The notion that this kind of modernization makes for enhanced national power and rapid progress and helps everyone achieve greater happiness was widely shared, regardless of ethnic or religious background or ideological affinity. India’s agnostic prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the atheistic Mao Zedong also saw themselves as modernizers in a hurry. Revolution, Mao warned menacingly, is ‘not a dinner party’; Nehru, a Fabian socialist, was anxious to change India’s ‘outlook and appearance and give her the garb of modernity’. Nehru’s admirer in neighbouring Pakistan, the Berkeley-educated Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and other left-leaning Muslim leaders were more than willing to invoke Islamic ideals of brotherhood and justice, but these were meant as broad, framing categories for more central progressive and modern concerns.
Often ostentatiously secular rather than devout, and Westernized in manner and appearance, they saw progress as an urgent imperative for their traditional societies; they hoped, above all, to make their societies strong and competitive enough in the dog-eat-dog world of international relations. Accordingly, all traditional institutions were brought to the tribunal of rationality and utility, and found wanting. Postcolonial leaders worked with the assumption that a robust bureaucratic state and a suitably enlightened ruling elite could quickly forge citizens out of a scattered mass of peasants and merchants, and endow them with a sense of national identity. The fin de siècle spirit of building a New Man and New Society through a rational manipulation of collective will prevailed across Asia and Africa, reflected even in the cultural sphere – in literature, songs and films that celebrated teachers, doctors and dam-builders.
Modern Head with Gothic Body
Postcolonial nation-building was an extraordinary project: hundreds of millions of people persuaded to renounce – and often scorn – a world of the past that had endured for thousands of years, and to undertake a gamble of creating modern citizens who would be secular, enlightened, cultured and heroic. Travelling through the new nation states of Asia and Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, Raymond Aron had already discerned the great obstacles in their way. In his view, there were not many political choices before people who had lost their old traditional sources of authority while embarking on the adventure of building new nation states and industrial economies in a secular and materialist ethos. The rationalized societies, constituted by ‘individuals and their desires’, had to either build a social and political consensus themselves or have it imposed on them by a strongman. Failure would plunge them into violent anarchy.
As it turned out, the autocratic modernizers failed to usher a majority of their wards into the modern world, and their abortive revolutions from above paved the way for more radical ones from below, followed, as we have seen in recent years, by anarchy. There were many reasons for this, primary among them the legacy of imperialism – the division of the Middle East into mandates and spheres of influence, the equally arbitrary creation of unviable nation states, unequal treaties with oil-rich states – and the pressures of neo-imperialism. Even when free of such crippling burdens, the modernizers could never simply repeat Europe’s antecedent development, which, as we noted earlier, had been calamitously uneven, fuelled by a rush of demagogic politics, ethnic cleansing and total wars. Moreover, as Western Europe itself was transformed and empowered by its economic miracle in the post-war era, and the United States emerged as the most powerful country in history, the postcolonial world had to telescope into two or three decades the political and economic developments that had taken more than a century to unfold in both Europe and America.
The new nation states failed to be a tabula rasa, despite the systematic destruction, as in Turkey, of the past. The rationalized state manifested itself in ordinary lives less by social welfare institutions than by brutal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, such as Savak in Iran, a sinister ‘deep state’ in Turkey, and the Mukhābarāt of many Arab countries: many citizens found themselves forced into a ‘maze of a nightmare’, as Octavio Paz wrote, ‘in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason’.
Turkey may seem relatively fortunate in being able to build a modern state with a Gothic body out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Disorder remained the fate of many nations that had been insufficiently or too fervidly imagined, such as Pakistan; their weak state structures and fragmented civil society condemned them to oscillate perennially between civilian and military despots while warding off challenges from disaffected minorities and religious fanatics. And even their relative successes in approximating the Western model – introducing a semblance of civil order through the police, diminishing the power and privileges of old elites, clerical, feudal and aristocratic, or extending Western-style education – had ambiguous results.
The mullahs and landlords lost some of their autonomy, social function and hereditary status. Desires for a libertarian and egalitarian order grew within the nascent civil society, especially among young men educated in Western-style institutions. But new inequalities, created by the bureaucracies of the modern state and the division of labour and specialization required by industrial and commercial economies, accumulated on top of old ones.
The cultural makeover forced upon socially conservative masses aggravated a widely felt sense of exclusion and injury. The radical disruptions left a large majority of the unprivileged to stew in resentment against the top-down modernizers and Westernizers. A typical agitator spawned during these decades was Abu Musab al-Suri, the chief strategist and ideologue for al-Qaeda. Born in 1958, a year after Osama bin Laden, to a devout middle-class family in Aleppo, al-Suri dropped out of university in 1980 to join a radical group that opposed Syria’s secular nationalist Baath Party and advocated an Islamic state based on Shariah law. Working his way through various Islamist organizations in Asia and Africa, al-Suri ended up designing a leaderless and global jihad for uprooted men like himself.
A Militant Intelligentsia
Al-Suri, labelled by Newsweek the ‘Francis Fukuyama of al-Qaeda’, was more accurately the Mikhail Bakunin of the Muslim world in his preference for anarchist tactics. In his magnum opus, The Global Islamic Resistance Call (2004), al-Suri scorned hierarchical forms of political organization, exhorting a jihadi strategy based on ‘unconnected cells’ and ‘individual operations’ – a call answered by today’s auto-intoxicated killers. In mass-producing such malcontents and radicals through modernization, Muslim countries followed, as discussed earlier, a pattern established by Russia – the first country where autocrats decreed a tryst with modernity. Already in 1705, a Prussian envoy reporting on the drastic Westernizing venture of Peter the Great, anticipated the backlash against Muslim leaders of the twentieth century when he wrote that this ‘very vexed nation’ was ‘inclined to revolution because of their abolished customs, shorn beards, forbidden clothing, confiscated monastery property’.