William R. Polk - Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North

THE HENRY L. STIMSON LECTURES SERIES

THE THOUSAND-YEAR WAR BETWEEN THE MUSLIM WORLD AND THE GLOBAL NORTH

William R. Polk

The Henry L. Stimson Lectures at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan
Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Landrum Bolling
A lifelong seeker of peace and understanding,
a Friend and a friend,
a truly great human being

And for Hassan Fathy
Architect for the poor who taught those who would
listen how to meet their need for shelter in beauty
with the soil under their feet

To be ignorant of the past is to be forever a child.

MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO

The destruction of the past is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century. Most young men and women
at the centurys end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking
any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.

ERIC HOBSBAWM, The Short 20th Century,
Independent on Sunday, October 9, 1994

I believe that an author owes his reader several obligations. First, he should reveal how he learned what he writes. Second, he should say why what he writes about is worth reading. Third, he should provide a sort of roadmap on the themes that tie together the events he describes. And fourth, he should make clear the theses he puts forward. Here I will try to honor my obligations to you.

I am writing from the perspective of nearly seventy years of research and observation. I have lived in or visited the countries I examine and have had the opportunity to discuss their inhabitants thoughts and actions with a number of leaders, journalists, academics, government officials, and such wise observers as taxi drivers and shopkeepers.

My vision has been affected, for better or for worse, by studying at a number of universitiesincluding Oxford, Harvard, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Baghdadteaching students and interacting with colleagues at Harvard and the University of Chicago and lecturing or attending conferences and symposiums at more than twenty other American universities and such organizations as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), Sciences Po, the Institute of World Economy and International Affairs of the (then) Soviet Academy of Sciences, the Middle East Institute, the American Association of Middle Eastern Studies, St. Antonys College, Oxford, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Ventilating my opinions among them brought forth suggestions and criticisms that have been of great value in the refinement of my own.

As president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs, I had sustained contact over years with the institutes fellows. They included men and women of extraordinary experience and great knowledge, including former UN secretary general U Thant, Lord Caradon of the British Foreign Office, soon-to-be prime minister Evgeni Primakov of Russia, former deputy prime minister Abdel Keyeum of Afghanistan, former foreign minister of Ghana Fed Arkhurst, former commander of the UN Emergency Force (UNEF) General Indar Rikkye, former vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank and later mayor of Bogota Enrique Pealosa, founder and head of the UN Environment Program Maurice Strong, Governor Pat Brown of California, and nearly a hundred others. They generously shared their experiences with me. The institute was what a research center should bea multiyear intellectual feast to which everyone brings a dish and at which everyone tastes all the dishes. I profited far more than I gave.

Among the journalists who have been close friends and with whom I exchanged ideas and information were Said Aburish, Michael Adams, Uri Avnery, John Cooley, Charles Glass, Johannes Gross, David Halberstam, Seymour Hersh, Peter Jennings, Murray Kempton, William Pfaff, Jon Randal, Eric Rouleau, Peter Scholl-Latour, Patrick Seale, Neil Sheehan, and Howard K. Smith. They enormously broadened the range of my contacts and kept me up to date.

During my four years of government service, as a member of the Policy Planning Council, I benefited from frequent exchanges with practically every senior member of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and particularly with McGeorge Bundy and Robert Komer of the National Security Council; Governor Chet Bowles, Governor Averill Harriman, Roger Hilsman, Thomas Hughes, Walt Rostow, and James Spain at the State Department; Sherman Kent at the Office of National Estimates at the CIA; Fowler Hamilton and his staff at USAID; and William Bundy and Robert McNamara at the Defense Department. I also worked with a number of senators, including Frank Church, Thomas Eagleton, William Fulbright, Hubert Humphrey, and George McGovern; in the House with John Brademas; and with Supreme Court justices William Douglas and Abe Fortes.

Both in government and in my personal capacity, I was fortunate to deal with and get to know a range of kings, presidents, prime ministers, and other officials, as well as scholars, journalists, and businessmen of the countries I address in this book.

Over the years, I have written a number of books that were, incidentally, background studies for this book. They include The United States and the Arab World; Neighbors and Strangers: The Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs; Understanding Iraq; Understanding Iran; The Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century; Violent Politics: Guerrilla Warfare and Terrorism; Distant Thunder: Reflections on the Dangers of Our Times; Humpty Dumpty: The Fate of Regime Change; and others.

I wrote this book because I find that none of the books now available deals comprehensively with the Muslim world and its encounters with the former imperial states. Each deals with parts of them. This is not a criticism; I have done the same. But narrowing the focus necessarily misses the overview. So here I have set out to deal with the whole Muslim world and its relationship with what I call the North of the world. This is what Muslims themselves do. They are aware of shared experiences and the interconnected nature of their lives. The reader will see that experiences have been shared from Morocco to Indonesia and from Bukhara to Nigeria. This has always typified the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj, the gathering of the people of the Muslim world. The sharing of ideas and experiences took on a new dimension in the nineteenth century with the advent of the press, magazines, and broadsheets. Today it is most evident in the movement of