MICHAEL JANSENreviews Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist RevolutionBy Alastair Crooke Pluto Press 328pp; £17.99
THIS BOOK is a carefully reasoned refutation of western thinking about “Islamism”, the thought processes underpinning resistance to the western drive for hegemony over the Muslim world.
Crooke begins by quoting a middle-ranking Shia cleric in the Iranian seminary city of Qom who said the dispute between “Islamism” and the West is, at heart, a dispute about the “essence of man”. Crooke argues that the secular West sees man as an individual and organises society around this view, while “Islamists” regard man as “integral to a wider existence” involving a religious commitment to strive for justice, respect and compassion and bound by defined responsibilities towards the Muslim community or Umma.
According to Crooke, “it is the revival of this radical message of social justice that lies at the centre of the Islamist revolution”, which strives to reaffirm Islam as a faith and to reform Muslim societies – a revolution to which the West has responded with fear and loathing.
While a cleric living in Qom has time to contemplate the essence of man, Crooke admits that mainstream Muslim rejectionism and resistance are the response to multiple challenges posed to the Umma by the expansionist West.
Crooke focuses on the triumph of Protestantism, individualism, and free-market capitalism over the past 200 to 300 years. This led to western conquests, massacres, ethnic cleansing, and division of continents and regions into manageable ethnic entities.
Crooke believes these shocking events “sent a strong signal to the Muslim world: do not expect the injustices [inflicted] on your peoples to be acknowledged in the West. They will be erased from memory. The justice of a cause is not enough to elicit support . . . Resistance represents a refusal to ‘normalise’ injustice.”
To prove his point, he examines two high-profile armed resistance groups: the Shia Hizbullah in Lebanon and Sunni Hamas in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. Crooke describes the diverging approaches they have adopted to the different challenges they face. He also draws a distinction between these movements, which are ready to reach accommodation with the West, and al-Qaeda and its allies, which engage in retributive violence and reject this possibility.
Crooke calls for fresh western thinking towards “Islam”, demonised at its birth in the seventh century by Christian clerics and philosophers, and “Islamism”, demonised by western politicians after the 1979 Iranian revolution which toppled the Shah, the West’s chief ally in the Middle East. Crooke compares the attitude towards “Islamism” with Puritan views expressed by Oliver Cromwell before parliament in 1656. He asked: “Who are our enemies; and why do they hate us?” There was, he said, an axis of evil – led by Catholic Spain – working against the Puritan project: “They hate us because they hate God and all that is good.”
Dún Laoghaire-born Irish national Crooke is a former British intelligence officer with experience in Ireland, South Africa, Afghanistan and the Middle East. While adviser to EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, he brokered Palestinian-Israeli ceasefires, helped bring an end to the 2002 Israeli siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and was part of the first mission by US envoy George Mitchell investigating the causes of the second Palestinian intifada.
He founded the Conflicts Forum, an international body that tries to promote dialogue between Muslims and westerners. This book is also meant to do that. But Crooke focuses too narrowly on Iranian Islamist thought and says little about the failings of Iran’s Islamic Republic, the Shia obscurantists who seized power there, and the Sunni reactionaries who make headlines today.
Michael Jansen is a Middle East analyst for The Irish Times