The Christian and secular West is often blamed by Muslims for shortcomings in their own societies. Writing in his book Orientalism, first published in 1978 and since reprinted many times over, the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said was courageous enough to speak of the Arab world as being ‘disfigured by a whole series of outmoded and discredited ideas’ and shortcomings which included ‘its political failures, its human rights abuses… the fact that alone of all modern peoples, we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development’. However, Said’s Orientalism, with its central charge that Western scholarship was a weapon of imperialism, became the key text in Arab and Middle Eastern studies in the 1980s and 1990s, and has itself contributed mightily to the revisionism and myth-making which have given many Muslims a highly distorted understanding of their own history; in particular, giving further credence to the widespread Muslim self-image of the umma as innocent victim of Western oppression. A central pillar of this myth of innocence is the belief that before the rise of Zionism the umma of the Ottomans was tolerant in a way that Western Christendom was not, particularly in its treatment of non-Muslim dhimmi – Christians and Jews. This is pure fantasy, as any reading of the reports of ambassadors, envoys and travellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will demonstrate.
And yet… set these shortcomings to one side and there remain political injustices that Western governments and pro-Western regimes in Muslim countries could and should have put right. First among those wrongs is the failure to support the creation of a viable state of Palestine. The ill-conceived invasion of Iraq – the Ambeyla Campaign multiplied by a factor of twenty – is another case in point. By allowing such grievances to continue, the West has done Islamist fundamentalism a huge and continuing favour. It has allowed the extremists to turn to the Muslim umma and say, ‘We told you so! Only we can help you. Together we can turn back the secular, Western tide and return to a glorious past.’ Remove the grievances, and the extremists and terrorists must wither away for lack of popular support.
On the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, Osama bin Laden’s Fanatic Camp survives, in part because he and his remaining ‘Arabs’ and Taliban allies have been offered sanctuary, but also because of the active connivance of the jihadised Pathans of the North-West Frontier Province – supported to a significant degree by the greater Pakistani populace. In October 2001 a pro-Taliban and anti-American coalition made up of five politico-religious parties was voted into power in the North-West Frontier Province. Dominated by the JI, JUI and Ahl-i-Hadith, its leaders have since sought to reintroduce Wahhabi sharia, issued fatwas proclaiming death to Americans and offered tacit support to Osama bin Laden. So widespread is the support for this coalition that the Pakistan Government has, to date, been powerless to act against it. Nevertheless, the same lesson applies: remove the grievances and mainstream, moderate Islam stands a better chance of reasserting itself.
The British prepare to invade Afghanistan for the third time: a fanciful engraving from the Illustrated London News in November 1878 as British and Indian troops gathered to launch three armies into Afghanistan. Pathan and Afghan hostility was largely due to fears of British occupation and the threat to their religion (Illustrated London News)
Pathans in ambush: an early lithograph from the 1840s by Lieutenant James Rattray, from his Costumes of the Various Tribes of Afghaunistan (British Library)
Elephant-drawn artillery and commissariat column pass a mosque in Peshawar city: an engraving from 1878 (Illustrated London News)
‘Abdallah Ebn-Souhoud, Chief of the Wahabys, beheaded at Constantinople in 1819’: an engraving of the captured Wahhabi Emir Abdullah ibn Saud, from Sir Harford Jones Brydges’ Account of the Transactions of His Majesty’s Mission to the Court of Persia (British Library)
Four armed Bedouin on horseback c. 1900 (George Eastman House)
Maulvies or learned teachers of religion in the courtyard of an old-style madrassah, northern India, late nineteenth century (Charles Allen)
A street in Patna city showing Fakir Dowlah’s mosque: a pen and ink sketch drawn in 1824 by Sir Charles D’Oyly of the Bengal Civil Service (Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library)
‘The Warning or the “inoffensive Wahabee gentlemen”’: William Tayler’s caption to his cartoon, which shows Sir Frederick Halliday (‘the Bengal Giant’) racquet in hand, restraining William Tayler (‘the Behar Chicken’) from attacking the three Wahhabi mullahs he had interned, Maulvi Ahmadullah in the centre (Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library)
Another of William Tayler’s cartoons, drawn by him in 1857 after his dismissal, captioned ‘Lootf Ali’s release’ and ‘Martyred Victim of the Commissioner’s Cruelty’. The gold-braided Lieutenant-Governor Sir Frederick Halliday watches as Tayler’s three leading critics in Patna (from left to right, Messrs Elliott, Farquharson and Samuells) come to the aid of one of the suspected rebels detained by Tayler (Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library)
‘The Umbeylah Pass and Chumlah Valley’: the scene of the Ambeyla Campaign disaster of 1863. The Wahhabi stronghold of Malka was sited on the distant mountain peak at the head of the valley. A sketch by Major John Adye, reproduced in his book Sitana: A Mountain Campaign
‘Storming the heights of Laloo, 15 December 1863’: the final engagement of the Ambeyla Campaign: a sketch by Major John Adye, reproduced in Lord Roberts, Forty-One Years in India, 1897
Saiyyeds of the Black Mountains, drawn by Lockwood Kipling of Lahore, father of Rudyard Kipling. The Saiyyeds provided a haven for the Hindustani Fanatics and three expeditions were mounted in the 1880s to expel them from the Black Mountains (Sue Farrington)
The banners of jihad: a band of ghazis or ‘religious fanatics’ advance towards their enemy waving banners, banging drums and firing their jezails in the air. A watercolour by Lieutenant Dixon, 16th Lancers, 1898 (Sue Farrington)
The murdered Viceroy, Lord Mayo, 1872. His public declaration that he would destroy the Wahhabis made him a target for assassination (Illustrated London News)