Israel is Islam’s Best Excuse for Self-Inflicted Failure
If Allah gave us his final revelation, why are we poor and misgoverned by authoritarian kleptocrats?
Christianity and Islam are both aggressive missionary faiths. But Christianity has long since ceased to be at the center of western governance. America excepted, western societies are mostly post-religious. W.H. Auden called the British “decent godless folk” for a reason. It’s also why westerners can’t understand the cultural and religious drivers behind the Muslim world’s wounded pride and bottomless well of grievance from defeat felt as shame and dishonor, in a culture whose governing principles are shame and honor.
“Palestine and the self-respect of the Arabs must be recovered,” he wrote. “Without Palestine there is no life for [the Arabs].” — Palestine Higher Committee member, Musa Alami (Wilf/Schwartz, page 51)
“There is a God, it is a just God there is a history and history has an arc and a purpose — a Telos — and that God oversees that purpose. If you fit that divine purpose of history you succeed in history….Islam’s geopolitical power is taken as theological evidence of Islam’s closeness to God and divine grace upon it. Over the last 150 years these thinkers’ and theologians’ problem with Islamic weakness isn’t geopolitical weakness; it isn’t that the British can control Egypt. It’s that if we are weak we are not close to God’s plan, our Islam is broken. Something about our faith is wrong we are far from God and need to return to God.” — Haviv Rettig Gur interview with Bari Weiss, March 21, 2024
The answer to the question, “What Went Wrong?” in “The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East” — as Bernard Lewis’ book title frames it — always yields this response: someone or something did this to us. Or we’ve been betrayed by the sinners among us and the solution is jihad against them to restore a pure, original Islam. Nakba (catastrophe) never comes from our bad choices. It comes:
Not from the Nebi Musa riots of 1920–21 that convinced Jews that only self-defense, not the British mandatory government, could ensure their survival.
Not from the Arab revolt and pogroms of 1936–39 against the British mandatory government and Palestine’s Jewish population.
Not from the pro-Nazi revolt and pogrom in Iraq in 1941.
Not from us rejecting the Peel, Woodhead and Anglo-American Commissions’ partition plans of 1937, 1939 and 1945.
Not from us rejecting the UN partition plan of 1947 and choosing a self-declared war of extermination instead.
Not from Arab civil and military leaders ordering Palestine’s Arabs to leave in 1948.
Not from our expropriation and expulsion of 851000 Mideast Jews who had lived there since long before the birth of Islam. We, not they, are victims and refugees, though those Jews were all resettled in Israel with no international aid, while Palestinians are the largest recipients of aid to refugees in human history.
Not from us refusing citizenship to Palestinan Arab refugees after 1948.
Not from us rejecting refugee resettlement proposed by the original, pre-jihadi UNRWA.
Not from Egypt and Jordan occupying from 1950–67 what remained of the land the UN designated for a Palestinian state.
Not from Egypt’s blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba in May 1967.
Not from the PLO launching terror attacks on Israel from Jordan, which led to the ten month Black September 1970–71 war between the PLO and the Jordanian army (15000 dead PLO fighters).
Why this catalog of catastrophes? Look everywhere but the mirror
This catalog of catastrophe led to victimhood-driven ideological suit-switching instead of the one thing that may have prevented it: looking in the mirror to see the real source of failure. The real answer to Lewis’ What Went Wrong question is too uncomfortable to accept: modernization without secularizing westernization and its individualism and greater gender equality is impossible. The latter was always the ultimate deal breaker.
“Muslim visitors to Europe speak with astonishment, often with horror, of the immodesty and frowardness of western women, of the incredible freedom and absurd deference accorded to them, and of the lack of manly jealousy of European males confronted with the immorality and promiscuity in which their womenfolk indulge. We find this observation even in the most unlikely places. Thus, for example, a Moroccan ambassador who was in Spain in 1766 speaks of the free and easy ways of Spanish ladies, and the absence of a virile sense of honor among their husbands….According to Islamic law and tradition, there were three groups of people who did not benefit from the general Muslim principle of legal and religious quality — unbelievers, slaves, and women. The woman was obviously in one significant respect the worst-placed of the three. The slave could be freed by his master; the unbeliever could at any time become a believer by his own choice, and thus end his inferiority. Only the woman was doomed forever to remain what she was….” (Lewis, pages 66–68)
“The emancipation of women, more than any other single issue, is the touchstone of difference between modernization and Westernization. Even the most extreme and most anti-Western fundamentalists nowadays accept the need to modernize and indeed to make the fullest use of modern technology, especially the technologies of warfare and propaganda. This is seen as modernization, and though the methods and even the artifacts come from the West, it is accepted as necessary and even as useful. The emancipation of women is Westernization; both for traditional conservatives and radical fundamentalists it is neither necessary nor useful but noxious, a betrayal of true Islamic values. It must be kept from entering the body of Islam, and where it has already entered, it must be ruthlessly excised.” (Lewis, page 73)
Napoleon’s brief invasion of Egypt in 1799 made clear to Arabs the Muslim world’s weakness they’d ignored for nearly three centuries while ruled by Ottoman Turks. But, like the Mongols before them who’d sacked Baghdad in 1258, the Turks were also Muslim. So the iron fist of defeat came wrapped in a velvet glove. Male, as well as Muslim, supremacy maintenance was a key grievance driver, as seen in this 1855 Hijaz rebel manifesto in reaction to Ottoman modernization measures:
““The ban on slaves is contrary to the Holy sharia. Furthermore the abandonment of the noble call to prayer in favor of firing a gun, permitting women to walk unveiled, placing divorce in the hands of women, and such like are contrary to the pure Holy Law. . . . With such proposals the Turks have become infidels. Their blood is forfeit and it is lawful to make their children slaves.” (Lewis, page 94)
Defeat inflicted by those previously viewed as barbarian infidels was shock of a different order, especially due to its consequences for its ancient Jewish communities living in dhimmitude apartheid:
“The Christian powers were naturally concerned with the status of the Christian subjects of Muslim states, and used their great and growing influence to secure for them a status of legal equality and — in fact though not in principle — economic privilege. In this drive for emancipation, Christians were the intended, Jews the incidental beneficiaries.” (Lewis, page 68)
What’s never happened, except a tiny minority of Arabs, is the Pogo epiphany: we have met the enemy and he is us — and not Jews. The Jews are just an excuse for Arab failure, a stateless nation with an equal right to sovereignty in their ancestral homeland.
Mirror avoidance by ideological suit-switching
Since France conquered Algeria and the Ottoman empire’s fall, the Muslim world has avoided this central question by trying on many momentarily fashionable ideological suits, both imported and local. All were found badly cut and ill-fitting to the moment they were tried. Like naive bagholding crypto scam speculators, Arabs have time and again sought solutions to their weakness that left them defeated and weaker than before, continually buying in at their market tops. They’ve repeatedly tried on foreign ideological suits to pursue what British Foreign Secretary said was:
“their essential point of principle…to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.”
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