, the Christians). God, he taught, is not only unitary; God is also exclusive, meaning he must be addressed directly, with no physical, human, or even ideational intermediaries. A physical intermediary might be an amulet, a gravestone, or any sort of ornamentation on a mosque (minarets should be torn down, he taught). A human intermediary might be a saint or a holy man. An ideational intermediary would be a philosophy, or any other mental structure not seen in the Koran. In practice, Abd al-Wahab asserted that any dependency other than dependency upon God is punishable by the forfeit of property and life, on the grounds that any such dependency implies polytheism, blasphemy; your amulet, your holy man, your philosophy has become, in effect, another god to you.

Abd al-Wahab was a Koranic fundamentalist or literalist. Whereas much of traditional Islamic jurisprudence had been founded upon the consensus of believers, held to be the foundation of the Shar’a, Wahhabists regard the Koran itself as the only foundation of the Shar’ia. He based many of his teachings on the writings of the medieval jurist and warrior Ibn Tamiyya, who had excoriated idolatry, devotion to saints, and philosophy some three centuries earlier. Appropriately enough, Ibn Tamiyya’s writings were republished in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s. Abd al-Wahab particularly loathed the Sufi branch of Islam, which inclines toward peaceable mysticism, and might lead to innovation; his Islam insists on strict legalism. Wahhabism also requires asceticism—again, grounded on the ban on polytheism. Above all, Wahhabism requires jihad or armed struggle against the polytheists and infidels. Wahhabists tend to regard true Islam as preeminently Arabic, and this happens to comport well with one aspect of the modern world, the nationalism that democratization and statism both foster.

As these teachings suggest, Abd al-Wahab, like the Prophet himself, and like Ibn Tamiyya, had the soul of the warrior. His movement has been compared to the more militant forms of 17th-century Protestantism. Although anti-modern in his doctrines, Abd al-Wahab had no compunction about the use of modern technology on the battlefield; he used firearms, not lances, in his many wars. In 1744 he allied with Muhammad ibn-Saud, the emir of a village near what is now the city of Riyadh. Ibn-Saud came from a distinguished family, as Abd al-Wahab did not, and family, then as now, counted for a lot in Arabia. For his part, Ibn-Saud needed Abd al-Wahab needed Abd al-Wahab for the warriors he brought with him, and of course benefited from the authority conferred by the Wahhabist religious method. To this day the Wahhabi-Saudi alliance forms the regime of Saudi Arabia, with the Koran as its constitution.

Declaring jihad against neighboring Arab tribes, the two men expanded their territory. Their successors captured Mecca in 1803—just as the United States and the Barbary monarchs went to war. This conquest attracted the unfavorable attention of the Ottoman Empire, home of the caliphate. The Ottomans sent Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman ruler of Egypt, to quell the movement. Ali expelled the Wahhabis from Mecca in 1812 and stayed in the region until 1819, conquering Riyadh itself. Defeated, the Wahhabi House of Saud nonetheless remained intact.

As the Ottoman Empire declined in the early 20th century, the Saudis saw their chance. The Wahhabi-Saudi alliance recaptured Riyadh in 1902, and they consolidated their power over local Bedouin tribes during the First World War. With the Ottomans out of the Arabian Peninsula after the war, the Saudis recaptured Mecca and Medina in the mid-1920s. True to their iconoclastic doctrines, Wahhabis smashed tombs of Muslim saints and imams throughout the peninsula. Europeans recognized the monarchic regime of Ibn Saud in the mid-twenties, but other Muslims did so more reluctantly—the last holdouts being the Egyptians, who waited until 1936. The other Muslims had reason for concern about Wahhabist control over the two most holy cities of Islamic civilization. The British backed the House of Saud, over the objections of Colonel T. E. Lawrence “of Arabia,” who advocated support of the Hashemite royal family, which today rules Jordan. More radical elements among the Wahhabis opposed the British/infidel presence, but were crushed in 1929 by the Saudis and the British. One might think of the radicals as Osama bin Laden’s precursors.

Ibn Saud formally proclaimed the Saudi Arabian Kingdom in 1932. One of the most unusual features of this monarchy is the line of succession he established. The throne passes not from father to son but from brother to brother. To this day, the Saudi king is a brother of Ibn Saud. Saudi Arabia was a modern, unitary state in its structure, but one dedicated in theory to the strictest Islam. While the figure of the armed prophet—Muhammad himself, as well as Abd al-Wahab—and the valorization of war do indeed square with Machiavellianism, the rest of Islam does not. Could Islam support a modern state?

The modern state needs substantial revenues. In 1933, Standard Oil of California entered into a contract with the new monarchy, and did discover oil there, a few years later. Just as Abd al-Wahab had availed himself of modern military technology as an instrument subordinate to the expansion of Islam, so the House of Saud would employ oil technology for the same purpose. The monarchs of 19th-century Germany and Austria had failed to meet the political challenges of modernity, but they had modernized their economies quite successfully. Among their main institutional innovations was the state-owned enterprise, typified by railways. Monarchs love state-owned revenue sources. Such enterprises radically decrease the need for tax revenues, thus decreasing the need for recognizing political demands for government by consent and representation—republicanism. The kinds of enterprises the German and Austrian regimes owned rather unfortunately required complex manufacturing and legislation. This meant that those monarchies became too complicated to remain truly monarchic. They became cumbersomely bureaucratic states; under the pressure of protracted war, they finally spun out of the control of their rulers.

Oil differs from many other sources of revenue. The technology needed to extract and refine it can be left to limited numbers of foreign infidels who can be isolated from the rest of society. Oil has been indispensable to the operations of the modern world, but its exploitation did not require the importation of any monarch-threatening infrastructures. State-owned oil revenues precluded the need for taxation and with it any economically-based call for popular political representation. The American republican slogan, “No taxation without representation,” can have little attraction to those who pay no taxes.

At the end of the Second World War, Saudi oil fields produced 21.3 million barrels annually. By 1975, they produced 2,852 million barrels annually. In that time, the enormous wealth generated by that production transformed Saudi society. Aristotle remarks that a regime may change if one part of the political partnership drastically increases in relative size and wealth to the other parts. How would the Saudi monarchy fare as the royal family enlarged and enriched themselves?

As early as the 1920s some Wahhabis grumbled that Ibn Saud had become too lax, taxing tobacco instead of banning it, allowing the use of telegraphs and other suspect devices. But Ibn Saud faced them down, by force and by law. He made the Koran the constitution of his kingdom, and his successors, if anything, toughened the laws they inherited from him—restricting the activities of women outside the household, for example, and persecuting Christians. But none of this fazed the new American president, Franklin Roosevelt, who made his move to Wareplace the British as Saudi Arabia’s top ally during the Second World War. Americans feared the return of the Great Depression after the war, and had rather disliked the British Empire since it had last proved useful—around the 1760 and the end of the French and Indian War. Just as the British had undermined the Ottomans in Arabia, so the Americans started to undermine the British, as chronicled by FDR’s son, Elliot Roosevelt, in his postwar memoir, As He Saw It. But we don’t need Elliot; we have, for example, the President’s toast to the king in September 1943. “In the future we should seek to know each other better,” he suggested, turning on his celebrated charm. “We have much in common. We both love liberty—both Nations” he continued, in a resounding slap at British imperialism. “I think we all know that the King is a very wonderful person. I was reading this afternoon a little magazine, and it was all about the King; and there was one little paragraph at the end that I liked a lot—all of it goes along with my own philosophy. ‘Ibn Saud’s most engaging quality is a kingly belief in eventual rightness. It did not surprise him greatly when Allah, who sent Arabia its ancient rains, provided also its new oil. Nor will it surprise him greatly if God presently provides also not merely victory [in the war] but the bright and honest world that should go along with it.'” The end of imperialism, the advent of the United Nations: yes, surely, FDR and Ibn Saud were very nearly soul-mates, although they might have differed somewhat on the principles under which nations ought to united. A detail left to another day.

The Wahhabist clerics surely had their own ideas on that matter. In 1964, King Faisal came to power, hoping to modernize the country. But in that same decade, his country saw an influx of Islamist activists and militants who had been exiled from the secularized despotisms of Nasser’s Egypt, Assad’s Syria, and Hussein’s Iraq—regimes then allied with Moscow. These were true Islamists, often affiliated with the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood. The interaction of these activists with the Wahhabists led to the radicalization of many of the latter, especially the younger generation. Faisal was himself assassinated by one of his young cousins. As a result of this ferment, the Saud dynasty needed to strengthen its ‘Islamic legitimacy,’ and for this it could turn to no other group than the clerics, which Faisal’s successor, King Khalid, quickly did.

The dynasty’s need only intensified a decade later, when neighboring Iran came under the rule of fundamentalist Shi’a clerics, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein attacked Iran. Acceding to clerical demands, they gave the clerics thoroughgoing control over education and (perhaps in response to the ‘Second Wave’ of feminism in the West, tightened control over women. In this they were responding not only to the wishes of the clerics but to the demands of Islamist youths, their numbers swelling as the Kingdom experienced the consequences of its own postwar ‘baby boom.’ Many of these young men were ‘exported’ to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, an experience which hardly caused a tempering of the Islamist ambitions among those who survived and returned. It was a ‘pressure valve’ likely to work only so long as they militants stayed safely abroad.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, King Fahd, Khalid’s successor, requested that troops of the American-led “Coalition of the Willing” be stationed on Saudi soil in order to protect the oil fields from any possible Iraqi attack. Once again, a Saudi king needed Wahhabite backing, and once again, the clerics were only too eager to cooperate, again at the price of further Islamicization of Saudi society. The Saudi defense minister entered into negotiations with the young jihadi Osama bin Laden, who offered to defend the border with his troops. This was a step too far even for a desperate regime, and the dynasty’s refusal alienated bin Laden, turning him against the regime of his homeland, with results we considered in the previous lecture.

Perhaps the most important consequences of the regime’s increased intertwinement with the Wahhabis has been the use of Saudi oil revenues for Wahhabi proselytizing and for funding Wahhabi terrorist groups. The Wahhabi-Saudi alliance extends to such allied countries as Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and, in recent years, Syria. Although Kurds, Jordan, Turkey, Iran, and most European Muslims remain outside the Wahhabi camp, substantial inroads have been made in Kosovo, Algeria, and Tajikistan, where they have met defeat, and in Chechnya, Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, the Philippines and, of course, the United States, where many mainstream Muslim organizations such as CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations) are Wahhabi-dominated. The notion of Pan-Islamism, invented by the Ottomans in the 1770s, has been taken over by the once-obscure Arabian sect founded by Abd al-Wahab. These remarkable inroads have been paved by the adroit use of modernity—oil technology—in some respects against modernity, and especially against democracy and secularism.

The Saudi monarchy has thus achieved many of the benefits of modernity without admitting into its realm any substantial number of the characteristic social class of modernity, the middle class. Saudi Arabia lacks a substantial middle class—the class inclined to demand political representation and to moderate the republicanism they build—not only demographically (there simply are not many middle-class people in the country—but also with respect to the country’s character, its ethos. Oil revenues fund a vast welfare state. The ‘commercial’ side of commercial republicanism is just as lacking as the ‘republican’ side. There is no ‘work ethic,’ as commercial republicans practice it. For the young, there is more incentive to study Koran than calculus. The Saudi economy lacks commercial diversity and the opportunities such diversity brings. Indeed, the economies of the twenty-two countries of the Middle East, with a combined population of some 300 million people, produce less than Spain. Ambitious men look to careers in religion and politics, but political careers are blocked by the monarchy. No wonder, then, that their ambitions turn toward the ruse o religion for revolutionary political purposes and not, for example, toward commercial entrepreneurship. In the West, the political philosopher Montesquieu proposed that the energies generated by religious passions be re-channeled into peaceful, commercial pursuits. The Saudi regime carefully blocs any such re-channeling—politically, doctrinally, and economically.

The Saudi ethos thus always stands ready to injure the Saudi ruling body and then to overturn or take over Saudi political institutions if that ruling body strays too far and too conspicuously from the doctrinal content of the ethos. The wealth generated by the oil economy has tempted the Saudi ruling body (the extended royal family) to stray–quite far, in some instances. Add to this a crisis in the oil industry itself. Revenues to support the Saudi state declined as oil prices have fallen in recent decades—that is, throughout the lives of the current generation of youth, the most numerous of any Saudi generation hitherto, resulting from years of having the highest population growth of any country in the world.

This population growth has hit the royal family itself. The king receives his title through the consensus of the royal family; family members, the Shar’ia, and the clerics limit his authority. The Saudi royal family consists of  15,000 members and, like the rest of the population, it is growing rapidly.  Under current economic trends, such a large family cannot sustain itself at the levels of affluence it has grown accustomed to enjoying. Further, affluence has led to a degree of luxury, of personal and social corruption, that the stricter Wahhabis find offensively impious. Hence Osama bin Laden.

How do things stand in Saudi Arabia today?

Saudi Arabia looks like a throwback to the Europe of the early modern period, the sort of traditionalist monarchy that declined in the West in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But the Saudis have proven resilient, surviving such crises as a revolt by religious militia in the late 1920s, the deposing of King Saud in 1964 by his half-brother, King Faisal’s assassination in 1975 at the hands of a nephew, the takeover of the Great Mosque in Mecca by jihadists in 1979, and the rise of al-Qaeda. So far, the size, wealth, and political experience of the Saudi royal family have kept the regime in place. King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz faced a threat from the al-Quaedists which peaked in 2003-04, but that threat declined after an effective campaign of internal repression, helped by the U. S. troop surge in Iraq, coupled with the turning of Iraqi Sunnis against the Qaedist forces in that country. A recent conference of Islamic clerics hosted by the Saudis was condemned by an al-Quaeda spokesman: “He who is called the defender of monotheism by the sycophantic clerics is raising the flag of brotherhood between religions… and thinks he has found the wisdom to stop wars and prevent the causes of enmity between religions and peoples. By God, if you do not resist heroically against this wanton tyrant, the day will come when church bells will ring in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula.” But such hand-wringing is just about all al-Qaeda recently has been able to muster against bin Laden’s old arch-enemy regime in Riyadh.  Most conservatives, both in Saudi Arabia and in Iraq, care first of all about their local communities; they do not appreciate the military attention al-Qaeda brings to their towns. And all the oil money has purchased friends in those towns.

The main external threat to the Saudi regime now is Iran, which seeks to extend its influence throughout the Gulf through Shi’a proxies in Iraq and elsewhere. Here too theological-political disputes push the Saudis and Americans into cooperation. At the same time, Saudis do not want the United States to attack Iran and rid the Sunnis of their Shi’ite problem more or less altogether; such a war would disrupt the oil trade, and the Saudis, having watched the Americans in Iraq, rather doubt that the American military would do a more effective job in Iran. But the Saudis do need the Americans for defensive purposes, being militarily unimpressive themselves.

And so for the time being the Saudis have wanted peace, except when challenged by the sort of threats in Yemen, where the Shi’a Houthis were threatening a revolution against the ruling Sunnis, and now seen in Syria and Qatar. All of these are ‘proxy’ conflicts with the Iranians. Elsewhere, Saudis are backing peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. They also want peace in Iraq, if such a peace would reduce if not necessarily eliminate U. S. ground forces, allow the Sunni minority there the capacity to defend themselves, and insure that Iraqi Shi’a do not become pawns of Iran. And they don’t want to be ‘flanked’ by the Iranians in Syria or Qatar, either. They want to do what their onetime rulers, the British, excelled at; they want to muddle through, live to see another day, and meanwhile use their considerable economic leverage, worldwide, to promote their own interests, including Wahhabism, through the construction of mosques and other means of religious ‘networking.’ They have become good at that, for the past century or so.

The Saudis are tending to their substantial economic interests in a variety of ways. They are investing some of their rising oil revenues in refining capacity and in the petrochemical industry. At the moment, the top five refiners are the U. S., China, Russia, Japan, and Germany The Saudis want to join the club, and state-owned Saudi Aramco hopes to bring the Kingdom from #12 in the world (where it is now) into the top five, in five years. That is optimistic, but there is no reason to think that this goal is unachievable, eventually. It is a matter of money, and the Saudis have a lot of it.

They don’t have as much as in the past. The oil price decline of the past few years hasn’t caused the American natural gas industry to collapse, as the Saudis had hoped. They have needed to liquidate some of their foreign investments and to cut social spending. This puts pressure on the regime. Although they still control about 20% of the world’s proven oil reserves, from which the government derives 75% of its income, their grip on the international oil cartel has weakened. They’ve been forced to liquidate $70 billion in foreign investments and even to cut the social spending that has kept most of its population quiet for so many years.

This also imperils their strategy for meeting the pending worldwide shortage of food. Here, the proverbial shoe is on the other foot, inasmuch as Saudi Arabia, once identified on maps as ‘Arabia Deserta,’ is as food-poor as it is oil-rich. Desalinization is not sufficiently advance technologically to make cereal grains viable on the Arabian peninsula. The Saudis have given up on their program to grow wheat. They have attempted to solve this problem by purchasing overseas agribusinesses. Declining revenues won’t help. And this is also where the Saudis lack of military capacity could hurt them. In a worldwide food crisis, food producers will feed their own populations first, and the Saudis will need to cut deals for any surplus that remains—if there is one. This will hold true whether or not the Saudis own the farmlands in foreign countries.

Today, the reigning king is Salman, who ascended to the throne in January 2015. Given the fact that the brother-to-brother succession line established by Ibn Saud can no longer be sustained, Salman made an important and controversial decision in designating not a second-generation family member but a third-generation nephew, Muhammad bin Nayef, as crown prince. He has appointed his son, Mohammad bin Salman, as Deputy Crown Prince; in this post, his son has overseen the military intervention against the Houthis in Yemen and has also worked for the diversification of the economy, and he has helped this year in orchestrating the diplomatic isolation of Qatar from other members of the Gulf Coordination Council. As you might imagine, these ‘personnel’ moves have proven controversial within the royal family, especially among the second-generation royals, who have been passed over in the royal succession.

To put matters more generally, Saudi Arabia’s regime has used modernity to resist modernity. In doing so, it has deliberately insulated itself from its weak middle class, the usual backbone of social democratization, but without making itself immune from social democratization itself. If the extended royal family may be said to constitute a sort of aristocracy or oligarchy, it is threatened today not by a moderate middle class but by a fanaticized, Wahhabi-educated, Wahhabi-propagandized populace, angry at corrupt royal rule and susceptible to the arguments made by the radical Islamists.