Opinion Muslims won’t play together

It’s a small but telling controversy. It puts the lie to the idea of the Islamic world as a bloc united by religious values that are hostile to the West. It also gives clues as to how the United States and its allies should handle two of their most urgent foreign policy matters: the Iranian nuclear programme and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is not the first time that Arabs have challenged the internationally accepted name of the waterway that separates Persia (or Iran,as it has been called since 1935) from the Arabian Peninsula. Pan-Arabist thought — which dominated Arab political life for most of the 20th century — insisted on the creation of a unified vast empire “from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arab Gulf,” provoking sharp confrontations with Iran since the late 1960s.

The Islamic regime in Tehran,which came to power in 1979 dismissing nationalism as an imperialist plot aimed at weakening the worldwide Muslim community. “The Iranian revolution is not exclusively that of Iran,because Islam does not belong to any particular people,” insisted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Yet like Stalin,who responded to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 by urging his people to fight for the motherland rather than for the Communist ideals with which they had been indoctrinated,Khomeini reverted to nationalist rhetoric to rally his subjects after the Iraqi invasion of 1980.

In this history of a single body of water,one sees a perfect example of the so-called Islamic Paradox that dates from the seventh century. For although the Prophet Muhammad took great pains to underscore the equality of all believers regardless of ethnicity,categorically forbidding any fighting among the believers,his precepts have been constantly and blatantly violated. It took a mere 24 years after the Prophet’s death for the head of the universal Islamic community,the caliph Uthman,to be murdered by political rivals. This opened the floodgates to incessant infighting within the House of Islam,which has never ceased.

Nor,for that matter,has the House of Islam ever formed a unified front vis-à-vis the House of War (as Muslims call the rest of the world). Even during the Crusades,the supposed height of the “clash of civilisations,” Christian and Muslim rulers freely collaborated across the religious divide,often finding themselves aligned with members of the rival religion against their co-religionists.

This pattern of pragmatic cooperation has also become a central feature of 20th- and 21st-century Middle Eastern politics. Ayatollah Khomeini bought weapons from even the “Great Satan,” the United States. Saddam Hussein used Western support to survive his war against Iran in the 1980s. And Osama bin Laden and the rest of the Afghan mujahideen accepted weapons and money from the United States,with the Islamic state of Pakistan as the middleman,in their struggle against the Soviet occupation.

So,if the Muslim bloc is just as fractious as any other group of seemingly aligned nations,what does it mean for United States policy in the Islamic world?

For one,take a harder line with Iran. Just as governments couldn’t muster the minimum sense of commonality needed for holding an all-Islamic sports tournament,so they would be unlikely to rush to Iran’s aid in the event of sanctions,or even a military strike. As for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,the idea that bringing peace between the two parties will bring about a flowering of cooperation in the region totally misreads history and present-day politics. Regional states threaten Israel’s existence not so much out of concern for the Palestinians,but rather as part of a holy war to prevent the loss of a part of the House of Islam. Any agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is far less important than a regional agreement in which every Islamic nation can make peace with the idea of Jewish statehood in the House of Islam.

And that,depressingly,is going to be a lot harder to pull off than even the Islamic Solidarity Games.