Secular Aspirations and Political Islam in the Arab Middle East: The 1950s Reconsidered

Abstract

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 37, 1, 2012 © The Maghreb Review 2012 This publication is printed on longlife paper SECULAR ASPIRATIONS AND POLITICAL ISLAM IN THE ARAB MIDDLE EAST: THE 1950S RECONSIDERED BY JAMES PISCATORI∗ Wm. Roger Louis ends his great study of the British empire in the Middle East by noting that, as the 1940s had witnessed British concern over the old regimes, the 1950s would turn to concern about a revolutionary Middle East.1 Those regimes were assumed to be revolutionary because they would be antiimperialist or nationalist. Military coups in Syria in 1949, 1951 and 1954, the Egyptian revolution of 1952, the revision of the Anglo-Egyptian treaty in 1954, the Suez war of 1956, and in 1958 the overthrow of the monarchy in Iraq, the Lebanese civil war, the British military intervention in Jordan and the formation of the United Arab Republic between Egypt and Syria were highlights of an eventful decade that induced anxiety in the West as bipolar geostrategic rivalry unfolded on the larger world stage. Mid-ranking military officers, nationalist and socialist ideologues and urban technocrats looked set to dominate the modern Middle Eastern political universe. While this view was common, it needs to be qualified in two ways. First, any implication that Islam was absent from the political equation of the time is offset by a defined view of the time that it was very much present. In this view, it was an unpredictable throwback to an earlier age but, with luck, it could be positively channelled given Islam’s even greater hatred of communism than of the West. The ascendancy of modernization theory in the 1960s somewhat obscured the extent to which Cold War imperatives had dictated an approving, utilitarian view of what was regarded as a traditional religious force. Second, some of the literature on political Islam has drawn misleading conclusions from the purportedly revolutionary Middle East of the 1950s. While explanations for political Islam, fundamentalism, Islamism, the Islamic revival or Islamic resurgence almost always prudently point to several causes, considerable emphasis has been placed on the reaction to this period’s perceived prevailing secularism, the belief that religion should be separated from the state and had little to contribute to political goals and programmes.2 * Durham University. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference on ‘The Middle East in the 1950s: Historical Perspectives: Israel, the Arab World, and the Great Powers’, co-sponsored by the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies and the Crown Family Center for Jewish Studies at Northwestern University, 25-27 April 2010. I am grateful to Professor Elie Rekhess for his kind invitation to participate and for suggesting this topic and to Ronald Nettler for his useful comments. 1 Wm. Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States and Postwar Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 747. 2 The new Egyptian revolutionary leader, ‘Abd al-Nasir, told the French journalist Jean Lacouture in 1954: ‘after eighteen months in power, I still don’t see how it would be possible 4 JAMES PISCATORI Even so perceptive an observer of the Arabs as Malcolm Kerr, who famously chronicled the Arab Cold War between the Arab nationalist revolutionaries and the conservative monarchies, argued that the struggle for secularization had been largely won in the 1950s, except among the diehard Muslim Brothers and in the cultural area. The remaining unspoken debate was between secularists who ‘would combat religious traditionalism by surgery and those who prefer medication’.3 In addition, a good deal of the literature on political Islam tends to date its emergence to a period of a decade or more after the end of the 1950s. Many would ascribe its rise as a formidable force in the Middle East to the mid- to late 1970s. For Gilles Kepel, this decade was neatly bracketed by the death of Egypt’s ‘Abd al-Nasir in 1970, heralding the decline of Arab nationalism, and the overthrow of the Shah in Iran in 1978–9, marking the rise of a revolutionary Islam. Some date it, at its earliest, to the loss of Jerusalem in the Arab–Israeli war...