Rough draft of a paper

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God."

- from Osama Bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa

On August 7th, 1998 car-bombs exploded simultaneously in front of US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. Two weeks later President Clinton responded with cruise missile attacks on suspected terrorist facilities in Sudan and Afghanistan. Two years later, on October 12th, 2000, a small boat packed with explosives rammed the USS Cole as it made a port call in Aden, Yemen. While both incidents received significant news coverage at home in the US, neither provoked more than a very limited response and with the close election in November 2000 the Cole did not loom large in the public’s consciousness. It had happened half a world away in a place few really cared about. After hijacked airplanes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, answering the question of the origin of Islamist terrorism assumed a much greater urgency.

Soon an abundance of answers to the question of the origin of such actions overflowed editorial pages, magazine articles, and books, each purporting to have the real reason. Explanations for the carnage ranged from a backlash against oil-thirsty “imperialism” to claims that Islam itself was the source and inspiration of the violence. Suddenly Samuel Huntington’s 1993 Foreign Affairs essay looked a lot more relevant and his impending “Clash of Civilizations” seemed to have arrived. One possible explanation which did not get much attention is far more mundane.

From North Africa to the Middle East and southwest and central Asia, the Islamic states which emerged in the aftermath of WWI and the end of European empires after WWII with the exception of Turkey have continuously suffered from corrupt and ineffective governments incapable of or unwilling to meet the needs of their citizens. Western imperialism and colonialism, Israel, oil, and Islam itself fail to adequately explain the terrorism which marked the second half of the 20th century and remains one of the greatest geopolitical challenges of the 21st. The 80 odd years of Turkish history since Ataturk dragged his fledgling state kicking and screaming into the modern world provide a yardstick against which the other states in the region may be measured. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, both of which have been strongly associated with Islamist terrorism, both came into their modern form in the first half of the 20th century as well but have failed to approach the success of Turkey. A comparison of these two countries with Turkey, historically, politically, economically, and religiously will show that imperialism, poverty, oil, and religion do not explain the vastly different development of those countries. Even more stark contrasts can be made between the countries of Southeast Asia whose economies were no more advanced than their Middle Eastern peers in the middle of the 20th century but at the beginning of the 21st century rank far above those of the members of the Arab League.

Economically these nations are not highly ranked but neither are they clustered together. According to the CIA Fact-Book, as of 2004 the per capita GDP of Turkey is $7400 and its growth rate is 8.2%. Saudi Arabia weighs in at $12000 per capita GDP with 5% growth. Pakistan’s per capita GDP of $2200 ranks it even with Papua New Guinea. The percentage of the population below the poverty line in Pakistan is estimated at 32% compared to Turkey’s 20%. Figures for Saudi Arabia are not available (all figures from CIA fact-book).
By way of comparison, Pakistan’s poverty percentage ranks it not far above Romania at 28.9% and well below nations like Peru 54%, Rwanda 60%, and Armenia at 50% yet none of those three nations has spawned the sort of international terrorism that has been carried out by Pakistan-based groups. Clearly poverty is not a sufficient force to inspire events such as 9/11. Therefore it makes sense to look at the history of these countries for what might fuel the violent exports that brought about the USS Cole and embassy bombings.

At the end of the First World War the Ottoman Empire was parceled out in the Treaty of Sevres. An empire which once stretched from north Africa to the gates of Vienna was no more. For the Ottoman Empire, frequently referred to as “The sick man of Europe”, defeat after siding with the Germans in WWI made the distribution of its imperial possessions a reality. Previously, Britain, France, and the other “great powers” had avoided such a partitioning as it would have dangerously exacerbated conflicts more or less checked since the Congress of Vienna, although Russia which had its eye on access to the Mediterranean was keen on the idea. At the end of WWI that always-precarious balance no longer held back the French and British establishment of “spheres of influence” as had been discussed in negotiations such as the Sykes Picot Agreement of 1916.

Following this crushing defeat, Turkey could have been expected to become a basket case. Instead, in 1923 Mustafa Kemal, Ataturk, founded the modern republic of Turkey. In the country which had been the heart of the Islamic empire at its peak, Ataturk imposed a stern program of westernization taking such measures as outlawing the fez, a traditional brimless hat, enshrining women’s rights to a degree greatly exceeding that of other Muslim states and implementing a strong separation of church and state. Despite several military coups it has always returned to civilian rule and maintained sufficiently strong ties to the outside world that it has been a member of NATO since 1952 and is a candidate for membership in the European Union.

Pakistan was ruled by the British from the mid 19th century until it was granted its independence after WWII. In contrast to the rest of British India, what would become Pakistan was overwhelmingly Muslim as a result of its domination by the Mughal Empire. Substantial political agitation by Islamic groups in the decades preceding independence by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Allama Iqbal, and others who ultimately led the push for a separate Muslim state paid off in August 1947. Following its independence Pakistan promptly launched itself into one of several wars with India over the Jammu and Kashmir area. In this first conflict over 100,000 were killed and the dispute remained unsettled. In 1971 the nation which had been split off from India was itself split as East Pakistan, soon to be Bangladesh broke away in a violent struggle by Bengalis angry at the economic exploitation they had endured under the domination of West Pakistan after independence from Britain.

Since Pakistan’s independence its governments have primarily been military rule with periods of civilian leadership being terminated as the result of corruption. During the Cold War Pakistan sided with the west and as did Turkey and during the 1979-1989 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan funneled supplies to the forces resisting the Soviets. In light of the high tensions over nuclear testing by India in the early 1970s and the Indo-Soviet pact of 1971, Pakistan’s alignment with the west during that time is unsurprising. Ultimately those forces which functioned so effectively to harass the Soviets were to be consolidated under the ill-fated rule of the Taliban when the Soviets and their covert western opposition withdrew. The failure to keep those forces it cultivated in check has haunted it as Islamist opposition to the government has grown after the end of the conflict. Currently former General Pervez Musharraf holds the office of president after seizing it in 1999 and reinforcing his claim with a referendum in 2002 which extended his term for an additional five years. In contrast , India, which labored under the same British administration for so long and was just as surely a tool of the other side in the Cold War has not had the same questionable legacy as Pakistan. Instead, India has developed a strong, functional democracy and modern economy which enables it to compete globally.

Saudi Arabia was created by the conquests of Abd Al Aziz Al Saud on the Arabian peninsula between 1902 and 1932 when it took its modern form. From its first days the country has been governed as an absolute monarchy although in 2004 limited voting for some municipal positions was conducted among males over 21 years old.

Saudi Arabia is the home of the holiest places in Islam and the birthplace of the Wahhabist form of that religion which is most associated with groups like Al Qaeda. The discovery of extensive oil reserves in 1938 has given the desert kingdom a strategic importance which has meant considerable political attention from the outside world but also political tension internally. The Saud family which has held the throne since the establishment of the kingdom has found itself in an awkward position as it tries to maintain its rule. On one side it must cooperate to some degree with the westerners who purchase its oil, the keystone of the country’s economy. On the other it must placate the Wahhabist clerics who played a pivotal role in Al Saud’s rise to power. This has frequently made for interesting contradictions in policy and appearance. To protect itself from the aggressive intentions of its neighbor Iraq, the Saudis allowed the US to establish bases in 1990 which were maintained until the withdrawal of US troops in 2003 and 2004. Yet the Friday sermons at some of Saudi Arabia’s state-supervised mosques have been among the most vitriolic and abusive in the Islamic world. And most notably, 14 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. Turkey by comparison a NATO member for decades and more than 99 percent Muslim, though it has had its problems with the large Kurdish population in its eastern provinces, has not produced anything approaching the terrorist violence embodied in the work of Saudi expatriate Osama Bin Laden.

From the early 20th century to the early 21st, of the remnants of the once enormous Islamic empire, only Turkey has maintained a generally secular government and despite the turmoil of military coups kept a strong democratic tradition alive. Saudi Arabia has not experienced the transitions of coups like Turkey or Pakistan but it has also not extended voting rights to its citizens in any meaningful way. Pakistan while more democratic in many respects than Saudi Arabia has not been nearly as successful as Turkey in building a modern state. All three are almost exclusively Muslim but only Turkey has not gained a name as an exporter of terrorism. While the exact degree to which misgovernment has fueled the fanaticism of Islam terrorists from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim states is not completely known, it is clearly a far more adequate explanation than the Islamic faith, poverty, or western imperialism.

URLs for Research Paper

1. Bin laden 1998 fatwa
http://www.ict.org.il/articles/fatwah.htm

2. History of Turkey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Turkey

3. History of Pakistan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Pakistan

4. History of Saudi Arabia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Saudi_Arabia

5. CIA Factbook
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html