Dalrymple on Karsh re: Islam--All or Nothing!

There is a very interesting book review on a book I intend to purchase in the City Journal by Ted Dalrymple, whom I first discovered in the New Criterion a while back, writing about his medical adventures in the bowels of Birmingham, England, among the marginal immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia---Muslims existing in a completely alien environment among hard-drinking low-class gentile soccer-hooligan wannabes.

Karsh's book doesn't do the Albert Hourani school of grandiose pageantry across centuries of Arab history, nor does he seem to come from the other semi-apologists for Ottoman and Islamic cultures whose expansion I have read about in neutral terms. The first book I read about Islam was The Mohammedans, by Gibbs, way back when the first oil shock had just rocked the gas-guzzling West. Since then, I have read a good half-dozen general histories of the entire Islamic phenomenon, or of the Ottoman subset or Arab subset of Muslim conquests. All are academic in tone and scholarly in intent, but lack a certain sense of what you confront when you are in an Islamic country.

What you confront often enough once you are in a Middle East society, even on the periphery as an Embassy official, is a sense of brotherhood among themselves and xenophobic solidarity against non-Muslims---at least among lower-class man-on-the-street Muslims. This varies from country to country, and Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, and a cosmopolitan center like Jidda in Saudi Arabia are more open and welcoming than other places----like dread Riyadh or other smaller towns in Saudi Arabia, e.g.
Here is a sample of the review, which I recommend reading in full:

It is important, of course, to distinguish between Islam as a doctrine and Muslims as people. Untold numbers of Muslims desire little more than a quiet life; they have the virtues and the vices of the rest of mankind. Their religion gives to their daily lives an ethical and ritual structure and provides the kind of boundaries that only modern Western intellectuals would have the temerity to belittle.

But the fact that many Muslims are not fanatics is not as comforting as some might think.....In his new book, Islamic Imperialism: A History, Professor Efraim Karsh does not mince words about Mohammed’s early and (to all those who do not accept the divinity of his inspiration) unscrupulous resort to robbery and violence, or about Islam’s militaristic aspects, or about the link between Islamic tradition and the current wave of fundamentalist violence in the world. The originality of Karsh’s interpretation is its underlying assumption that Islam was, from the very beginning, a pretext for personal and dynastic political ambition, from the razzias against the Meccan caravans and the expulsion of Jewish tribes from Medina, to the siege of Vienna a millennium later in 1529, and Hamas today.

Karsh seems to grasp the nettle, as old-time Brits used to put it, of looking at the entire Islamic phenomenon without either the bland historicism of Hourani or the polemic ferocity of some Western writers. But his judgments are harsh:

Contrary to its universalistic pretensions, Karsh argues, Islam has never succeeded in eliminating political power struggles within the Muslim world, where, on the contrary, such struggles have always been murderous. Islamic regimes, many espousing in the beginning the ascetic principles of what one might call desert Islam, invariably degenerate (if it be degeneration) into luxury- and privilege-loving dynasties. Like all other political entities, Islamic regimes seek to preserve and, if possible, extend their power. They have shown no hesitation in compromising with or allying themselves with those whom they regard as infidels. Saladin, a mendaciously simplified version of whose exploits has inflamed hysterical sentiment all over the Middle East, was not above forming alliances with Christian monarchs to achieve his imperial ends; the Ottoman caliphate would not have survived as long as it did had the Sultan not exploited European rivalries and allied himself now with one, now with another Christian power.

In short, Islamic imperialism, in Karsh’s view, illustrates three transcendent political truths: the Nietzschean drive to power, Michels’ iron law of oligarchy, and Marx’s economic motor of history. Religious feeling, on this reading, is but an epiphenomenon, a mask for what is really going on.

Ah, epiphenomenon and its echo of the great Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin!

To be fair to the Muslims, they more or less invented the sort of transcendent political history that enabled later Western historians like Gibbons and Giambattista Vico and Toynbee to search for underlying principles and modalities which were constants in different cultures.

Ibn Khaldun and his Prolegomena as well as Ibn Battuta in his travelogues from Rabat to Indonesia/China both anticipated later philosophies of history. So Islam cannot be described as lacking a sense of belonging to a larger context, nor as being unaware that it was subject to certain secular historical influences which Muslim philosophers were the first to describe in detail.

This interpretation raises the difficult and perhaps unanswerable question of what should count in history as a real, and what as merely an apparent, motive for action. When Bernal Diaz del Castillo claims a religious motive for the conquest of Mexico, at least in part, should we just dismiss it as a sanctimonious lie to justify a more rapacious motive? That he ended up a rich man does not decide the question; and Diaz himself would have taken his material success as a sign that God smiled upon his enterprise, just as Muslims have viewed their early conquests as proof of God’s approval and the truth of Mohammed’s doctrine. (On the other hand, failure for Muslims never seems to provide proof of the final withdrawal of God’s favor, much less of his non-existence, but rather shows his dissatisfaction with the current practices of the supposedly faithful, who will return to His favor only by restoring an earlier, purer form of faith.)

Also, the Muslims always had to explain why their religion did not put a premium on, nor demonstrate many examples, of miracles. They came up with the sort of lame circularity of the fact that the complexities of the Koran were a "miracle." Actually, the Christians could have argued that the success of Christianity as emanating from a bunch of dumb fishermen from Galilee, the Ozarks of the Roman province of Palestine, was also a miracle. But the Christians' profession of the divinity of Jesus trumped any mere "miracles," whether of the Koran or the Twelve Apostles [and their "wives," the Epistles!]. Karsh's book takes no prisoners, nor does Dalrymple:

Karsh seems to oscillate between believing that Islamic imperialism is just a variant of imperialism in general—imperialism being more or less a permanent manifestation of the human will to power—and believing that there is something sui generis and therefore uniquely dangerous about it.

I hesitate to rush in where so many better-informed people have hesitated to tread, or have trodden before, but I would put it like this. The urge to domination is nearly a constant of human history. The specific (and baleful) contribution of Islam is that, by attributing sovereignty solely to God, and by pretending in a philosophically primitive way that God’s will is knowable independently of human interpretation, and therefore of human interest and desire—in short by allowing nothing to human as against divine nature—it tries to abolish politics. All compromises become mere truces; there is no virtue in compromise in itself. Thus Islam is inherently an unsettling and dangerous factor in world politics, independently of the actual conduct of many Muslims.

Karsh comes close to this conclusion himself, when he writes at the end of the book:

Only when the political elites of the Middle East and the Muslim world reconcile themselves to the reality of state nationalism, forswear pan-Arab and pan-Islamic dreams, and make Islam a matter of private faith rather than a tool of political ambition will the inhabitants of these regions at last be able to look forward to a better future free of would-be Saladins.

The fundamental question is whether Islam as a private faith would still be Islam, or whether such privatization would spell its doom. I think it would spell its doom. In this sense, I am an Islamic fundamentalist. The choice is between all and nothing.

In countries where Islam does not demographically control the public marketplace of ideas and political discourse, as in Lebanon, Islamic elements attempt to impose it by terror and force [Hezbollah] when they cannot by means of the ballot box. In a secular Muslim country like Turkey, a very difficult situation is arising, as a secular Ataturk military confronts an Islamist government attempting to enter the European Union. If Europe rejects a moderate Islam, and the military is Qaddafized, will another Iran be the result? The mind boggles.