THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VI, Issue # 220, October 19, 2004
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
ISLAM, NATION, & ASSASSINATION IN THE ISLAMIC MIDDLE EAST
By Martin Kramer
ISLAM, MIDDLE EASTERN POLITICAL CULTURE, & THE ASSASSINATION OF TYRANNICAL RULERS: RELIGION OR
NATIONALISM AS THE MOTIVE FORCE & JUSTIFICATION OF THE USE OF ASSASSINATION AS THE MEANS TO ACCOMPLISH
REGIME CHANGE IN A COUNTRY -- ISLAMISM & THE REVIVAL OF RELIGIOUS ASSASSINATIONS
FULL STORY:
Until modern times, there existed no form of legitimacy in the Middle East, outside of Islam. Rulers ruled in the name of God; assassins
struck them down in the name of God. The assassinations of the early caliphs and the struggle between the Sunni rulers and the
Assassins in the Middle Ages took precisely this form: each side claimed to act in accord with divine will, revealed in divine texts.
Religion played a crucial role in the rationale of assassination, but it also played a crucial role in the rationale of government, law, and
warfare indeed, of everything. This invocation of God by the ruler and his assassin characterized the entire pre-modern period in the
Islamic world, right up to the end of the nineteenth century.
Assassination in modern times may be divided roughly into three sequential stages, in which the rationales shift dramatically. In the
first stage, rulers continued to rule in the name of God as they always had, but their assassins claimed to act in the name of the nation.
In the second stage, rulers themselves claimed to rule in the name of the nation; the assassins also claimed to act on behalf of the
nation in striking them down. In the third stage, the present one, rulers still claim to rule in the name of the nation, but it is now
assassins who claim to act in the name of God. This essay will briefly illustrate these three stages with examples.
ORDINARY MAN
The break with the pre-modern pattern first occurs at around the turn of the century when the "shadows of God," traditional Muslim
rulers, for the first time faced assassins who were inspired by nationalism and who claimed to be acting on behalf of the people. The
origins of national awakening and nationalist assassination can be traced to the same person: Sayyid Jamal ad-Din "al-Afghani," the
Persian activist and agitator who carried the message of national revival across the Islamic world during the 1880s and 1890s.
Afghani is counted as a hero of national revival. He figures in every account of the emergence of modern, liberal interpretations of
Islam, and he is hailed as a great reformer and progressive. But he was also a conspirator who plotted assassinations. To bring about
national revival, he believed that the rulers of the day had to be removed, if necessary by the bullet. A disciple once found him pacing
back and forth, shouting, "There is no deliverance except in killing, there is no safety except in killing."
These were not idle words. On one occasion, Afghani proposed to a follower, the reformist thinker Muhammad Abduh, that the ruler
of Egypt, the Khedive Ismail, be assassinated. As Abduh said, Afghani "proposed to me that Ismail should be assassinated some day
as he passed in his carriage daily over the Kasr el Nil bridge, and I strongly approved, but it was only talk between ourselves. ... It
would have been the best thing that could have happened." [1] This tells us much not only about Afghani but about Abduh, also
celebrated in the West for his liberal ideas.
Afghani had more luck in inspiring a disciple to assassinate Nasir ad-Din Shah, ruler of Iran, in 1896. It is interesting to relate what
Afghani said about that assassination:
"Surely it was a good deed to kill this bloodthirsty tyrant, this Nero on the Persian
throne
who nonetheless knew how to throw sand in the eyes of civilized Europe
so that it did not recognize his deeds. It was well done then to kill him, for it may be
a warning to others. This is the first time that a Shah has found his death not in a
palace revolution but at the hand of an ordinary man, and thus for a tyrant to receive
just recompense for his deeds." [2]
Afghani rightly identifies a turning point in the assassination of Nasir ad-Din Shah: the Shah deserved to die, not for deviating from
religion, but for betraying the nation. The assassin, this "ordinary man," had acted on behalf of all ordinary men on the behalf of
the people. The traditional rulers the shahs of Iran and the Ottoman sultans had built their defenses in their claim to rule by
will of God. But suddenly here appeared new nationalisms that ignored this claim, creating a new rationale for assassination:
sovereignty belonged to the "ordinary man," who had the right to freedom from tyranny. Assassination by the "ordinary man" in an
era of populist nationalism tended to level the moral ground, making possible the later emergence of the assassin as national hero.
Modern technology also made it possible for the "ordinary man" to reach the divine-right ruler, who once had been so remote. In
1905, a carriage packed with explosives just missed killing Sultan Abdulhamid in a major square in Istanbul. The ruler now had to
fear more than the dagger and the poison of the palace plots. Another kind of plot, hatched among conspirators in secret societies
or the army, and justified in the name of the nation, could claim him just as readily.
RITE OF PASSAGE
Nationalists did eventually clear the palaces, more often by revolution than by assassination. As the century unfolded, nationalist
governments took power throughout the Middle East. But this did not delegitimize violent opposition, because the nationalist rulers
ruled in authoritarian, or dictatorial, ways. In the name of the nation, the nationalist rulers sent their opponents off to the
prisons of Abu Zabal and Tura near Cairo, or Mezze in Damascus. And, in the name of the nation, assassins plotted the murders of
rulers, usually in bids to seize power. If they succeeded, the assassins then became rulers.
Consider two examples. In 1945, the twenty-seven-year-old Anwar al-Sadat and his friends decided to assassinate the on-and-off
Prime Minister of Egypt, Nahhas Pasha. Nahhas had been one of Egypt's most popular nationalist politicians, but the younger
nationalists thought him too pro-British. Listen to Sadat describe the decision to kill him:
"When we were schoolboys, we had gone out twice a day to have a look at Nahhas,
cheering and applauding as he rode down to work and back. He had been a mythical
hero a peerless symbol of patriotism, self-sacrifice, and devotion. But then he lost
everything and we came to regard him as a traitor. His disloyalty to Egypt and her
people made his removal a national duty. We therefore decided to get rid of him." [3]
This rather blunt passage demonstrates how readily nationalists may replace accolades for the hero with grenades for the traitor.
The group staked out Nahhas's motorcade; one of the members threw a grenade, but luckily for Nahhas, it missed his car. The
group was quite disappointed; eager to assassinate someone, they decided to kill the Finance Minister, Amin Osman. This
succeeded, and, while Sadat was not the triggerman, he was tried as part of the conspiracy and was acquitted only after a lengthy
trial.
In the isolation of Cell 54, Sadat experienced his political epiphany. But what did he say about the deed that put him there? "The
assassination of Amin Osman achieved its objective," he wrote. "We had managed to mar the image of effective colonialism, with
unprecedented decisiveness, in the eyes of the people." [4] The act was done, then, on behalf of "the people." Sadat nowhere
displayed any remorse about the resort to assassination to remove a "traitor."
Another assassin who ended as ruler was Saddam Hussein. In 1959, the twenty-two-year-old Saddam and a group of young
Baathists decided to assassinate the then-ruler of Iraq, Abd al-Karim Qassem, a military man who had crushed the monarchy and
established himself as "Sole Leader." Saddam and his colleagues planned to ambush Qassem's motorcade. Saddam was not
supposed to fire at Qassem, only to provide cover. But according to his semiofficial biography, "when he found himself face to
face with the dictator, he was unable to restrain himself. He forgot all his instructions and immediately opened fire." [5] However,
Qassem was only wounded, and Saddam fled abroad.
After Saddam's ascent to power, this experience as a fledgling assassin, far from being deemed a liability, became a deliberately
cultivated part of the Saddam myth. In Iraq, there were television shows and even a movie on the tribulations of the heroic young
assassin. He is wounded in his brave attempt; he extracts a bullet from his flesh with a knife; he gallops across the desert on a
horse; he swims to freedom across the icy Tigris with a knife between his teeth. Here is the assassin as hero, as a role model of
commitment and self-sacrifice.
In the cases of Sadat and Saddam, we see how conspiracy to assassinate becomes a rite of passage and valuable preparation for
more complex conspiracies to come those that will carry the plotter to power. To have been an assassin is a credential that
enhances the aura of the ruler. And as such, it is inspiration for the next generation of assassins. Assassins cut down Sadat;
Saddam, who was cannier, managed to escape them, despite many attempts. The nationalists, from Afghani onward, made
assassination heroic; once in power, they could not stop its cyclical repetition, now directed against them.
HOLY MURDER
I come now very briefly to the last stage, which is the present predicament. The rulers rule on, ostensibly in the name of the nation.
But, since the widespread revival of Islam as an idiom of protest, it is the assassins who claim to act in the name of God. The first
revival of assassination in the name of Islam may be traced in the deeds of the Muslim Brethren in Egypt, whose members
assassinated Egypt's Prime Minister, Nuqrashi Pasha, in 1948. There were also the actions of Iran's Devotees of Islam, who
assassinated Prime Minister Ali Razmara in 1951. Islamists were suppressed in both Egypt and Iran in the 1950s and 1960s but came
back with a roar in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In Egypt, Islamists assassinated President Sadat in 1981, and, in 1995, they came
close to assassinating President Mubarak in Ethiopia with an attack on his motorcade.
In Iran, the Islamists made a revolution but failed to assassinate the Shah, who managed to get away, and then died of his cancer.
One might argue that the Shah's assassination has been an absent element in the heroic narrative of the revolution. Some
compensation was found in the fact that the ruler who gave refuge to the Shah, Egypt's Sadat, met his death at the hands of an
Islamist assassin. Iran's official approval for this act found symbolic expression in 1982, when it issued a stamp in the assassin's
honor. The stamp showed the assassin, Khalid Islambuli, shouting defiantly from behind bars. The City of Tehran renamed a street
after the assassin: it became Khalid Islambuli Avenue. The street bore that name until January, 2004, when Iran decided to mend
fences with Egypt and instructed the City to rename the street Intifada Avenue.
In sum, we may look back at the last century as one in which religion, as the motive force of assassination, surrendered primacy of
place to nationalism. But that surrender, it seems, was only temporary. Religious assassins are now back claiming victims, who, in
some cases have been assassins themselves. We may also look back at this century as a continuation of that long tradition of
authoritarian, if not totalitarian, rule -- rule of the kind that has always fed assassination with legitimacy and sympathy, no matter
how it is packaged.
Alas, assassination itself is unlikely to change this tradition. "Surely it was a good deed to kill this bloodthirsty tyrant," said
Afghani. Perhaps, but, as this only ushers in the next tyrant, the Middle East may be said to be locked in a tragic cycle of tyranny
and tyrannicide. By and large, assassination in the Middle East does not stir the same revulsion as it does in the constitutional
democracies of the West, and it will not do so until its peoples have a say in who governs them.
NOTES:
[1] Quoted by Nikki R. Keddie, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din "al-Afghani" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 114.
[2] Ibid., p. 412.
[3] Anwar al-Sadat, In Search of Identity: An Autobiography (New York: Harpercollins, 1978), p. 58.
[4] Ibid., p. 60.
[5] Quoted in Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi, Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography (New York: The Free Press, 1991), p. 18.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
The Middle East & the Arabs
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
Martin Kramer is Editor of the Middle East Quarterly.
The foregoing article by Martin Kramer was originally published in the Middle East Quarterly, Summer, 2004, and can be found on
the Internet website maintained by the Middle East Forum.
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
October 18, 2004
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