Djelloul Marbrook

Nothing frames the clash between the West and the rising number of Muslim jihadis more clearly than President Bush’s October 11th press conference. He used the word caliphate as if it had a metallic taste, displaying his vast ignorance of Islamic history.

The President refers to the caliphate as misguidedly as the al-Qaeda and Salafist extremists. The extremists, he said, wish to reestablish a caliphate, as if that would be worse than North Korea joining the nuclear club.

He and his neo-con strategists don’t understand the caliphate any better than the Muslim crackpots do. There were three major caliphates in Arab history: the earliest Umayyad caliphate in Damascus, the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad that brought down the Umayyads, and a second Umayyad caliphate in Cordoba. Each of them represent a high-water mark not only of Arab but of human civilization. Each of them left dazzling heritages of which we ourselves are beneficiaries. And, most importantly, the Abbasid and later Umayyad caliphates left us unforgettable models of tolerance and moderation.

There were other caliphates, notably the non-Arab Turkish caliphate, which also at various times provided us with a model of religious and ethnic tolerance.

The nostalgia of the fanatics for the caliphate is weirdly misplaced. The great caliphates of Islamic history would have had little truck with their brand of ignorance and misrepresentation of the Quran. Indeed the fabulous Cordoban caliphate (inset) was brought down by Muslim extremists whom today’s North African Salafists closely resemble, not by the Christian Reconquista.

Bush’s appalling misuse of the word signals to Muslims who understand their own history that he knows nothing of it and cares less. To their fanatics he merely signals they’ve gotten his goat.

The mathematics we use to reach into space, to push the envelope in medicine and science, and to efficiently kill Iraqis derive in large part from the caliphate at Cordoba. Our banking system, starting with the British exchequer under Henry I, was fashioned by Arab mathematicians from
Toledo in Spain. If President Bush had shown the slightest appreciation of such matters he would have gone a long way towards letting educated Muslims know that we know something of the achievements of which they’re so justifiably proud. Instead he used the word caliphate as if it were a cherry plunked in his martini.

The Muslims have little experience with democracy. They perceive it, coming from the West as it does, as neocolonialism, and watching our soldiers rush to protect the oil fields while allowing the museums to be looted did little to mitigate that impression. But they understand the glories of their caliphates, and they know that caliphs (successors to the Prophet) like the Umayyad Mu’awiya or the Abbasid Haroun al-Raschid of Arabian Nights fame, or Abd ar-Rahman of Cordoba would have rolled up the likes of Osama bin Laden and his ilk in the wink of an eye.

The caliphates of Islam empowered the scientific West and showed how the races of man can live creatively under the same tent, provided their government is benevolent and moderate. Is this the model the President thinks we must fear, or does he think we should fear the fanatics’ ignorance of their own religious history?

No reporter challenged his use of the word the other day, and so we have semi-officially informed the Muslims that we’re as stupid when it comes to understanding their caliphates as the angry nitwits who have murdered more than 600,000 of their own people in Iraq.

The press found a lot to palaver about in the President’s used-car rant, but they missed the key to the darkest side of his Middle East policy: he doesn’t care who they are, where they’ve been or what they hope to become. Anyone who does would never use the word the way he did, as if it were an evil idea. And if he’s so concerned about Islam’s religious right, why isn’t he concerned about our own religious right, poking us ever closer to a theocracy? Or Israel’s, for that matter?