Middle East politics and regional dynamics

¶ … surge of Islamic movements, revolutions and political life in the last fifty years, as well as some of the events of the last ten or fifteen years, culminating with the attack on September 11 and the fight against terrorism, have brought about a legitimate discussion around the causes and effects of political Islam, as well as on the main factors that have influenced it in the last half a century.

The first issue that needs to be taken into consideration is the element of extreme cohesion that the Islamic world has: the Qur'an. According to the Islamic world, the Qur'an is the "literal, hence absolutely true, word of God as revealed to the Prophet Mohammed"

In my opinion, the direct and most important implication, both in terms of internal politics and international relation, is the creation and practice of Islamic law, as one of the three fundamental systems of law (the other two are Anglo-Saxon and the Roman system). In many Islamic countries, like the Islamic Republic of Iran, the judicial system is strictly organized around the sayings of the Qur'an and these are often strictly applied in everyday life.

It seemed important to mention at least this particularity of the Islamic world in order to emphasize and justify the fact that in some of the Islamic states where the religion plays the most important role, namely Iran for example, the intrinsic relationship between the political leader and the religious leader is extremely powerful. It is often the case here that they are one and the same person.

This should be believed only natural, since the importance of religion and of the spiritual leader in Islam is so great. In many ways, the political leader is strictly connected to his religious identity, given the fact that the separation between church and state is not existent here and that the religious basis is key to all political decisions.

It would be interesting to note and argue that the countries that had previously enjoyed the most spectacular approaches towards the Western civilizations have nowadays approached fundamental Islamic ideas most. Again, the case of Iran seems best: previous to the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran, in 1979, the rule of the Shah was one of the most 'modern' of the entire region. Assimilation of American and European elements of culture later led, however, to an extreme return to Islamic value and rule.

The export of the Iranian Revolution was later attempted in nearby states of the region, especially in Iraq, in Syria or Algeria and the only reason that it failed to materialize to the degree it had in Iran was that the international power did not see it as strategically fit. On the other hand, the fact that political Islam or the political component of Islam had significant sympathies in the area must have relied on something, a common element in all regions of the Broader Middle East and Northern Africa.

This was strictly related to post-colonialism and to the conditions that developed in this area after the collapse of the British and French Empires, after the Second World War. Naturally, the void of power that was produced in the region had to be filled with something. In countries like Egypt, Syria or Iraq, an experimental Arab socialism was attempted, relying on the friendship and advice from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Its failure left, in many cases, "massive corruption and overreliance on coercion"

. Iraq comes to mind as the best example, but Egypt has never enjoyed democratic conditions after obtaining its independence. We may thus conclude that, in some Islamic states, post-colonialism was assimilated to experiments meant to determine the best governance for the future. Many of these have failed, including socialism assimilation attempts (Syria, Iraq), nationalistic approaches (Egypt) or Western approaches (the Shah rule in Iran). The void that occurred in many cases was filled with political Islam (Iran). In other cases, a third way was chosen, like in Egypt, for example.

It is difficult to discuss political Islam without relating to its main source of financial backing and to the most important resource in the area (next to the human resource, obviously not negligible): petrol. The thesis of petro-Islam finds different arguments in authors who are for or against the idea. While rejecting the thesis for Saudi Arabia or other smaller regional actors, Beinin and Stork state that "the case for petro-Islam in Iran is even weaker"

. The intrinsic connection between Islam and petrol is rejected because of previous historical events that have shown an incumbent form of political Islam (in Iran, for example, at the beginning of the 20th century, in the form of political activism of the mullahs).

On the other hand, historical events of the 1970s need to be taken into consideration. As it has been shown, "the financial clout of Saudi Arabia had been amply demonstrated during the oil embargo against the United States, following the Arab-Israeli war of 1973"

. Evidence speaks for itself. In the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli war, Islamic factions in power in Saudi Arabia, under the rule of the Wahhabite family, provoked the extreme rise in oil prices simply by decreasing the offer of oil on the international markets. As such, at this particular point, political Islam also had a financial backing. Further more, Saudi Arabia showed the way for other states in the region where political Islam is powerful.