How culpable is the West in conflict with Islam?

“I am confident that the Lord is at work here,” said former US secretary of state and CIA director Mike Pompeo last week. Pompeo, a probable 2024 presidential candidate, was affirming the US’s unwavering support for Israel as that country steps up military operations, which have already killed dozens of Palestinian civilians this year.

His message was not surprising, but — as an antithetical mirror of the stance of fundamentalists among Muslims — its religious burnishing jarred. What are the roots of such feelings? Rather than simply assuming a state of perpetual hostility between Western nations and the Muslim world, perhaps we can try to understand the genealogy of the oldest conflict in history.

Perspectives are important. From a Muslim vantage point, European powers perpetrated gross territorial theft on May 16 1916. The embers of the Ottoman Empire presented a land-grab feast for Britain and France, who divvied up colonial spheres of influence in the Middle East via their secret Sykes-Picot Agreement. Together with Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration — which egregiously pledged to create a Jewish homeland in conflict with the rights of Palestinians, who comprised the big majority — the agreement reneged on promises to Arab leaders of self-determination in return for their support against the Ottomans during World War 1.

Sykes-Picot certainly represented arrogant meddling. Recklessly, it compounded problems by creating arbitrary, nonsensical borders. It can also be interpreted as a colonial invasion of the entire region. For millions of people the treaty and the declaration had enormous repercussions, many of which can objectively be described as terrible — and these continue today. Debatably, then, was this a form of terrorism?

A deep sense of betrayal by the West has festered ever since among generations of ordinary people, not least descendants of the estimated 350,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes in the nakba of 1948 as a direct consequence of the unravelling of the Balfour Declaration. Today, about 7-million Palestinians are a scattered diaspora. Their cause has never been addressed by the US, which picked up the imperialist baton from Britain and France as part of its Cold War strategy and subsequent foreign policy dicta.

And so that seminal instant, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11 2001, which seared — like a literal and figurative brand — a certain idea of Islam in the minds of many in the West, was not the only watershed. 9/11 shaped subsequent international relations and geostrategic policies in a quarter of the world, but it was a symptom of something far bigger, brewing for a long time.

How should we frame the call-to-arms sermon of Pope Urban II in November 1095, which launched the Crusades, a 200-year long wave of military campaigns to seize the Holy Lands? We may choose to believe that extremist impulses are no longer embedded in Western identity and culture. But the UN conventions and the Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, including instilling and defining the word genocide, came nearly a millennium too late. For centuries, the West has trampled the Arab world, trodden on the rights of Arabs, and vilified Islam.

Knowing that to a big extent Christianity seeded the original culture war, to understand how it continues to fan its flames today we need to look deeper into the American consciousness.

In his book The Fate of Abraham, British investigative journalist Peter Oborne illuminates the influence exerted by the evangelical Christian movement in the US.

The core thrust behind Donald Trump’s election did not spring from nowhere in 2016, but has been flourishing for hundreds of years: an authoritative and energetic religious justification which sees its imminent culmination in The Rapture, the idea that the apocalypse is looming but that “true” Christian believers will be saved.

Rapture, with the principle of Manifest Destiny, is central to America’s belief that it is enjoined “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man”, according to John Sullivan, the New York journalist who conceptualised Manifest Destiny in 1845. Oborne’s book convincingly argues that Manifest Destiny — allied with other Christian-based forces in Europe — significantly influenced the shape of relations with the Muslim world in the 19th and 20th centuries.

But how powerful is this notion today? The short answer: very. “Evangelical” is now less a religious creed, more a political identity and ideology. It is the most powerful voting bloc in the US, propelling Trump to the presidency (his vice-president, Mike Pence, is a devout evangelical and is on record as believing in Rapture), giving the conservatives the majority in Congress, and prompting the Supreme Court’s recent reactionary bias.

This is the context for Pompeo’s comments, which, as an evangelical, he no doubt believes, and which are obligatory conservative power play phrases. Christian exceptionalism continues to steer the US, the most powerful country in the world, and so it frames both the agenda for, and the narrative of, the West’s interaction with Muslim nations.

This is also why, to all intents and purposes, the US will never reprimand Israel. No matter how far right the Israeli government swings — consensus is that the current government is the most reactionary in the Jewish nation’s history — and regardless of how much more territory it unilaterally seizes in the West Bank, US support for Israel is tied to America’s evangelical right wing, and so it is locked in. The overwhelming majority of UN member states recognise Palestine, but the US doesn’t (nor does Britain, France, Germany and most EU countries).

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is enormously complex. More than 50 years of an attempted, stop-start peace process has brought practically no progress. The futile status, like the 700km of wall that weaves around communities, separating and shutting out Palestinians, symbolises the intransigence of both sides. But by backing Israel to the hilt the West entrenches deep suspicions, or the sense of outright bad faith, among Muslims.            

For the Muslim world another infamous day was August 19 1953, when a CIA-backed military coup, with assistance from Britain’s MI6 agency, overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.

After his election in 1951 Mosaddegh had quickly nationalised the oilfields in the hands of private British companies and implemented other laws to curtail the elite and the powers of the monarch, Shah Reza Pahlavi.

The rights to all Iran’s oilfields had been purchased for £20,000 in 1908 with the formation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, now named BP. Oil was another reason Western powers coveted Middle Eastern territory. Since its discovery, the resource has been far too important to be left to the people who live on top of it, notes veteran BBC reporter for the Middle East Jeremy Bowen in his book The Making of the Modern Middle East.

After the coup the shah ruled ruthlessly, propped up by the US for 25 years in return for almost half of Iran’s oil assets being signed over to US companies. It took the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to overturn what the US had done.

Today, Iran is an ironclad theocratic regime that brutally suppresses its citizens, foments terrorism and fights wars by proxy in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. (It participates in the war on Ukraine, too, by supplying attack drones and ballistic missiles to its ally, Russia.)

“We” characterise the country in the image of its turbaned, grey-bearded, stern, fundamentalist leaders. But the Persian empire was one of the world’s founding civilisations, making important contributions to the arts and sciences. How different might the globe’s political alignments be today if the West’s colonial and imperial quest, and its capitalist-rooted greed for oil riches, hadn’t snuffed out the seeds of democracy in previous decades?

After 9/11, counter-terrorism became an industry in the US. Between 2002 and 2017 the government spent $2.8-trillion on counter-terrorism measures, representing 15% of Americans’ total discretionary expenditure. The context is that domestic, predominantly far-right white supremacist, terror attacks since 2001 have outstripped jihadist attacks by roughly four to one (the ratio is far higher if the near-daily incidents of non-ideological mass shootings are taken into account). But the impact has been a conditioning of most Americans’ cold attitudes towards Muslims — and hardened antipathy among some segments of the citizenry.  

One manifestation is that Western societies see the Muslim world as homogeneous and its 2-billion people as centred only in the Middle East; actually, Islam has diverse forms, and Muslims are widely dispersed. Azerbaijan is the most secular Muslim country; Oman is predominantly Ibadi, a school which is notably tolerant; Indonesia has the largest single Muslim population; while North Africa and the Sahel region also have big Muslim numbers.

Another is our visceral understanding of jihad as a mindset of destruction. The idea of jihad as a holy war is not incorrect. But it defines the word in Western minds, whereas a more holistic meaning incorporates Muslim adherents’ internal spiritual struggle to live piously and to contribute to the good of society.

The result is that in the so-called war on terror the West’s Judeo-Christian values, which it claims to defend, have been sacrificed. Al-Qaeda, Islamic State (Isis) and other Islamist terror groups have gained legitimacy because, in effect, they and the neoconservatives responsible for US foreign policy over the past 20 years pronounce an identical analysis of Islam: disregard for its messages of compassion and humanity and an insistence that it is a violent, retributive religion.

We need to reflect on our use of terminology and language. “Extremist” and “Islamist” are sprouted by politicians without understanding either their real meanings or the impact of their propagandist repetition. Oborne makes an observation that challenges us as followers of current events: there is a contradiction between Western countries’ free speech principles and the media’s shading of even nonviolent Islam commentaries as a threat to the West and often, worse, part of a wider terrorist movement.

For proof of how deep this runs, consider that in 2019 the UK’s government was cited as deeply Islamophobic. The cabinet itself was accused of discriminatory sloganeering, with outwardly racist utterances towards Muslims — “ragheads” and “letterboxes” — attributed to former prime minister Boris Johnson.

In enlightened, liberal, laissez-faire France a culture war has been unfolding for 20 to 30 years as the country’s Muslim population has grown. The New York Times reported recently on the small town of Callac in Brittany, where residents strongly oppose a plan to settle Syrian refugees. Many deem it part of a “great replacement” scheme to supersede French natives; others express fears that “radical Islam” will infiltrate the community.

France has had its own awful experiences of terrorism. On November 13 2015, Isis killed 131 people in a series of co-ordinated attacks in Paris. Earlier that year, 12 employees of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo were murdered by Al-Qaeda after it published a cartoon depicting Prophet Muhammad. “Je suis Charlie!” is still a rallying cry in defence of the perceived — and real — threats to the fundamental values of France.

And yet, does the media in France hide behind free speech in its bias, even hatred, of Islam as a religion and its associated cultural values? Charlie Hebdo is a leftist, quasi-anarchic title, but its February 6 cartoon mocking the devastation of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria (“No need to send tanks”) borders on hate speech. The spokesperson for Turkey’s President Recep Erdoğan expressed outrage: “Modern barbarians! Drown in your grudge and hatred.”

Like Britain and the US, the origins of the outlook of many French people, and the driver of its international policies, can be traced to the seismic impact of France’s colonial past in the predominantly Muslim regions of the Middle East, North Africa and the Sahel.  

Though Western powers were neither responsible for, nor participants in, many of the conflicts between and within Muslim nations throughout the centuries, there is clear culpability for some of the strife, especially in modern history.

Credible analyses of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 note that the US and its coalition partners created the very conditions that fostered Al-Qaeda and, later, Isis. Obliterating Iraq’s state institutions under the guise of ridding the region of weapons of mass destruction represented a triumph of the West’s military-industrial complex over truth and common sense. There were no such weapons, but president George Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair’s lie was the pretext for the invasion, which “created [other] wars and provoked hatred of Muslims in the US and among its allies across the globe”, writes Oborne.

From hasty over-reaction to dithering, the West must accept a degree of responsibility for the failure of the pro-democracy Arab Spring uprising and the wars that resulted from its suppression.

The protracted conflicts in Libya, Syria and Yemen are, to varying degrees, attributable either to irresolute or under-imaginative strategic decisions taken by successive US administrations, not least president Barack Obama. He mustered no more than words in support of the Syrian “Day of Rage” protests which kick-started the Arab Spring in that country in March 2011. He walked away from his own red line, specified as the use of chemical weapons, when Syrian President Bashar Assad did so against his own people in 2013, causing over 1,000 civilian deaths.

Assad and other authoritarian rulers clinging to power in the region — and Vladimir Putin — saw America’s weakness. Russia moved in to prop up Assad, and the Syrian civil war is now the world’s longest-running and deadliest current conflict, with nearly 500,000 deaths and the largest refugee crisis since World War 2.

Obama’s inaction signalled “that the world’s only superpower, and key allies such as Britain, were not prepared to fight for a free, democratic Syria, no more than they would fight for democracy in support of other Arab Spring revolts”, noted Simon Tisdall, foreign affairs correspondent for The Guardian.

Contextually, the Arab Spring’s collapse is associated with the West’s history of support for authoritarian regimes in the broader region, like the Shah of Iran decades earlier, and Egypt’s brutal military dictatorship under Abdel Fattah El-Sisi now.

Morally, the balance of judgment should surely be that nothing can excuse terrorism, defined as the unlawful, politically motivated use of murder and violence against civilians, and ranging in scale from mass atrocities such as 9/11 to last year’s shocking public stabbing of the novelist Salman Rushdie.

By the same moral design, Guantánamo Bay, America’s longest-standing war prison, exists as a 21-year-and-ongoing form of state-sponsored terrorism. Its practices — incorporating rendition and torture — have been periodically ruled illegal by the US Supreme Court and consistently condemned by human rights organisations including the American Civil Liberties Union. A total of 779 men have been held in Guantánamo; 34 are still there. Only 12 have ever been charged and just two convicted.

Cue cries of disgust: how can there be a moral equivalence between naked terrorism and the retaliation or preventive measures? Which side of this coin is rooted in a more systematically just context, underpinned by humanist values and principles?

The point, however, is that ever since the Judeo-Christian and Muslim worlds collided, leaders on both sides have made appalling decisions based on religious dogma, aggrandisement, and blind prejudice. There has been an unwillingness to assess history and learn from it, to envision lasting solutions and forge compromises towards these.

On the surface, it was just another photo-op when US President Joe Biden met Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in July last year. The images show that Biden wasn’t warm. In 2019 he had pledged to treat Saudi Arabia as a pariah state over its human rights record, and the murder and dismemberment of American-Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, which US intelligence agencies say was ordered by Bin Salman, would have been on his mind.

But Biden had to kowtow because he needed the Saudis to stabilise oil production and soften crude oil’s drastic price rises at the time. The US also relies on the despotic kingdom as a buffer against Iran, which is why it continues to sell tens of billions of dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia annually. A leading arms sales tracking organisation, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, records that Saudi Arabia bought 23% of all US weapons sold between 2017 and 2021.

The Biden-Bin Salman meeting, and the flow of weapons, demonstrates the modern world’s complex geostrategy dilemmas within the interactions between Western, predominantly Christian, and Islamic nations.

Biden is an arch compromiser. He will have been acutely aware of Saudi Arabia’s role in the catastrophe of Yemen, “by every measure of pain and suffering, [currently] the harshest place in the world to be born, to live and to die”, writes Bowen. But he will also know that the US has long propped up the Saudi dynasty and that US policies have strengthened the radical Wahhabi strain of Islam in that country.

So if we scratch just a bit deeper a key point emerges: the West bears a big share of responsibility for the fraught relationships with the Muslim world and its myriad conflicts.

To start dissipating hatreds, to narrow the divide between entire blocs of nations, between countries such as the US and Iran, and between swathes of population groups within countries such as Britain and France, it’s vital to understand the roots of the schisms. And truths, too, about the “other” side. For the sake of the long-term future of all cultures and religions, East, West and all other compass points, we must find our common humanity.