Fernand Braudel Center, I. Wallerstein, "Islam, the West,and the World"

by Immanuel Wallerstein

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[Lecture in series, "Islam and World System," Michaelmas Term, at Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Oct. 21, 1998]

My title, "Islam, the West, and the World" has two geographic terms in it. So I think it best to start with taking a look at the geography. There are three so-called world religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - that have their historical origins in the same rather small area of the world, the southwestern corner of the Asian continent. They all claim some special relationship to this region, which is seen as their spiritual home. None of the three religions remained, however, localized in this region.

As a result of their being conquered and the destruction of their states, Jews were relocated (or relocated themselves) to Egypt, then to Babylonia, then in Roman times to various parts of the Mediterranean, then later throughout much of Europe, finally in modern times to the Western Hemisphere and to many other zones of the world. All of this created what is called a diaspora. And, as we know, in the twentieth century, many Jews returned to the original area and a new political structure was created, the state of Israel, which asserts itself to be the reconstructed homeland of the Jewish people.

Christianity started as a religious movement among the Jews in this home area. Relatively soon, however, the Christians cut their ties with the Jewish community and proselytized among non-Jews, primarily within the then-extensive Roman Empire. A mere three centuries later, Christianity had become the state religion of the Empire, and in the succeeding 5-700 years Christians pursued a policy of conversion, primarily throughout the continent of Europe. Later, the construction of the modern world-system involved a so-called expansion of Europe, one that was simultaneously military, political, economic, and religious. Within this context, Christian missionaries spanned the globe, but were noticeably more successful in parts of the world that were not dominated by so-called world religions. The number of converts in largely Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Confucian-Taoist zones were relatively few, and particularly few in Islamic zones.

Finally, Islam appeared in the same home area some six centuries after Christianity. It too was a proselytizing religion, and spread very rapidly throughout what we now call the Middle East, northern Africa, and the Iberian peninsula. In the sixteenth century, it was pushed out of Iberia but simultaneously penetrated what we now call the Balkans. Meanwhile, it had been extending its geographic zone eastward towards southeastern Asia and southward into the African continent. In the twentieth century, the process of spread continued and eventually, by migration and conversion, reached into the Western Hemisphere and western Europe.

I have not done more than resume some schoolboy knowledge. I have reviewed this geography in order to point out that, despite the fact that all three religions, and particularly Christianity and Islam, are worldwide in scope and claims, we tend to think and to speak of Christianity as the "West" and Islam as the "East." To be sure, there is no doubt some geographic basis for this shorthand, but less than we assume, and diminishing. Hence, we have a question as to why we insist on using this geographical shorthand. It obviously has more political than geographic meaning.

We have had some answers recently that are well-known to you. Samuel Huntington sees the West and Islam as two antithetical "civilizationss " in long-term geopolitical conflict. Edward Said sees Orientalism as a false construct erected for ideological reasons by the Western world, and both pervasive and pernicious in its effects. I prefer to approach the question another way, and ask the question, why has it been that the Christian world seems to have singled out the Islamic world as its particular demon, and not merely recently but ever since the emergence of Islam? Actually the reverse has probably also been true, that Islam has regarded Christianity as its particular demon, but I do not feel I have the competence to discuss the question of why that is so or the degree to which it is so.

Although my emphasis will be on the modern world, I do not believe we can explain what happened without some reference to the European Middle Ages, for it is out of this period that we have derived our mythologies about this relationship. As we all know, Christianity and Islam encompassed at that time large zones which more or less bordered each other. Although each zone was rent with internal strife of multiple kinds, each zone appeared to regard itself as a cultural unit, and one in conflict primarily with the other. In part, the reasons for this lay in the dominant theologies, the sense of each that it incarnated the entire and only possible truth, and probably also the very fact that they had both originated in the same small area. The Christians claimed that they had fulfilled the Jewish law and therefore supplanted it with a new and final revelation. The Moslems in turn claimed that they had built on the wisdom they had inherited from Jews and Christians with a new and truly final form of commitment to Allah. So, one part of the quarrel was an intra-family quarrel about heritage and truth. This is the kind of quarrel that has often turned out to be the most divisive, the most bitter, because in some sense the most filled both with affection and competitiveness.

There was another part to this quarrel, one less about ideas than about resources and power. In the rolling back and forth of conquests - the 8th-century Ommayad thrust into Iberia and France, the Christian Crusades into the Holy Land, the Saracen pushback of the Christian conquests, the Reconquista of Spain, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, the eventual pushback of the Ottomans - it is true that the Christian world and the Islamic world were struggling over the control of vast areas of land, their resources and their populations, and that for each the other represented the main military threat. To be sure, both were faced at specific points in time with other conquering groups from northern Asia. However, not only were these other conquerors eventually forced back, but many of these conquering groups were converted religiously and thus tamed as a cultural menace.

All this set the scene for the modern world-system, where a capitalist world-economy came into existence in western Europe and began to expand its economic frontiers to encompass more and more of the world. The core of this system was (western) European and Christian. But here we have to observe that the European geographic focus changed. The initial expansion of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tended to jump over the Islamic world, or at least its Middle Eastern core. European powers went west, they thought to India, but came instead to the Americas. And they circumnavigated Africa, again to reach out to Asia. In part, this was because they sought what they thought to be the wealth of Asia. But in part this was because it was easier. The Islamic world seemed a hard nut to crack, particularly at that moment, at the height of Ottoman power. In any case, it is as though there was a hiatus, a break in the centrality of the medieval Christian-Islamic struggle. The struggle was not forgotten, but it seemed to take second place for the time being in West European concerns in terms of their immediate geoeconomic and geopolitical projects.

If we look at the history of the modern world-system from its beginning in the long sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, we shall observe that European dominance sometimes took the form of direct colonial rule and sometimes took a more indirect form, one that has sometimes been termed the establishment of semi-colonies, by which has been meant an economic subordination mixed with politico-military intrusions that stopped short of establishing actual imperial rule. Once again, a quick overview of world geography would be useful. The colonized areas were the Americas, most of Africa, most of South and Southeast Asia, and Oceania. The main areas that were not fully colonized were eastern Europe, the Far East, and the Middle East. This is of course a very crude summary, and needs to be specified and nuanced in many ways.

There are a series of very obvious explanations in each case why full colonization was neither sought nor possible in these regions, and why it was sought and was possible in the others. I shall not review what led to the difference in European attempts to control different regions, but rather ask what was the difference in the consequences for the peoples of any given region that their relationship with Europe in the modern world has been one of being colonies as opposed to one of being semi-colonies. (Of course, as of the late nineteenth century, the term Europe should be considered a cultural term and should be understood to include the United States.)

For the moment, I restrict myself to observing that the fiercest political conflict with Europe in the twentieth century has come exactly from the three regions that were only "semi-colonized": the Soviet Union, the Chinese People's Republic (and North Korea), and "Islam." Of course, "Islam" is not a state, but Iran, Iraq, Libya only begin the list of states which have been in fierce conflict with the pan-European world. Since these are the three regions which have been in sharpest conflict with Europe, it is quite comprehensible that, in the imaginary of European discourse, the demons have been located there: Communism, the Yellow Peril, Islamic terrorism. Today, of course, in the West, the demon of Communism seems an historical memory, China a difficult but cultivated friend (even ally). There remains primarily Islamic terrorism - a demon much discussed and much feared in the West, but essentially an imprecise construct representing a blurred vision of reality.

How did so-called Islamic terrorism become such a central image in the world today, and especially since the collapse of the Communisms in 1989/91? As we know, for several decades now, there have been important social/religious movements in Islamic countries which are often labeled "Islamic fundamentalist," and somewhat more rarely, "Islamic integrist." These labels are not, to my knowledge, self-designations, but are those used in the Western world and in the media. In Islamic countries, these movements are more likely to be called "Islamist."

Where do these Western designations come from, and to what do they refer? Note that the two terms used originate not in the Islamic sphere but in the Christian world. Fundamentalism is a term derived from the early twentieth-century history of Protestantism in the United States, where certain groups, particularly within Baptist churches, called for a return to "fundamentals." By this, they meant that they believed that various modernist, even secularist, ideas had invaded Christian theology and practice, leading it astray. They called for a return to beliefs and practices of an earlier era. Integrism as a term derives from Catholic history in western Europe, particularly France, and referred to a similar call for the "integral" faith, without dilution from modernist and/or nationalist views and practices.

So, by analogy, Islamic fundamentalism (or integrism) became the label given to those groups in the Islamic world who feel that modernist views and practices have led the faithful astray, and call for a return to older, purer, more correct views and practices. The main target of so-called fundamentalists is always those who bear the same religious label but who either are totally secular in practice or observe what the "fundamentalists" consider to be a diluted and distorted version of the religion. Historians of religious ideas constantly point out that "fundamentalist" groups never represent with full accuracy what were the supposed older, purer, more correct versions of belief and practice. These historians have no trouble demonstrating that these so-called fundamentalist groups always reinvent the tradition with numerous differences, sometimes considerable ones, from the actual beliefs and practices of yesteryear.

But, of course, these movements are not groups of Ranke-ian historians, searching for religious truth wie es eigentlich gewesen ist. They are movements of the present putting forth a claim that everyone should believe certain things and engage in certain practices. And pedantic exercises of the verisimilitude of their historical claims are of no interest to them whatsoever. Nor are they of very much use to those others in the present, not members of these groups, who wish to understand what they are doing and proclaiming, and why.

The fact that the terminology in use derives from Christian religious history gives us a first clue to what is going on. Whatever it is, it is not peculiar to Islam. In the twentieth century, we have had not only Christian and Islamic "fundamentalists," but Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist versions as well, and they all seem to share certain common features - the rejection of "modernist," secularist tendencies within the group; the insistence on a puritanical version of religious practice; a celebration of the integrity of the religious tradition, and its eternal, unchangeable validity. But they share a second feature, even in their Christian versions: an opposition to the dominant power structures of the modern world-system. It is this combination - a reformist demand of a return to "fundamentals" within the religious group, and an antisystemic rhetoric that goes beyond merely religious issues - that is both their defining feature and the key to an analysis of their significance in the evolving history of the modern world-system.

Let us step away from religious issues for a moment, and look at the political economy of the world-system. What do we see? The capitalist world-economy is an historical system that has combined an axial division of labor integrated through a less than perfectly autonomous world market combined with an interstate system composed of allegedly sovereign states, a geoculture that has legitimated a scientific ethos as the underpinnings of economic transformations and profit-making, and liberal reformism as a mode of containing popular discontent with the steadily increasing socio-economic polarization that capitalist development has entailed. This system originated in western Europe and over the centuries expanded to incorporate the entire globe.

In the nineteenth century, there emerged within this system antisystemic movements which were based on the interests of oppressed groups within the system. These movements set themselves the object of transforming the system into something else, something more democratic and more egalitarian. The two main forms they took were those of social and national movements. By the post-1945 period, such movements were well organized throughout the world, and a tripartite de facto geographic division seemed to exist. The so-called social movements had split by the First World War into two main camps - Social-Democrat and Communist - which organized themselves internationally as the IInd and IIIrd Internationals. Both varieties claimed to represent the interests of the working classes. Both kinds of movements were distinct from the nationalist movements within "empires," which spoke in the name of "peoples" whose national identity was not recognized, and who sought to create national states.

All three kinds of movements had emerged in the period 1850-1945, and were originally politically quite weak. All three kinds of movements had however believed that history was on their side and that their cause would eventually be fully realized. All three kinds of movements, after much internal debate, had decided upon a two-stage historical strategy: first gain control of the/a state structure; then transform the world. In the 25 years after 1945, one could say that all three kinds of movements achieved stage one of their strategy, an achievement that might have amazed observers at the beginning of the twentieth century, but one that seemed to validate their own certainty that history was on their side.

Geographically, the three main varieties of movements divided the world. The Communist movements came to power in a zone that went from central Europe to the northern Pacific, and encompassed about a third of the world's area. The Social-Democratic movements came to power (at least to alternating power) in the Western world - western Europe, North America (if one counts New Deal Democrats as Social-Democrats), and Australasia. And nationalist movements, now frequently called national liberation movements, came to power in Asia and Africa, and somewhat similar populist movements came to power in Latin America.

There are two things to note about this remarkable political surge forward of the antisystemic movements. It occurred at the very moment of time when United States power in the world-system was at its height, and therefore at a moment when prosystemic forces were at their most coordinated, most integrated, presumably at their strongest. Secondly, virtually all of these movements had fulfilled stage one of the strategy - they had achieved power - and thus, having achieved power, could be judged on the degree to which they were able to accomplish the changes promised as stage two of their announced strategy, the transformation of the world.

The world revolution of 1968 constituted the world reaction to this double reality: the worldwide hegemony of the United States, and the establishment of its world order, on the one hand; and the worldwide realization by the antisystemic movements of stage one, the coming to power of the various movements often grouped together under the label of the Old Left, on the other hand. The revolutionaries condemned the first actor, the United States, for its oppressiveness, and they condemned the second actor, the Old Left movements, for their inadequacy as opposition movements to, if not their actual collusion with, the hegemonic project. While the first denunciation was obvious for a radical world movement, the second loud denunciation, that against the traditional antisystemic movements, was to be the more consequential.

The second denunciation was the cry of deception. To understand deception we have to assess expectations, and perhaps illusions. From the standpoint of 1968, the world was looking back on a history of antisystemic struggle that went back in popular imagination at least to the French Revolution, although the struggles may have begun locally at a later date, some as late as the early twentieth century. In any case, there existed a long historical memory.

What were the major elements in this historical memory? First of all, there had been a difficult struggle, in which the actual movements originated as a weak force and slowly gained strength through mobilization of popular support, both locally and fraternally from elsewhere. Furthermore, there was the memory not only of struggle but of repression, often severe repression by the powerful forces in the local region, a repression that was actively abetted and supported by worldwide powerful forces (and most immediately the United States government).

The second memory was that of the opposite tactic of the forces of oppression, that of cooption, which had historically split the movements between those who received the fruits of cooption and those who necessarily could not. The latter, when not depressed, were angry and sought ever more radical spokespersons. But since the process of cooption, of concessions that ameliorated the lot of some but not of all, was an ongoing, repetitive process, it was also a confusing process, since the lessons needed to be relearned in each successive generation, and this weakened the ability of various segments of the oppressed to make common cause with each other and to achieve fundamental change.

And there was the third memory, which neutralized the other two memories - of repression and cooption. It was the memory of achievement - achievement measured in the growing strength of the movements themselves in terms of the numbers of persons they could mobilize and in terms of their public recognition as actors in the political realm; and achievement measured in the accumulating concessions that were part of the cooption processes.

This third memory was the source of political and historical hope - the firm expectation that "history was on their side," that a better life was in store for the children and grandchildren of those living now. This third memory was based on what might be called a quantitative reading of recent history - more members in the associations, and improvements in the style of life (that is, more money in the lifetime bank, more gadgets in the style of life). This sense of deep hope in the future, this sense of certainty that there would be more equality and more democracy, especially when it was based on the fact that the oppressed were struggling hard to achieve this and that it was their struggle which was responsible for achieving it, was paradoxically the most depoliticizing worldview possible. It allowed one to discount the paltry results of the present in the light of the significant results anticipated in the future.

This vision was in fact the essential message of liberal reformism, as promoted ironically but efficaciously by the antisystemic movements themselves. And the more radical such movements claimed to be, the better they could persuade those they mobilized to be patient about the results of their impatient and vigorous demonstrations. It was in this way that the various antisystemic movements of the Old Left served paradoxically as the most important guarantor of political stability of the world-system in the long run, despite their frequent calls for political turbulence.

There was only one negative in this call to latent passivity beneath the facade of manifest activity, a call justified by a quantification of achievements, measured both locally and worldwide. It was that, eventually, one could do the arithmetic, and assess how significant were the changes that had been realized and what was the real pace of this change. It was precisely at the moment of maximum visible achievement of the antisystemic movements that this eventual moment of overall calculation seemed to come. The world revolution of 1968 was the outcome of this assessment of the effectiveness of the century-long strategy. And the verdict was negative. Disillusion followed the illusion of success. The success was deemed less than real, the beneficiaries of the changes a small group (what in the Soviet system was called the Nomenklatura), the real gap between the privileged and those underneath more polarized than ever (despite all the presumed reforms and successes of the Old Left).

It is time to return from this general worldwide assessment to the Islamic world. Of course, the processes described here were as true of it as of most other regions of the world outside the core zones - no more, no less. But of course, each region had its historical specificity and the reactions took a local guise. What had been the historical specificity of the Islamic world, and in particular its historic Arab core?

If one looks at all the successive movements in the various Arab countries from say 1900 on, the calls for nahda, for an Arab revolt, for a nationalist awakening all tended to be modernist in their rhetoric. They analyzed the oppression they felt as in part the result of outside control (imperialism) and in part the result of internal "traditionalism." They called therefore for a simultaneous rejection of outside control and an internal cultural change. The two went together and reinforced each other, indeed might be said to make each other possible. To be sure, the movements to which these sentiments gave rise were diffuse in their social base and multiple in their visions of the social future. Some had more conservative and some more radical views of the good society.

Generally speaking, however, for all these movements, Islam as a religion played only a small role, and for many of them a somewhat negative one. To be sure, they might insist on the fact that they were Moslems, but this was thought of as a sort of cultural affiliation, and perhaps as a necessary claim to appease less enlightened potential followers. The future they envisaged was a modern one, by which they meant a secular one. The various Arab movements shared many of the premises of Kemalism in Turkey. The Moslem League in colonial India was not very different.

These movements, especially the more radical ones, were by and large successful in the post-1945 period. They came to power in various forms: Nasserism in Egypt, the Baath in Syria and Iraq, the Neo-Destour in Tunisia, the FLN in Algeria. These regimes all tended to join with parallel movements in other parts of what was now called the Third World in movements of the so-called nonaligned powers, movements inspired by the Bandung conference. Indeed, as we know, Gamal Abdel Nasser personally played an important role in the creation of this world network, and the Algerian FLN provided an inspirational model across this network, similar to that of the Vietnamese movement.

On the other hand, the post-1945 periofd saw some major difficulties for the Arab world, and by extension for the Islamic world as a whole. The biggest was the creation of the state of Israel. I would not like to discuss here the whole history and merits of this story. I merely wish to underline a few facts. The Zionist movement came into existence more or less at the same time, the turn of the twentieth century, as Arab nationalist movements. It shared much of the same rhetoric - the need to create an independent state, the sense of oppression by the powerful of the world-system, the sense that there should be an internal transformation of the psychology of the Jewish people, the ambiguous (and reticent) relationship with Judaism as a religion. In the Zionist imaginary, the Arabs did not play a real role before 1948. The enemy was the Christian world, and of course, after 1918, Great Britain in particular.

But this imaginary changed radically with the creation of the state of Israel. The military resistance of the Arab states to the creation of Israel meant that the primary opponent became the Arab world, and this was largely an Islamic world. This attitude was all the more reinforced by the Israeli victory in the 1967 wars, which brought a large Arab population under Israeli rule. It was at this moment that a modern Palestinian nationalist movement, the PLO, was organized. The PLO was a movement of the same type and rhetoric as the other modernist, nationalist movements I have mentioned. And it had the same reticent, ambiguous relationship with Islam as a religion, all the more since in Palestine there is a significant Christian Arab population, who in fact support the PLO.

Without reviewing the history of Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian relationships from 1948 to today, one can say that, by and large, the Israelis have had the upper hand militarily and politically. But we can also say that the Palestinian mobilization has been sufficiently successful to force the Israelis, on the whole reluctantly, to enter into what are now very protracted, inconclusive, and frustrating so-called peace negotiations, negotiations which could collapse completely.

The existence of Israel has posed a problem for Arab nationalism in that it added a locally-based enemy to the more remote Western world, a locally-based enemy that was less ready to make concessions that the collective West. They only real parallel in the non-European world in the twentieth century was the existence of an apartheid state in South Africa, and the latter problem has now been resolved with the change in the constitution and the coming to power of the African National Congress.

The Arab world has had, in addition, a second special problem, almost as great as that of Israel, and imbricated with it. This is the fact that it is the locus of a large part of the world's oil supply. This had not been known in the nineteenth century. It only became a consideration after the First World War, but it has been a central geopolitical reality ever since, and especially since 1945. The United States has not been at all indifferent to the politics of the region for this reason. Nor has Russia or Western Europe. Maintaining a continuous flow of oil supply, and a reasonable limit on oil rent, has been a major concern of the great powers. This has given them an additional reason both to support Israel and to invest in an effort to encourage and stabilize relatively more conservative regimes in power.

If one looks at Islamist movements in the Arab world, they actually have a history as long as that of nationalist movements, and in some countries could be confused with them. The Wahabite movement in the Arabian desert, and the Senussi movement in Cyrenaica shared some features with the secular nationalist movements. They too worried about outside oppression, and they too called for an internal renewal that laid stress on purer, more puritanical, behavior. They too moved toward the creation of a modern state structure. But of course they used a religious rhetoric unlike the secularist movements. They too came to power. The Senussi regime was replaced by a more secular regime in 1969. The Saudi regime has successfully resisted such a fate up to now.

When we look at so-called Islamist movements, what do we see? We see groups who say two things. They say, first of all, that all these movements that have come to power in the various countries have not succeeded in removing or undoing the role of outside powers in their internal affairs, even if they are technically independent states. They take note of the continuing role of the U.S. in the region, and of the powerful presence of Israel, which is regarded as primarily an outpost of the West, a settler state akin to the Crusader states of the Middle Ages. And they say secondly that this situation is abetted and indeed made possible by the very regimes that say they are opposing this - not only the secularist regimes but also, be it noted, presumably religiously-based regimes such as that of Saudi Arabia.

Hence, what Islamists say is that, if one wishes to overthrow outside oppression and foster internal renewal, one has to get rid of these modernist Arab regimes, including in this category the Wahabites. Of course, this is the same thing that Ayatollah Khomeini said about the Shah's regime in Iran, and the Taliban have said about the pseudo-Communist regime in Afghanistan, as well as of its various successors. Thus far, in the Arab world, no Islamist regime has come to power, except in the Sudan.

Furthermore, if one looks at the ways in which these Islamist groups have mobilized politically, one can see that they have not merely put forth an alternative rhetoric, and hence an alternative analysis of the mode of functioning of the modern world-system, from the modernist movements they have been opposing, but they are also saying that these modernist regimes have failed in the primary task of modern states, providing for the minimal ongoing welfare and security of the citizens. It is well-known that the Islamist organizations provide extensive social service to those in need, and frequently fill serious voids in state functions. Another noted feature of Islamist movements is that they recruit extensively and successfully among students in technical/scientific branches of the universities, and then make use of their skills in advancing their cause.

Now both these features - the social service function and the attractiveness of Islamism to young engineers/scientists - demonstrates that the Islamists are not romantics of a bygone agricultural society. They are rather purveyors of an alternative form of modernity, one that is open to technological advance but rejects secularism and its attendant values. Where they are ambivalent is in their attitude to the state structures. Out of power, they are a powerful antistatist force, not merely in politics but in ideology. They reject the centerpiece of secular modernism, the centrality of the embracing, presumably neutral state as a moral and political fulcrum. They insist on the priority of a set of spiritual values, as expounded by an authorized group of interpreters. This priority creates problems when the Islamists actually achieve political power, as today in Iran, for example, and has the potential of creating an ongoing tension between state and religious authorities, the exact problem the modern secular state was intended to resolve. Thus far, Islamism as a political force has continued to give priority to its extra-statist rhetoric.

So how may we interpret what has been happening in Islamic countries in the last twenty years or so? I think the prime element has been the disillusionment, both among the educated elite and the populations at large, with the performance of the historic antisystemic movements, the movements of national renewal and liberation, that were the major expressions of popular struggle in the twentieth century. These movements, in all their variants, have been found wanting. They are condemned for having pursued a futile strategy. They are condemned for permitting a small group to profit venally from the struggle. They are condemned for having failed in their primary objective, to enable the peoples of their region to attain either real political autonomy or real economic advancement compared to the dominant zones of the world. Whether or not this condemnation represents a balanced judgment on the activity of these movements is irrelevant; the fact is that this disillusionment is massive.

The disillusionment has had the consequence that the underlying long-term reformist strategy of the antisystemic movements seems pointless, especially two central tactics: the transformation of mores via secularization; and the creation of strong state structures. The way was open for an alternative vision, one that used neither of these allegedly pointless tactics. In the Islamic world, this alternative vision has been Islamism. In other parts of the world, the same disillusionment has bred different visions, all of which however share the feature that they reject the allegedly pointless tactics.

From the point of view of the holders of power in the world-system, such alternative visions are both better and worse than the now antiquated tactics of the movements of national liberation. They are better in the sense that the Old Left is always pointing out. The alternative visions push people away from a penetrating analysis of the actual structures of the modern world-system, and thereby make it easier for the privileged in the world-system to maintain these structures on a day-by-day basis. The charge is that when the holders of alternative visions, such as Islamism, come to state power, they find either that they have no real foreign policy, or that they have an ineffective one, or that they can be in fact easily coopted into operating within the framework of the system. Up to a point, this charge is true.

On the other hand, the rise of forces with an alternative vision is desperately bad for the holders of power in the world-system, for one simple reason. One of the key stabilizing features of the modern world-system is the confidence populations put in their state structures as their efficacious political defenders vis-a-vis the whole range of outside forces that impinge on their daily lives. In this sense, these state structures, especially after secularist antisystemic movements come to state power, are veritable political demobilizers. They preach confidence in the leadership, and hence they preach patience. When the alternative movements break down the confidence in the state structures, they remove the constraint that caused political demobilization.

This calculation of the pluses and minuses, from the point of view of the powerful in the world-system, of the rise of these alternative movements explains much in the current demonization of Islam in the West. While the option of cooperative cooption of Islamist forces is constantly played with by the West, in general they have emphasized the dangers in the breakdown of popular confidence in their own state structures. This has been reinforced in the case of the Islamic world by two factors which are special to them: the existence of Israel, and their role as a locus of oil supply. These latter two factors alone explain little, but as reinforcement for the choice of tactical response to Islamism, they are crucial.

If the existence of oil resources is both a blessing and a curse for the Arab world, it is nonetheless a reality outside their control, even if it is a reality that may not go on forever. The existence of Israel, on the other hand, is a historically contingent reality, one that is therefore more changeable, and therefore one that has been the focus of acute struggle. Thus, we must look briefly at the source of the very strong support the Western world has given to the state of Israel. It was never inevitable. And I remind you that it had been very uncertain as of 1945, even as of 1948. I don't believe in fact that it was locked in as a policy priority, either in the United States or western Europe, until 1967.

There are three elements in this policy. One is that the historic anti-Semitism of the Christian world, which was pervasive virtually from the beginning of Christianity, reached a morally repulsive acme in Nazism and the Holocaust, and this caused a very deep guilt reaction. It would be a mistake to underestimate the role this sense of Christian guilt plays in the current situation. It has led to dramatic changes in the rhetoric of a range of major social groups in the West - secular intellectuals, the Catholic Church, and fundamentalist Protestant sects some of whom are now talking a language of the necessity of having the state of Israel as a prerequisite for the second coming of Christ.

The guilt complex might not have withstood other geopolitical considerations had it not been for Israeli victory in the wars of 1967. This victory did two things. On the one hand, it created an overwhelming support for Israel on the part of world Jewry, a level of support that had not been there before. This victory over Arabs had the psychological effect of being at one and the same time a compensation for the Holocaust and a belief that the Arab world threatened a second version of it. Once again, I do not discuss the degree to which such a vision was justified, but I insist on its occurrence.

The second consequence was doubtless that, for the first time, the Western world was persuaded that Israel might serve a function as a military control on restless Arab countries, and Israel became integrated to Western geopolitical strategy. The price of this second decision went up severely once the Intifada began, which accounts for Western concern with the so-called peace process, and the increasing disgruntlement of Western powers with the Israeli government. But the basic support of Israel has not yet disappeared.

In any case, the combination of Christian guilt about anti-Semitism, worldwide Jewish support of Israel, and the Western view of the utility of Israel as an element in the political stabilization of the world's major oil zone has resulted in the mediatization of so-called Islamic terrorism as the grand demon of the 1990's. This is all the more the case since the demons of Soviet Communism and of the Yellow Peril seem to have evaporated. And it is all the easier to demonize Islamism to the degree that Islam is culturally a cousin of Christianity, unlike Buddhism or Hinduism. The family feud tonality adds to the irrationality and the persistence of the demonization. Another element that adds to choosing Islam as the demon is the fact that most of the core of the Islamic world was never truly colonized. In an important sense, the West feels somewhat confident in dealing with ex-colonies. After all, they had conquered these areas once militarily and governed them, and think they know their weaknesses. The non-colonized or only semi-colonized zones retain an aura of mystery and therefore of danger.

Let me resume what I have been arguing. On the one hand, what has been happening in the Islamic world, and in particular the rise of Islamism as a social and political force, is simply one variant of what has been going on everywhere in the peripheral zones of the world-system. The basic interpretation has to revolve around the historic rise of antisystemic movements, their seeming success and their real political failure, the consequent disillusionment, and the search for alternative strategies. All of this is part and parcel of the development of the modern world-system as an historic social system.

On the other hand, there are some special elements in the relationship of the West and Islam that result in the quite extraordinary demonization of Islam in the West. I have tried to indicate the complex of these elements: the millennial relationship of Christianity and Islam, and the millennial relationship of Christianity and Judaism; as well as the fact that all three religions are linked in a sort of set of extended family ties. I added an unbudgeable but theoretically accidental geoeconomic reality, the location of oil. And finally, I added the elimination of alternative possible demons from non-colonized areas of the world.

This brings me to my very last theme. Can the West do without a demon? I doubt it at the moment. The West is facing a massive crisis - not merely economic, but fundamentally political and social. The capitalist world-economy is in crisis as an historical social system. I cannot review here the crisis in detail, something I have done elsewhere on several occasions⁽¹⁾, but I raise these issues to insist that the consequence is a great deal of confusion and self-doubt in the West, a situation which always evokes the need for demons. This same confusion and self-doubt pervades the Islamic world, as is evident from the zigzagging tactics of all the main actors. the secularist forces are in disarray. The Islamist forces are not very clear, and not at all agreed among themselves, what their real political program is or ought to be.

Once again, we should put this in the context of the world-system as a whole, and not limit our attention to the Islamic world. Systems that are in crisis enter into a chaotic period, out of which eventually emerges a new order. Their trajectories bifurcate, and it is intrinsically impossible to predict the branch that will prevail. In practice this means two things. Even small pressures in one direction or another may be decisive, since the system is far from equilibrium. And the social struggle is therefore extremely acute. The question that arises therefore is how the sides in the struggle for shaping the successor social system will align themselves.

When the struggles were less acute, the lines seemed to be sharp. that is why we can speak of antisystemic movements within the modern world-system. These movements thought they knew what they were about and who their primary enemy was. So did the forces that defended the existing system. What the last twenty-five years has taught us all - I think of it as the lesson of the world revolution of 1968 - was that our vision of the struggle was deeply flawed, that opponents were not real opponents, and allies not real allies, whichever side one was on. In this sense, the Islamists are profoundly correct in saying that we have to recalibrate our understanding of what are the issues that divide the existing historical system and what are the alternative historical possibilities of a possible reconstructed world-system.

Their critique is on the mark, but what of their solution? As I have said, I do not believe they are sure of what solution they really intend. Those of us who do not share some or most of their premises and are heirs of a more secularist tradition find it difficult to accept most of what they offer as first steps to a better future. What I do feel is that there is a need for a genuine dialogue, or multilogue, about the essential limitations of our existing world-system, and the parameters of our historical alternatives. Personally, I think the basic conflict is that between those who seek to establish/reestablish a hierarchical world order in which some are privileged and most others not and those who wish to construct a maximally democratic and egalitarian order. I think that each requires different kinds of value-systems to undergird it, and that the historic world religions may have much to teach us about what is crucial in such value-systems.

The real problem is that among the secularist and the fundamentalist camps in all parts of the world, there are persons on both sides of what I anticipate will be the great politico-social struggle of the coming fifty years. I think myself that posing the issue as one of secularism versus fundamentalism is distracting us in a very major way from clarity of vision. And clarity, not demons, is what we need most at the present time.

1. See in particular Utopistics: Or, historical Choices for the Twenty-first Century, New York: New Press, 1998

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