The late J.B. Kelly, a distinguished scholar of the Middle East, spent much of his career trying to correct fundamental misunderstandings that all too often shaped the decisions of Western policymakers. Bruce Thornton, reviewing a recently published collection of Kelly’s essays from the 1980s and 1990s, comments on some of the most persistent, and dangerous, mistakes:
How many times for nearly four decades have we heard . . . justifications for Muslim violence based on the West’s alleged imperialist and colonialist sins, or the festering conflict between Israel and her Arab neighbors? Yet, as Kelly points out, . . . one has only to study “the upheavals which have racked the Arab world” or “the bizarre alignments that currently adorn the Arab landscape, to conclude that the Palestinian issue is incidental to the chronic distemper” afflicting the region. This insight is confirmed today by the close cooperation of Israel with Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia in confronting the serious threat posed by Iran to all four countries and its attempt to manufacture nuclear weapons, a danger having nothing to do with the Palestinian issue.
This foreign-policy mistake of assuming other peoples think and believe as we do has been continually made by the West for decades. During the cold war, for example, the error lay in assuming that the Muslim Middle East would be our natural allies against the Soviets, given the Soviets’ atheist ideology and Russia’s long history of aggression against Muslims. Yet as others have also pointed out, modern Islamism shares many assumptions with Marxism, such as the demonization of imperialism and capitalism. In the sermons of the Ayatollah Khomeini, godfather of the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution, these Marxist tropes were linked to the West’s debauchery, materialism, and corruption of Muslim society. This alliance of necessity is still evident today, particularly in Europe, where leftists frequently are apologists for radical Islam.
The most significant event of the period these essays cover was the Iranian revolution, the origins of which continue to be misunderstood today. The standard narrative is that the cruelty and oppression of the Shah’s regime drove the Iranian people to overthrow his rule, leaving behind anger and resentment at the U.S. for its neo-imperialist support of its puppet in the region. For example, much is made of the crimes of the Shah’s secret police, the Savak. . . .
[However, as] Kelly reminds us, it wasn’t the cruelty of the Shah, unexceptional in the region even today, that sparked the revolution, but his ostentatious corruption and, most important, his alienation of the clerical class brought on by his liberalizing and secularizing reforms, which were seen as threats to Islam.
Read more on Defining Ideas: http://www.hoover.org/research/islam-through-looking-glass