Moscow - Tehran Alliance

Published on February 16th, 2017 | by Mark N. Katz8

Targeting Iran’s Regime Will Strengthen, Not Break, the Moscow-Tehran Alliance

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by Mark N. Katz
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published on February 13, hawkish scholar Michael Ledeen argued that “dismantling the Khamenei regime as peacefully as possible” is the best way to end what he describes as the Russian-Iranian alliance. His argument, though, contained several questionable assertions that cast doubt on the feasibility of his policy recommendations.
Early on in the article, Ledeen notes that before Russia intervened in Syria in September 2015, the survival of the Assad regime was seriously threatened despite receiving military assistance from Iran. But his assurance that “[w]ithout Russian bombers and special forces, Iran would face defeat, as would Mr. Assad” is not necessarily true. Now that Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah (as well as other Shi’a militia forces) have inflicted severe losses on the opposition to Assad, Iran and its Shi’a allies could likely defend Assad even if Russian forces withdrew. Further, with Saudi Arabia now preoccupied with the conflict in Yemen and Turkey focused on suppressing the Kurds in both Turkey and Syria, it is not clear that these two countries would be willing or able to support the Syrian opposition to the point where it could threaten the Assad regime as it did just prior to the Russian intervention.
Although Ledeen describes the Russian-Iranian relationship as “very tight,” he points out several reasons why Putin should prefer a “nonjihadi” Iranian regime. These include Iran’s strong military and nuclear capabilities. Although many in the West and Israel understandably fear Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, Russia is not equally fearful of this outcome. Indeed, many Russian scholars and observers I have spoken with over the years are incredulous that the U.S. actually fears an Iranian nuclear capability. America, after all, has tolerated a nuclear Pakistan, which many in Moscow see as far more erratic and threatening than Iran. They also wonder why the rules of nuclear deterrence—nuclear states are deterred from launching nuclear attacks by the knowledge that they will immediately come under nuclear attack themselves—are not seen as applying to Iran. The ayatollahs, after all, want to preserve their rule, not see it destroyed.
Ledeen’s assertion that Iran “supported separatist Muslim movements in the ‘stans and Chechnya” is just plain false. To this day, Russian observers express appreciation for Iran’s cooperating with Moscow to negotiate an end to the Tajik civil war in the 1990s instead of supporting the opponents of the Kremlin-backed post-Soviet regime there. And, unlike certain Arab countries, Iran did not support the Chechen rebels. The desire to maintain good relations with Moscow as well as the fear that Chechen secession would inflame secessionist movements inside Iran were far more important to Tehran than solidarity with fellow Muslims (especially ones who are Sunni).
This leads to another point that Ledeen overlooked: Russian and Iranian cooperation is not just based on common animosity toward America and Israel, but also on a common fear of Sunni jihadists. Just as groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are anti-Western, they are also anti-Shi’a as well as anti-Russian. Moscow and Tehran, then, have a common interest in working against them independent of their shared antipathy toward the U.S.
Toward the end of his article, Ledeen recognizes that the U.S. is not really in a position to offer a deal to Moscow that would draw it away from Tehran. His recommendation for breaking the Russian-Iranian alliance, then, is to help the “vast majority of Iranians” (whom he numbers in the millions) “topple the Islamic Republic and establish a secular government resembling those in the West.” But America’s efforts to promote democracy in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya should raise doubts about its ability to do so in a much larger country such as Iran. Ledeen does not actually call for U.S.-led military intervention in Iran, but he doesn’t explain how some lesser degree of American support can enable even millions of Iranians to topple the Islamic Republic. The ayatollahs and their Republican Guard allies have, after all, been quite successful at suppressing the regime’s opponents. Ledeen does not explain how this is going to change now.
Further, it is not clear that the downfall of the Islamic Republic would actually result in a “secular government resembling those in the West.” One possibility is that an even more zealous regime could replace the current Islamist one. Another is that, like Iraq and Syria, the downfall of an authoritarian regime that holds the country together by force could result in an outbreak of secessionist conflict involving groups with cross-border ties: Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen, and Baluchis. Despite the examples of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, Ledeen does not acknowledge even the possibility that the downfall of the current authoritarian regime in Tehran could lead to indefinite conflict there—which would not benefit America’s allies or interests in the region.
Last but not least: If Tehran even suspects that the Trump administration is seriously attempting to topple it as Ledeen proposes, the immediate effect will be to motivate the country to strengthen its alliance with Russia. And if Putin thinks that Washington is attempting to topple the Islamic Republic, this will only increase his fears that Washington could try to topple him too. Following Ledeen’s policy advice, then, is only likely to strengthen the Russian-Iranian alliance and not end it.

Calling Iranians "descendants of Magi"by Shireen Hunter

Published on September 14th, 2016 | by Shireen Hunter

12

Calling Iranians “Descendants of the Magi” Is Actually a Compliment

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by Shireen T. Hunter
Recently, the chief mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz Al Sheikh, said that Iranians are Majus. This is the Arab name for Iran’s Zoroastrians, who were the majority of the people at the time of the Arab invasion of Persia in the 7th century AD. The mufti was implying by this statement that Iranians are not Muslims.
This belief is neither new nor limited to the Saudis or the Wahhabis. However, as far as I can recall, no significant Muslim religious leader had openly called them non-Muslims, although some secular leaders had done so before. For example, during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein regularly referred to the Iranians as Majus, and even worse, as insects that should be sprayed with pesticides. Indeed, he did just that by using chemical weapons against them.
This widely held Arab belief that Iranians are not real Muslims is based on the premise that they never fully converted to Islam. Instead, they developed Shi’ism, which is allegedly nothing more than their old religion with a thin guise of Islam. Moreover, Arabs believe that the Iranians did so in order to subvert and undermine their true and pure Islam. In a Cairo bookshop near Al-Azhar several years ago, I saw a book for sale entitled Shia Conspiracy Against Islam. Since then, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and others, along with religious figures such as the Egypt-born resident of Qatar Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi, have sponsored many more books on Shi’ism’s threat to Islam and Iran’s plans to convert Sunnis to Shi’ism.
Some highly educated and otherwise reasonable and tolerant people also subscribe to this view. Once at a meeting in Cairo, long before the current upsurge in Sunni-Shia disputes, a very enlightened and tolerant Egyptian colleague, in response to a comment of mine about the dangers of sectarianism in the Muslim world, said: “Yes, you are right. We have a big problem and that is the conflict between the Muslims and the Shias.” He thus betrayed an ingrained attitude toward Shias.
The idea of Shi’ism as an Iranian creation has, of course, no historical validity. The split that occurred within the Muslim community of Arabia immediately after the Prophet Muhammad’s demise and that eventually led to the Sunni-Shi’a divide, was a purely Arab phenomenon. At the time, Arab/Islamic armies had not yet conquered Iran. Later, some Iranians might have seen in the Shi’a split from Sunnism a reflection of some of their ancient values and rites. But they certainly did not invent Shi’ism. The first impetus for the Iranian embrace of the House of Ali came after the Arab invasion and the policy of ethnic discrimination practiced by Iran’s new Arab rulers, beginning with the first Caliph Omar, despite Islam’s claim to the racial and ethnic equality of all Muslims. The Abbasids even perpetuated this practice, although Persian Muslims had contributed considerably to their victory over the Umayyad dynasty.
If Iranians are non-Muslims then Islam’s edict that Muslims should not fight other Muslims does not apply to them. Therefore, you can kill Shi’a Iranians just like any other infidel without any twinge of conscience. In the current atmosphere of tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran, spreading the view of Iranians as non-Muslims has considerable political ramifications. For example, it can help the Saudis enlist other Muslims in their fight, both overt and covert, against Iran. Already, groups such as the Taliban, the Islamic State, and al-Qaeda have internalized this Saudi view and view the Iranians as infidels.

The Real Gift of the Magi
The Saudi mufti’s undignified outburst is understandable given these latent prejudices as well as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s criticism of Saudi handling of the Haj. More surprising is that Iranians are offended at being called “Majus.” Majus means disciples of the Magi (Mogh), which means Zoroastrian (or pre-Zoroastrian) priest. These same Magi, of whose wisdom Plato spoke highly, brought gifts to the Christ child.
In fact, Zoroastrianism is the first of the world’s monotheistic religions, although it is often seen as dualistic because it recognizes the existence of an evil force (Ahriman) that fights the good God (Ahura Mazda). But, as in the Old Testament, the good God ultimately triumphs. Zoroastrianism has a sophisticated cosmology and is the foundation of many principles that are part of the Abrahamic religions, including the abstract concepts of heaven, hell, a bridge of judgment, a cosmic denouement at the end of the world, and the coming of a messiah, or Mahdi (Saoyeshant) in Zoroastrianism.
In fact, Zoroastrianism offers the first dialectic rather than circular understanding of human history and destiny. The conflict between two opposing forces leads to a final denouement rather than perpetual reincarnations or the soul’s absorption into a vast center of energy. It’s ironic that Westerners, with their emphasis on the battle between good and evil on display during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, do not recognize its source. Zoroastrianism recognizes free will and enjoins good thoughts, good works, and good words. It is a positive religion and emphasizes the role that the individual should play in the ultimate victory of good over evil. Also a happy religion, its festivals outnumber its mourning ceremonies.

Under the Sassanids, Zoroastrian Iran developed what the Danish historian, Arthur Christensen, has called “a magnificent edifice.” Although not on a par with Greece or Rome, it had its centers of learning, including the famed university of Jundi Shapur, today’s Ahwaz, where many Christian and Greek scientists came when Byzantium’s policies discouraged learning. The sixth-century Sassanid King Khosrow Anoushirvan had a reputation for modeling himself after Plato’s philosopher king, a reputation that enticed some Greek philosophers to go to his court. Although he did not live up to their expectations, they were surprised that he was familiar with Greek philosophy and the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Sassanid Iran had a flourishing culture of art, painting, sculpture, and music. In short, the children of the Magi had not done so badly for themselves.
By the time of the Arab invasion in 642, Iran’s Zoroastrianism had lost some of these positive aspects. It had become more fatalistic, partly because of the influence of Babylonian creeds, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Asceticism had replaced its more active spirit. Imperial overstretch had weakened the Sassanid Empire, thus making it easier for the Arabs to defeat it.
The Gift that Keeps on Giving
Despite their defeat, the Iranians largely formed and shaped what has come to be known as Islamic Civilization. For 300 years, Muslims used the Sassanian tax and other archives for their own administrative purposes. Sassanian administration, court etiquette, and governing methods became the model for the Islamic Caliphates and later Turkic rulers from the Seljuks to the Ottomans. Most post-Islamic books on politics, such as Siyastnameh of Khajeh Nezam ul Molk—the vezir of the Seljuk king, Malekshah—and later books were modeled after the book of Ardeshir Babekan, the founder of the Sassanid Empire, called Karnameh Ardeshir Babekan. Many Persians, such as the Barmaki family, actually ran the chancelleries of the Abbasid caliphs and later those of Turkic rulers.
The Baghdad Dar Ul Hikma was modeled after the Sassanid Khaneh e Danesh (both mean houses of knowledge). Its art forms, which later were much diminished by Islamic restrictions on painting, sculpture, and music, shaped Islamic art from Mesopotamia to Andalusia to Mogul India. As noted by Professor Roman Girshman, the real inheritor of Sassanid art was Islam, which took that art with it everywhere it went. Professor Ada Bozeman has called this influence Iran’s conquest of Islam. Sibveyh, a Persian, wrote the first Arabic grammar, and the Iranians, together with Christians, translated Greek works into Arabic. Even the Persian One Thousand and One Nights (Hezar Afsaneh) became the Arabian Nights. In short, while not perfect, Iran’s pre-Islamic civilization could more than hold its own with other existing civilizations, including that of Byzantium.
It’s not surprising for the Saudi mufti, out of political expediency, to call Iranians Majus. What is sad is that present-day Iranians should see this appellation as an insult. But then Iran’s Islamists have been waging a campaign against the country’s indigenous culture for at least 60 years. Since their victory in the 1979 revolution, they have worked relentlessly to erase all vestiges of Iran’s indigenous culture and to subsume it under a state-sponsored, politicized, and ideologized form of Islam that is totally alien to Iran’s traditional Shia Islam, which is closely intertwined with Iran’s early civilization.
Image: The three magi, from an illuminated manuscript in Farnborough Abbey

The Myth of the Islamic State

The Myth of the Islamic State - The History of a Political Idea

Mohammed Ayoob

Foreign Affairs Sunday, April 3, 2016

MOHAMMED AYOOB is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of International Relations and Founding Director (2006–2012) of the Muslim Studies Program, Michigan State University, and author of The Many Faces of Political Islam.

ISIS’ declaration of an Islamic State [1] begs a fundamental question: When and how did that concept become a part of the political vocabulary [2]of Muslim societies? After all, the idea hasn’t been around forever, and its popularity has waxed and waned over time. In fact, its emergence and popularity are tied to the specific conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Muslim societies responded to European colonial rule.

As long as Muslim rulers ruled over Muslim lands, no matter how arbitrarily, the notion of an Islamic state was dormant, if not nonexistent. Although the concept of sharia existed in Muslim political vocabulary, sharia law was normally confined to personal matters such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The corpus of criminal and civil law was viewed as rightfully created and administered by states. One of the greatest Ottoman sultans, Suleiman the Magnificent, was even given the title Qanuni (law-giver) as testament to the fact that much of the legal sphere naturally fell outside the purview of sharia.

The normal order of things broke down once non-Muslim powers came to rule over most Muslim societies in the age of colonialism. European governments set out to define hardened colonial boundaries where frontiers had previously been fluid, and they attached legal sanctity to the lines drawn on maps. In the premodern states, legitimacy had been based on conquest and ability to defend territory. The states were also minimalist in terms of their intrusion into the lives of their subjects. By contrast, the colonial state’s legitimacy rested not only on conquest and holding territory but also on its capacity, modeled on European nation-states, to weld diverse subjects into a homogenous mass through a common language, a common legal system, and the provision of basic services, in return for taxes and other resources.

Iraqi security forces arrest suspected militants of the Islamic State (ISIS) during a raid and weapons search operation in Hawija, April 24, 2014.

The arrival of colonial rule kicked off the search in Muslim lands for the answer to what went wrong, that is, how the natural order of things—namely, Muslim rule over Muslim lands—was overturned. One of the most popular answers, and also the most simplistic, was that the natural order was crumbling because Muslims were no longer faithful to the fundamentals of Islam. The only way to remedy this situation, the thinking went, was to return to the pristine age of Islam, the period of the salaf-al-salih (righteous ancestors), covering the first four decades from the founding of the Muslim polity in 622, when the Prophet Muhammad and his immediate successors exercised power. This longing for a return to pristine Islam included the re-creation of that imagined golden age’s political system. These ideas were grafted onto the increasingly dominant European style nation-state, creating the hybrid notion of Islamic state, or rather the Islamic nation-state.

The urge to create an Islamic state gained further momentum in the second half of the twentieth century, as secular post-independence regimes in the Muslim world—politically authoritarian, economically inefficient, and morally bankrupt—failed to deliver power, wealth, or dignity to their peoples. The slogan “Islam is the solution” gained currency precisely because every other model of governance seemed to have failed. And so “golden age” and “caliphate” crept into the Muslim world’s political discourse.

STATE OF CONTRADICTION

In the process of building modern Islamic states, however, the idea’s proponents tended to gloss over the concept’s inherent problems and internal contradictions. The most important of these was, of course, the fact that the Islamic state is an idea borrowed from the experiences of the West and, therefore, had no basis in the historical experiences of the Muslim world. Further, they ignored the problem that the imagined golden age was fundamentally un-replicable because all revelation ended with the death of the prophet and so divine guidance in political and social affairs was no longer possible.

Perhaps even more troubling, the golden age wasn’t even particularly golden. Three of the first four caliphs (the Rashidun, or “rightly guided”) were assassinated, itself an index of high political instability. Political and social fissures between the natives of Medina and migrants from Mecca, and, more important, disputes among the Meccan elite—especially between the Banu Umayya and the Banu Hashim, the two powerful clans of the Qureish, the Prophet’s tribe—plagued the period, and civil wars soon became the order of the day. Eventually these conflicts ended up creating the theological divide between Sunni and Shia [3].

Meanwhile, rapid expansion of the Arab-Muslim empire created its own divisions and frailties, especially as the “Arab” empire under the Umayyads became the “Muslim” empire under the Abbasids with the induction of Persian and Turkic notables into the political and military elite. By the mid-tenth century, the caliph reigned only in name with local warlords, predominantly Turkic, holding most of the power.

 

 

 

To be sure, the concept of the caliphate, which became important as a way to hold the community together after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, remained important at least in theory. But there is little to suggest that it was ever integral to the practice of Islam. Beyond being hard to justify as a Koranic concept, it has an extremely checkered history. Succession after the prophet’s death was a far more complicated affair than the popular hagiographic accounts indicate. There were at least three parties contesting for power in those days: the leaders of the Ansar (the tribes of Medina); leaders of the Meccan refugees, especially from the tribe of Qureish, from which Muhammad had hailed; and a splinter group of Meccans who, with support from some of the Medinites, argued that succession should remain within the family of the prophet and that Ali ibn Abi Talib, the prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, was the rightful heir.

This enmity became intertwined with a pre-Islamic rivalry between the Banu Hashim, the specific clan of the prophet, to which Ali belonged, and the Banu Umayya, who had held much of the power in pagan Mecca before being ousted by the victorious Muslims returning from Medina. Most leaders of the Banu Umayya converted to Islam after the Muslims’ conquest of Mecca, many possibly to save their skin. The politically astute Banu Umayya eventually got their way. Their power increased as they coopted other Muslim factions, largely through the use of state power and patronage. This coalition later emerged as the majority faction in Islam known as the Sunnis.

The institution of the caliphate, now arrogated to themselves by the Umayyads, was thus transformed into arbitrary hereditary rule. It would have possibly lost legitimacy in the eyes of the believers had it not been for the proposition propagated by the ulema, the religious scholars, that Umayyad rule was legitimate. The ulema’s aim in doing so was to prevent chaos in the yet fledgling Arab Muslim community. They used the Koranic verse “O you who have believed, obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you” to justify even the most arbitrary and unjust rule. Justice, in other words, was sacrificed to preserve order, a proposition that became the hallmark of Sunni religio-political thought for a long time to come.

The Abbasid hereditary caliphate followed Umayyad rule. Its main contribution was that it saw the beginnings of a rational bureaucratic state, thanks to the influence of the newly inducted Persian elite; it was manned substantially by Persian dignitaries. However, it also introduced the Persian idea of kingship (zille-ilahi, the shadow of God on earth) thus further augmenting the arbitrary and authoritarian character of the state.

The institution of the caliphate, now based on the twin principles of force and heredity, was further degraded from the middle of the tenth century with the rise of Turko-Persian military fiefdoms. The fiction of the caliphate was maintained but real power lay with the predominantly Turkic sultans who ruled openly on the basis of the principle that might makes right, with the caliph investing in them post-facto with the right to rule over territory they already controlled by force.

It was only when Ottoman power waned [4] in the second half of the nineteenth century (which coincided with the major European powers starting to divide up Ottoman territories) that Sultan Abdul Hamid II began to emphasize the role of the Ottoman sultan as the caliph of Islam. He used his role as the caliph to bolster his legitimacy among his Muslim subjects and to instigate rebellion among the Muslim subjects of the European powers that threatened the Ottoman Empire. In the end, the Ottomans were defeated in World War I, and Turkey’s new government, led by Mustafa Kemal, abolished the institution of caliph in 1924.

The sentiments that Abdul Hamid had helped unleash, though, endured. Anti-colonial movements, some of them described as jihads, raged in Algeria [5], Egypt [6], northwest India [7], Indonesia [8], Sudan [9], Somalia [10], and elsewhere. These movements focused above all on challenging European rule and attaining independence within the distinct proto-states formed by colonial boundaries. However, they also borrowed heavily from Islamic terminology to mobilize their populations against European rule. This set the stage for the emergence of more explicitly Islamist movements bent on turning their societies into Islamic societies and their polities into Islamic states.

Several major political movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt [11] and the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan [12](originally India), specifically seeking to Islamize their societies and polities, emerged during the colonial period and continued to be active in the post-independence era in opposition to the relatively secular elites that took power after the departure of the colonial rulers. However, their notion of the Islamic state was largely circumscribed by the boundaries of the nation-state that had emerged following the end of colonial rule. The era of multiple Islamic states had now arrived, with the logic of the sovereign nation-state subsuming its Islamic content.

IN CONTEXT

Today, around the world, each purported model of the Islamic state is distinctive and is a product of specific contexts—and each advocates the implementation of an Islamic polity within discrete national borders. This has given short shrift to the idea of a universal and uniform Islamic state. No two states are as unlike each other as Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two leading self-proclaimed Islamic states. Saudi Arabia is based on the model of a hereditary monarchy that is well served by a subservient religious elite that is given free rein in the cultural and social spheres as a quid pro quo for preaching political docility and obedience to the House of Saud.

The Islamic Republic of Iran finds the idea of hereditary monarchy anathema and fundamentally un-Islamic. It prefers to govern through a pseudo-Islamic version of Plato’s philosopher-king dressed up as the vilayet-i-faqih (rule by the supreme jurist), which, according to many senior Shia theologians, violates the basic tenets of Shia theology. The Iranian system’s arbitrariness is alleviated somewhat by representative institutions such as the Majlis and an elected presidency. However, this hybridity creates its own problems and opens the system to criticism from both traditionalists and modernists—the former finding it too Western and the latter too antediluvian.

What these historical and contemporary examples demonstrate is that there is no consensus over what an ideal Islamic state ought to look like, nor is there any convincing evidence that the “righteous ancestors” ever formulated such a vision. Rather, Islam was and is used and abused by rulers in order to shore up their legitimacy. Wherever and whenever a state calls itself Islamic, it is temporal power, not religion, that is in the driver’s seat. The lesson one draws from all this is that Islam needs to be saved from the state, not that the state should become the vehicle for the imposition of Islamic norms.

Whenever and wherever the state becomes the solitary repository of Islamic wisdom, as in Saudi Arabia and Iran, Islam becomes the handmaiden of the rulers, which threatens its essential role as the fount of societal morality and a constraint on temporal power. Historical evidence and contemporary experience thus demonstrate that the term “Islamic State” is an oxymoron that should be expunged from the political vocabulary of Muslim societies—something that ISIS’ latest incarnation of the Islamic State makes abundantly clear.