Geopolitical Analysis

By K.N. Pandita

Will there be a realization in the ummah of what has befallen it with death sentence for Saddam given by a court whose judges are appointed not by the people of Iraq but by an external aggressor?

The ummah has once again lost the opportunity of wriggling out of the shackles of conservatism and stepping into the era of modernity and internationalism.

Saddam, when in power, was the symbol of a new Islam desirous of separating politics from religion. Prior to him, such efforts were either not made or made but faced with failure. History will record that he also failed but not because of his “wrongs”. Iraq has been conquered, devastated and may be even fragmented. The barbarous Hulagu had done her little less harm way back in mid-13th century.

Saddam has been bigger than the issues of sectarian, ethnic, linguistic and cultural specificities, some of which have been the bane of the principle of fraternity (ukhuwwat) as enunciated in Islam.

Islamic history is replete with revolts against orthodoxy and conservatism. Generally these were quelled with all brutality right from the times when non-Arab nations came under the sway of Islam. Reformist movements met with no better fate, and Shia’ism, itself a landmark reformist movement in a sense, got bogged down with its own complexities.

The first to systematically subject the ideology of prophet-hood, revelation and revealed book etc. to the mechanism of induction and deduction were the Mu’taziltes in 11th century A.D with the great Central Asian philosopher-physician Avicenna in the forefront. On social-political plane, a profound question, which another great Islamic historian-thinker of his times, Ibn Khaldun (14th century) posed to the Islamic conquerors in the muqaddima was how they would handle the issue of harmonizing Islamic ideology with the ideologies of the conquered nations whose civilization antedated Arab civilization and rested on remarkably broad-based social structure and institutions.

Orthodoxy not only failed to produce a convincing answer to this crucial question but unfortunately persisted with its blinkers. From 11th century onwards, we find Islamic orthodoxy gradually moving towards rigid formulation, and, in the process, willing to hibernate in the cocoon of a caring but practically isolationist fraternity.

Mesopotamia of olden times and baynu’n-nahrayn of Arab historians, now known to us as Iraq, remained the most crucial regions of the Islamic world in around 8th century A.D. It had not lost the glory of its ancient heritage, and under the Caliphate of the Abbasids (9th century) became the seat of dissemination of Greek sciences to the Roman Empire and then to the West. The main reason for a spectacular service to composite culture was the heterogeneity of its population and the freedom of thought and movement.

Islam remained landlocked through the mediaeval ages, fighting internal dissensions and schism, carving or dismembering principalities and satrapies, waging ethno-sectarian wars and vying with one another in fundamentalizing belief. It was left with no time to visualize the importance of sea routes and maritime trade.

Western colonial powers fully exploited internal weaknesses of the Muslim states, their turning away from the importance of maritime routes and trade, and the lack of cohesion among ethno-social groups. The Mughal Empire in the Indian subcontinent and the Ottoman Empire in Eurasia declined and dismembered. A phenomenon surfaced in which Muslims began to juxtapose faith with a notion of deliverance.

Presence of oil in the Middle East (early 20th century) was a boon as well as a scourge for the Gulf States including Iraq. The British Imperialism dovetailed its colonial policy to new requirements and dictates in the Middle East based on economic interests. Henceforth oil would be the determining factor in international relations and diplomacy.

It is against this heavy concentration of western material interests in the Arab world that the Ba’ath Party of Saddam came into being. It had history before its eyes and it had the aspiration of freedom of Muslim world as its achievable goal. Baa’ath was not only a political party but in fact a movement in continuation of earlier aborted reformist movements. After eight centuries of unending internal strife and debilitating inertia of static conservatism, Islam needed a catalyst to help her move into the new era of internationalism.

Thus a movement of far – reaching consequences was formulating in Iraq during cold war era. As it moved into 1980s and 90s, it needed a military muscle besides the ideology. Rarely in the history of Islam do we find a man of such iron-will as Saddam Hussein was, produced by a battered and beater nation. His war with Iran was ideological not political. He welded factions into a movement that, for the first time in Islamic history, transcended faith and sect, ethnicity and a diminutive identity. Saddam was gradually trying to mould a civilization and a mass of people into a great international force based on non-discrimination and equality –- the fundamentals of Islamic social philosophy.

One day saner elements among the Muslims world over will realize the loss Islam will suffer if Saddam Hussein, the deposed and indicted President of Iraq, is hanged under the verdict of a court under siege. (The writer is the former Director of the Centre of Central Asian Studies, Kashmir University).