Islam's struggle with nationalism

By reigniting West Asia just when we had begun to believe it had gone into deep sleep, Hamas has underlined the many contradictions within, and questions about, the Islamic world

This week’s argument risks failing the test for what’s appropriate given the awful violence the Israeli armed forces are raining on Gaza right now. The point, however, needs to be made sooner rather than later. It also draws from, and moves a step forward from, what we wrote in an earlier piece in October, 2020.

Let’s make the principled point on Gaza first, as what’s playing out there isn’t open to much debate. It is a brutal retaliation, collective punishment, and mass revenge being delivered by an angry sovereign power with the strongest military in the region and beyond.

What Hamas carried out on October 7 was a hate crime against Israelis and Jews at a mass level. Revenge and punishment against the malevolent and terrorist Hamas, in its magnitude and indiscriminate nature, are starting to resemble a retaliatory, large-scale hate crime against Gaza Palestinians, and, on a broader plane, Muslims. It has become counterproductive already, embarrassing Israel’s friends and uniting its critics.

America apart, almost all of Israel’s significant friends have spoken up, expressing more or less similar views. They’ve also abstained from voting on the UN General Assembly resolution asking for a ceasefire. Those that abstained include India, among Israel’s closest friends now. It won't bother Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel.

The question we need to ask is, could Israel have been just as nonchalant if it had faced a united challenge on this from the Islamic world? If the Muslim world were a real, political, pan-national entity, it would add up to nearly 2 billion people, or one-fourth of the world’s population today. In comparison, Jews account for up to 16 million, or 0.2 per cent. Are the Muslims largely poor and the Jews rich, and thereby, is a mismatch in their relative power to be expected? Muslims are about 25 per cent of the global population, and account for nearly 23 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP). That isn’t insignificant power. What do the Jews account for? Jewish people are spread across the world. And while they lead many financial institutions, they do not see themselves as one nation or one power. Nor do they secretly own the world as conspiracy theories say.

They identify with Israeli Jews, but even today in major urban centres and campuses across the Western world — where much of the global wealth resides or is transacted — significant numbers of Jews have come out in protest against the severity of Israel’s response. We haven’t seen any such response from Muslim groups. Even among the governments of Muslim-majority nations, those who have uttered words of condemnation can be counted on the fingers of one hand: Egypt, in one Sisi statement that was widely quoted in Western media and not denied, the UAE, and probably one or two more.

Think about it. A force representing one-fourth of the world’s population, holding a bulk of the global energy reserves, much military power, including nuclear weapons (Pakistan), and 150 times the Jewish population, has failed to deter Israel. If anything, Israel is able to toss this off — and I use that expression carefully — with contempt.

What, then, is the power of the Islamic world? Or what is commonly described as the Ummah, the dictionary meaning of which is “the whole community of Muslims bound together by ties of religion”. Translated, it means that all the Muslims of the world are united in a pan-national entity by their faith. Which brings us to some further questions. Is there such a thing as the Islamic world? Does a faith, any faith, transcend national boundaries or nationalist sentiment?

By reigniting West Asia just when we had begun to believe it had gone into deep sleep and entered a period of relative peace and reconciliation after the Abraham Accords, Hamas has also underlined the many contradictions within, and questions about, the Islamic world.

Islam is unique in that no other major faith sees itself as a pan-national entity in the loyalty, motivation and commitment of its adherents. There is no Christian equivalent or dream of an Ummah equivalent. The third most numerous faith, the Hindus, might have arguments among themselves but only over whether their country, India, is a Hindu Rashtra or not. The Jews have one country of their own. The deepest contradiction within political Islam (as distinct from the faith and its practice and customs), comes from the belief that religious loyalties should take precedence over nationalism. The result is the Ummah fantasy.

The world’s Muslims have set up multiple identity-based pan-national organisations. The most prominent is the OIC, or the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, with its 57 members and five observer states. These represent 23 per cent of the global GDP. Their achievement as a collective, for any common Islamic cause, is zilch. There’s been the Arab League, some other regional organisations in Africa and Asia, and none has counted for much on anything seen as a pan-Islamic issue.

The only pan-national organisation of Muslim nations making an impact is the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and it is the most West-friendly of these clubs of Islamic nations: Two of its key members joined the Abraham Accords, and the third was on the verge of doing so when Hamas struck. Its adversary, if anything, is a fellow Islamic nation in Iran. Qatar, though a member, sits on the periphery geographically and politically, managing its deep ties with Iran, the US, and the most anti-Western non-state actors — the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Qatar, let’s simply say, plays being Qatar.

If we step back and look at the so-called Islamic world’s history with conflict, we will find that almost all of it in the past 50 years has been within itself. We choose the cut-off year as 1973 because that was the last time some Muslim countries joined hands to fight a common non-Muslim enemy: Egypt and Syria against Israel in the Yom Kippur War. It could be argued, however, that both, led by Ba’athist, pro-Soviet, supposedly socialist dictators, were still not exactly Islamic powers. Oil-producing Muslim countries did come together with this war to cartelise and raise the price of oil. Never mind that it ended up benefiting them more commercially than causing much strategic damage to Israel or its American allies.

Look, on the other hand, at armed conflicts within this “world.” The thousands of Muslim civilians killed in Gaza, including women and children, are thousands too many. In the war between the US-backed Saudi forces and Yemen’s Houthis, the UK-based Campaign Against Arms Trade (caat.org.uk) lists more than 377,000 killed, at least 150,000 out of these as a direct result of the fighting.

In the neverending civil war in Sudan, nearly 300,000 have been killed over the past decade, in addition to another 200,000 or so who were documented to have been killed earlier in its Darfur province. Nearly 400,000 Muslims have been killed in the civil war in Syria. Almost all of these million-plus listed in the past decade have been killed by fellow Muslims, barring about five to seven thousand each (if that many) by the Americans and the Russians (acting for the Assad regime).

We know the history of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, Af-Pak, and so on. And while it is fashionable to blame the West for all the crises in the Muslim “world,” it was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that peremptorily occupied Kuwait and it was Islamic powers that pleaded with the Americans to come and liberate it. Among the press corps covering that war, there used to be a cruel joke: What should be the anthem of the Saudi and allied Muslim nations, armies (including elements from Pakistan)? “Onward Christian soldiers”.

One key reason a powerful community of 2 billion punches so below its weight is that it is beset with so many conflicts and contradictions. The most self-destructive is its failure to accept that nationalism, and often even ideology, are much stronger sentiments than the cross-border loyalties of a shared religion. This fantasy of faith-based unity has once again been laid bare by the Muslim world’s failure to influence Israel’s conduct of its Gaza war. Mr Netanyahu, or any Israeli leader of the day, always works on this safe presumption.

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