The Two Faces of Islam by Stephen Schwartz

Author:Stephen Schwartz [Schwartz, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7629-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2003-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

Khomeini’s advent, coming close on the heels of the oil boycott and Beirut, changed more than the Islamic status quo that had existed since the end of the second world war. The Iranian revolutionary regime worried the Russians almost as much as it did the Saudis and the Americans, and they suddenly looked with anxiety at their Islamic possessions in Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan. The Slavic empire at its height included millions of Muslims. Russian Communism had forcibly lifted them into the contemporary world by compulsory education, industrialization, and modern communications and transportation, but it had cut them off from the historical legacy they shared with Arab divines, Turkish conquerors, and Persian poets and mathematicians. The vast majority of Muslims under Soviet rule were Sunnis. But how would they respond to the call of the Imam?

Late in the day as it was for the Leninist system, Communism seemed solidly established as a permanent element of the global political landscape. If anything, the Russians appeared to have tipped the worldwide balance of forces decisively to their advantage when their Vietnamese clients harried the United States and its allies out of Southeast Asia. Yet at the same time the internal crisis of the Soviet system—almost uncanny in its resemblance to that of the Saudi kingdom—advanced, largely misunderstood in the West, through the 1970s.

No sooner had they gained an impressive apparent victory over the West in Indochina than the Communist ship ran aground on the shoals of history. The election of a Pole, Karol Wojtyla, to the papacy, also in 1978, represented the first challenge to Muscovite imperialism that could not be answered by force alone. The authority of political dictatorships could vanish, to be brusquely replaced by that of sincere men of God—whether the benign John Paul II or the harsh Khomeini. Suddenly aware of how quickly the breath of chaos might descend upon their necks, the Russian Communist rulers began casting about for a new internal enemy that could be manipulated to unify their people as well as an external target against which to mobilize their Slav subjects. In the past, the Jews would have filled the bill admirably. But Western condemnation of Soviet anti-Jewish measures had stung painfully, and a return to total, frenzied Judeophobia in internal Russian politics seemed an uncertain path.

Muslims, however, presented an ideal target for the suppressed resentments of the Russians. There were millions of them inside the Soviet Union. They represented a hereditary enemy of the tsarist empire. They had never liked Communism. They differed from the Slavs in appearance and language. They had a high birth rate and could be presented as a demographic threat to the Russian nation. Muslims were overrepresented in the criminal classes thanks to brutal Russian discrimination. This was especially cruel against the Chechens, who along with other small nations had been deported from the Caucasus in their entirety by Stalin during the second world war. In addition, they had kept their Sufism alive in secret, and

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