Violence and Terrorism in the Middle East: A Short History

Violence and Terrorism in the Middle East: A Short History Charles Lindholm Recently President Bush, supported by American Muslim clerics, announced that Islam was "a religion of peace" which had been "hijacked" by al-Qaeda. But this reassuring blanket statement was immediately disputed by those who claimed instead that Islam is much more accurately seen as "the religion of war." In support they cited the Muslim belief that the world is divided in a continuous struggle between the dar al Islam (the unified house of Islam) and dar al harb (the house of the infidel); the Muslim believer is duty bound to participate in this holy war (jihad). It is true that belief in jihad is central to Islam, as is attested by many sacred texts. For example, as one hadith (saying of the Prophet) proclaims: "There is no monasticism in Islam; the monasticism of this community is the holy war." It is also historically true that Islam began in battle. Exiled from his home for his subversive beliefs, the Prophet Muhammad gained warrior allies in the Saudi hinterlands, defeated his numerically superior opponents, and returned as a conqueror to his natal city of Mecca. He was a great war leader as well as a spiritual redeemer, promising his followers not only admission to heaven in the next world, but also concrete spoils of victory in this one. Those early Muslims who did not participate in jihad were considered lacking in religious merit. Those who fell in battle were guaranteed immediate entrance into paradise. Nor did Islam become a religion of peace after Muhammad's death (632). Instead, Muslim warriors battled on against the vast and powerful Persian and Byzantine Kingdoms; miraculously, against all odds, they were victorious, validating the authority of their message as well as establishing the foundation for the great Islamic dynasties - Umayyad, Marwanid, Abbasid, Buyid, Fatimid, Seljuk, Ottoman, Safavid - that were eventually to rule from Morocco to Afghanistan. In other words, Muslims never accepted the admonishment to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Instead, they sought to depose the party of Caesar and replace it with the party of God. Yet a portrait of Islam as a warlike religion is just as simplistic as the image of Islam as a religion of peace. Although Muslims divide the world into warring camps of believers and unbelievers, in real life it is not so easy to decide who is who, since "only God knows" the true content of the human heart. As the great twelfth century scholar and Sufi Muhammad al-Ghazali wrote: "Whoever says `I am a believer,' is an infidel; and whoever says `I am learned,' is ignorant" (al-Ghazali 1963: 134). Nor should a Muslim try to force others to recognize the truth. After all, the Quran itself says that God "leads astray whom He will and guides whom He will (16.95); some will never believe, for "God has set a seal on their hearts" (2.6). The final word is that "the truth is from your Lord; so let whosoever will, believe, and let whosoever will, disbelieve" (18.28). In this context, many Muslims have interpreted the injunction for jihad as a command to purify the self by ridding one's own heart of hypocrisy. With self-doubt, spiritual introspection, and resigned acceptance of the inevitable plurality of beliefs as major religious themes in Islam, war against the heathen without has usually been secondary to war against the Pharisee within. Nor has conversion to Islam usually been at the point of a sword; instead it has most often been a voluntary response to Muslim egalitarianism and the Prophet's expansive message of salvation. In this environment, pogroms against Jews, Christians, and other minorities were much less common in the premodern Middle East than in premodern Europe; all the descendants of Abraham were recognized as having a fundamental kinship with their Muslim brothers. Muhammad did not repudiate the previous annunciations of Jesus or Moses. Rather, he saw his message as the restoration of earlier prophecies to their pure state. Thus, Muslim honor was generally satisfied with the payment of tribute from minority populations (the dhimmi) who in return were forgiven from military service and other religious obligations. The moral is that it is easy to paint Islam as either essentially pacific or bellicose - just as it is easy to draw texts from the Bible or from the Torah to make either case about Christians and Jews. The truth is that the record is ambiguous: Islamic scripture, like that of the Christians and Jews (or Hindus or Buddhists for that matter) can interpreted in various ways for various purposes. In a real sense, it is the protean character of great religions that makes them so eternally appealing. Islam is no different in this respect: its adherents can be pacifists or terrorists or somewhere in between; all can equally call on holy writ to justify themselves. But an objective observer ought not be taken in by these claims; neither terrorism or pacifism is reflective of some essential aspect of Islam, any more than the brutality and torture that stains European history is a direct and inevitable consequence of the message of Jesus. With that caveat in mind, let me trace the history of terrorism and assassination in Middle Eastern Muslim society, and explore its ideological and structural correlates. To begin, it is crucial to recognize that Islam is a millennial religion in which the millennial dream was actually achieved, at least for a moment, during the rule of Muhammad and the four rightly guided Caliphs (deputies) who succeeded him (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali). To put it in Christian terms, it is as if, instead of being crucified, Jesus had become Emperor and was then succeeded in that post by four of his close disciples. All of the majority (Sunni) Muslims look back on this era as a period in which human beings lived in a kind of earthly paradise, as a God-given justice prevailed among the believers. Ever since, Muslim rulers have been measured by this high spiritual standard, and have failed to live up to it. For some zealots, this failure has implied a state of permanent revolution; true believers must overthrow unjust rulers in the hope of bringing the redeemer (the mahdi) and precipitating the end of time. Despite Muslim nostalgia for the golden days of early Islam, this dynamic of disappointment and rebellion was at work at almost the very beginning of the Muslim polity, and was the source of schisms that continue to have repercussions even today. It began with the death of Muhammad. Afterwards, the faithful had to live in a world where the Prophet no longer served as the living arbiter of good and evil, truth and falsehood. Some of his tribal followers did not accept the rule of his elected successors, and considered them to be usurpers. Battles for power also ensued between the old preIslamic elite of Mecca, who were late converts, and those who had joined Muhammad earlier, but did not have such illustrious lineages. And resentment simmered about who had the right to control and distribute shares in the booty from conquest. These antagonisms came to a head when the third Caliph Uthman favored his noble relatives with top administrative and military posts, inflaming the anger and jealousy of Muslims from rival lineages. In 656, after a few days of angry dispute. these rivals killed Uthman and buried him ignominiously in a Jewish cemetery. With Uthman's murder, the "door was opened" and fitna, chaos, was loosed in the world of Islam; that door would never again be closed. Uthman's successor, the Prophet's son-in-law Ali, struggled to gain control of the empire, but he was opposed by Uthman's allies, and especially by his cousin Muawiya, the military governor of Syria, who swore to revenge Uthman's death and to succeed him as Caliph. Muawiya's success and Ali's death in 661 spelled the end of the rightly guided Caliphate and the beginning of secular rule that has dominated in the Middle East ever since. As Ignaz Goldziher puts it, henceforth the Sunni Caliph became "nothing but the successor of the one who preceded him, having been designated as such by a human act (election, or nomination by his predecessor), and not entitled by the qualities inherent in his personality" (Goldziher 1981: 183). However, many Muslims who had participated in Muhammad's community could not accept the disintegration of their unified charismatic collective so easily. They remembered the promises of the Prophet and the experience of the divinely consecrated commune of all Muslims (the umma) - memories that continue today to activate religious resistance to secular government - and sought more sanctified candidates to fill the post of ruler over an Islamic collective. This quest, in its most extreme manifestations, has animated terrorism practiced in the name of Islam throughout the ages. There were two main approaches to re-establishing the sacred polity. The first was taken by those referred to as the kharijites, `those who go out'. These originally were early tribal followers of Muhammad who later favored Ali against the alliance of military elite and Meccan aristocrats. But when Ali vainly sought negotiation with his enemies, the kharijites rejected him as a poseur and assassinated him. They then proclaimed radically egalitarian religious republics for themselves, wherein only the most pious and able would rule, regardless of family, ancestral spirituality, priority of conversion, or any other claim - in some groups, even women were given the same rights as men. Pitiless opponents to all who denied the truth of their egalitarian moral stance, they saw themselves as "the people of heaven" battling against "the people of hell". An ember of their moral fervor still burns in a sermon dating from 746, execrating the Umayyads who, the preacher says, "made the servants of God slaves, the property of God something to be taken by turns, and His religion a cause of corruption....(they) said `The land is our land, the property is our property, and the people are our slaves'.... The(se) people have acted as unbelievers, by God, in the most barefaced manner. So curse them, may God curse them!" (Quoted in Crone and Hinds 1986: 130, 132). W.M. Watt has portrayed the kharijites as a retrograde movement of disappointed tribesmen hoping "to reconstitute in new circumstances and on an Islamic basis the small groups they had been familiar with in the desert" (Watt 1973: 20). But unlike the pre-Islamic tribesmen, for them the rule of the strongest and cleverest was not enough; their leader also had to be the most devout, and he could be deposed and even killed at any time, for any moral error, so that commanders rose and fell with rapidity. Arguments over doctrine also continually split the kharijite bands. Although they were good at fighting, the loosely organized and internally divided kharijites could not gain any wider legitimacy or establish a stable governmental structure. They wasted themselves in unwinnable wars against the whole world, and against one another as well, in vain hopes of establishing an absolutely pure polity. Despite an absence of political success, the kharijite impulse to high morality and political anarchism has had an affinity ever since with devout rebels who refuse to accept secular rule or elite domination. Even today, modern Islamist radicals are execrated by the orthodox as `kharijites' because of their radical egalitarianism, moral self-righteousness, willingness to use violence against those with whom they disagree, and relentless opposition to central authority. In turn, the radicals denounce their moderate opponents as apostates for accepting the `unIslamic' command of the secular state. Although the anarchistic kharijites long were a thorn in the side of Middle Eastern regimes, and though their message still has a powerful appeal, a more effective source of sustained sacred opposition to the status quo came from quite the opposite ideological direction. Instead of arguing for a radically egalitarian community of believers who freely elect as a leader the man best among them, these rebels subordinated themselves to a sacred authority whose word was absolute law. For them, Muhammad's charisma was reincarnated in his descendants, notably in Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law and nephew, who served as the fourth Caliph after the murder of Uthman. The Shi`ites, or `partisans' of Ali, argued that, since Muhammad had no sons, Ali had inherited Muhammad's spiritual power and must be recognized as Imam, the sacred ruler of all of Islam. For those following Ali or other lineal descendants of the Prophet, the problem of authority was solved by recognizing that one particular member of the Prophet's kin group had spiritual ascendance above all others, and therefore had the intrinsic right to rule. The Shi`ite belief in the omnipotence of their transcendental Imam incited enthusiasm among the faithful, who could righteously unite behind him in a jihad against the corruption of the center. But this also meant that their faith was often severely challenged when the dream confronted political reality, and the faithful had either to accept disappointment of their hopes or embark on yet more fervent pursuits of the millennium. The first crisis of faith occurred when Ali was assassinated by a poisoned sword wielded by a kharijite fanatic. As mentioned, the kharijites had been early supporters of Ali, won over by his opposition to the entrenched interests of the Meccan elite. But they were furious when Ali compromised with his opponents after a stalemate in the Battle of Siffin in 658. For kharijite zealots, any compromise was a bargain with Satan, and Ali had to pay for this betrayal with his life. Ali's son Husain was no more fortunate; he was abandoned by his allies and slaughtered with his followers by Muawiya's son Yazid at the Battle of Karbala in 680 - an event commemorated with weeping and expiatory self-laceration by Shi`ites ever since. From Karbala on, Shi`ite resentment over Sunni rule and the injustice of the world has fanned subversive acts of opposition, which have sometimes included terrorism. For example, the origins of the Abbasid dynasty (750-945) lie in the actions of Shi`ite underground religious revolutionaries, the Hashimiyya, who aroused an alienated populace to revolt against the oppressive regime of the Marwanids. The Hashimiyya were experienced conspirators who recognized from experience that an urban revolt in the center of the Empire was impossible, but believed that a revolution from the margins could succeed, and identified Khurasan in Eastern Iran as the most likely place for such a revolt to begin. A tiny, tightly knit group of extremists, the Hashimiyya used sophisticated techniques of recruitment and organization that closely resemble those of revolutionary Islamic radicals today. Operating in small, segregated, highly disciplined, cells of true believers under strict central leadership, they maintained absolute secrecy while spreading anti-government propaganda and millenarian rhetoric. Overt rebellion started in the garrison town of Merv, where 2200 rebels raised the black banner of revenge and revolt in 747. They soon were joined by thousands of dissatisfied revolutionaries, and the movement swept Islamdom from east to west, ending in 750 with the ascent of the Abbasids and the beginning of a new imperial absolutism. The leader of the Hashimiyya conspiracy in Khurasan was a shadowy figure, perhaps an ex-slave or bondsman, who is known to history only by his pseudonym, Abu Muslim Abdulrahman b. Muslim al-Khurasani (`a Muslim son of a Muslim, father of a Muslim of Khurasan'). This name was meant to indicate that he was neither client nor patron, Arab nor Persian, but was simply an ordinary Muslim from Khurasan. As M.A. Shaban says, "he was a living proof that in the new society every member would be regarded only as a Muslim regardless of racial origins or tribal connections" (Shaban 1971: 183). Based on his promise of equality, he was able to unite a polyglot army of followers. Not unexpectedly, one of the first acts of the Abbasid King whom Abu Muslim had placed on the throne was to organize Abu Muslim's assassination. The martyred hero has been popularly recalled ever since as a Messianic rebel who remains in hiding, awaiting the proper time to lead the people back to power, He was one of the first of such Muslim popular martyrs, who are called upon even today to justify popular rebellion. However, it is noteworthy that at Abu Muslim's death, there was no mass uprising. Very possibly most Muslims then, like most Muslims now, were satisfied to have a stable, if tyrannical, regime in power, following the local precept that "sixty years of an unjust Imam are better than one night without a Sultan." Similar schismatic and redemptive millennial Shi`ite movements have periodically marked Muslim political history. For example, in the early tenth century the Abbasids themselves were almost overthrown by the radically egalitarian Qarmatids, who mobilized supporters with the doctrine that the Messiah was soon to arrive and usher in the end of time. Retreating to the desert, these rebels forsook all traditional forms of distinction and shared their property communally. They appealed to the idealism of the oppressed masses, attacked caravans of holy pilgrims, and in 930 committed the ultimate sacrilege by absconding with the Kaaba, the great stone all Muslims face when they worship. This powerful revolutionary movement only lost momentum when its military leader, Abu Tahir, named a young Persian as the actual Mahdi. Unfortunately for the Qarmatids, the new Mahdi soon distinguished himself by his insolence, ignorance, and cruelty. When he was executed, the movement lost its legitimacy and vanished. Other, more successful, Shi`ite movements include the Fatimids, who ruled Egypt and the West from 969 to 1171, collapsing as a result of internal dissension, and the Safavids, who conquered Persia in 1501 and became increasingly secularized and dissolute until their downfall in 1722. But perhaps the most relevant historical precedent for the present day is to be found in the extraordinary trajectory of a famous but quite small offshoot of the Fatimids: the Nizari branch of the Ismaili Shi`ites. The prototypical assassins, they found refuge in several remote mountain enclaves at the very margins of the Seljuk empire at the end of the eleventh century. Because of their fervor, their willingness to die for their beliefs, and their practice of assassination as a political tool, the Nizari gave rise to legends of hashish-intoxicated madmen and mystical voluptuaries, dying at the whim of their mysterious master. These legends disguised something even more remarkable: tightly disciplined communities of absolute believers, all imbued with a spirit that placed their ultimate mission above any personal desire - even above the desire for life. The Nizari began under the charismatic leadership of the theologian and mystic Hasan al-Sabbah, the `old man of the mountain.' Hasan argued that the spiritual authority of the living Fatimid Imam was directly derived from a community of true believers whose absolute faith both defines and validates the Imam's mission. In order to manifest the reality of the Imam the community must therefore devote itself completely and selflessly to bringing about his domination in the world. For this sacred purpose, any means whatsoever could be employed, including clandestine operations by undercover agents who remained hidden in place for years, awaiting the opportunity to kill their appointed targets. Their most famous victim was Nizam al-Mulk, the great Seljuk vizier, who was killed in 1092 in retaliation, so it was said, for the death of a Nizari carpenter - an indication of the millennial egalitarianism of the movement. The Nizari were an isolated and relatively weak group who could not confront the might of the Seljuks and their allies directly. But the absence of any institutional means for passing down authority made assassination an effective tool for disrupting the empire. As Marshall Hodgeson puts it: "The shaykhs and amirs, a sage here and a ruler there, filling their offices by personal prestige rather than any hierarchical mechanism, were quite irreplaceable in their particular authority; when they were out of the way, the Isma`ilis could be free to establish their own more permanent form of power" (Hodgeson 1955: 81). Terror was also used in tandem with positive reinforcement. Hodgeson tells the story of the anti-Ismaili theologian Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi (d. 1209) who was accosted by assassin, threatened with a dagger, and told that if he stopped his preaching he would be given a regular bag of gold. When asked later why he ceased castigating the Nizari, Razi said "he had been persuaded by argument both pointed and weighty" (1955: 183). But despite their successes, the Nizari eventually abandoned assassination as a tactic and accommodated themselves to the Seljuk regime. The plain fact was that most Muslims then, as now, found assassination reprehensible, and would not follow Nizari leadership. The trajectory of this archetypical band of religious terrorists is both unexpected and instructive. Most of the Nizari immigrated to India in the thirteenth century in order to escape the invading Mongol hordes. Now known as Khojas, they soon became wealthy entrepreneurs. Their present Imam, the Aga Khan, is reckoned to be the forty-ninth in the line. He is a thoroughly modern individual, but he is still the absolute spiritual leader of his flock - indicating that Shi`ite faith does not necessarily lead either to violence or to a repudiation of modernity. In fact, there are distinct capitalistic advantages in having one's divinely appointed spiritual guide right here on earth. Of course, it helps if that guide is a Harvard graduate with a strong business sense. This brings me to the great oppositional Islamic upheaval of modern times, i.e., the Iranian revolution of 1979, led by Ayatollah Khomeini. It is worth spending a few lines recapitulating the history of this movement, since, along with the wholly secular regimes of Iraq and North Korea, it is part of the "axis of evil" recently execrated by President Bush. Iran is also the nation in the Middle East where Shi`ism predominates. Furthermore, the Shi`ite clergy has had much greater independence than Sunni clerics elsewhere in the Middle East, partly due to differences in the notion of spiritual authority (Sunni clerics are mainly interpreters of sacred text, while Shi`ite's believe that certain scholars, known as Ayatollahs, are sacred in themselves), and partly due to the Iranian clerisy's control over vast amounts of property. Because Iranian Ayatollahs have such great spiritual authority and wealth they were able to resist secularizing trends in government, even prior to the advent of the Westernizing Reza Shah, who sought to sidestep Islam entirely by seeking legitimacy in a manufactured connection with Pre-Islamic times, while looking to the Christian West as both his model and protector. The efforts of the Reza Shah and his successor led to great feelings of cultural alienation among the more traditional classes of Iran. Thus, the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini was not a great surprise, at least in retrospect. A brilliant scholar, a mystical teacher, a charismatic leader, he drew the materially disaffected and culturally dispossessed to him, and as he did, his own unstated claim to be the manifestation of the redeemer was validated. In his sermons, he repudiated the passive and supplicant attitude of Shi`ism and appealed to its latent dreams of activism and transformation - the believers could now express their spirituality in a cosmic revolution that would overturn all the stultifying dissimulation, guilt, and corruption of the past and reawaken the sacred community under Khomeini's divine leadership - an eschatological event for which no amount of self-sacrifice was too great. This change was symbolized when the coffins of young people killed fighting the Shah were paraded in the streets during the celebration of the martyrdom of Husain at Karbala. The message was that these new martyrs must not be abandoned as Husain had been. Meanwhile the Shah was convincingly portrayed as the modern Yazid, a puppet of the capitalistic devils in the West. The old Shi`ite eschatology was reawakened, transformed, and reinvigorated; believers could now redeem the ancient stain of betrayal by actively purging this world of evil. This message inspired impressive acts of self-sacrifice and ended in the overthrow of the Shah, but also led to terrorist attacks against Americans and others. These could be justified on the grounds that in the battle against Satan, any methods were acceptable. Khomeini's central claim was that he was refinding a divine order that had been lost - Said Arjomand (1987) calls his message `revolutionary traditionalism'. Ironically, the `tradition' that was sought had actually never existed - though Khomeini and his followers argued that this was only because of a derailing of history due to Sunni treachery. From their perspective, the wrong turn of Islam occurred when Ali had been killed. To set right the historical injustice, the Shi`ite clergy sought to take the authority that had been denied them first by Sunni usurpers and then by the Shah, and reunite the state and the faith. This sacred polity was to be ruled by an infallible Guide whose word "takes precedence over all other institutions, which may be regarded as secondary, even prayer, fasting and pilgrimage" (Ayatollah Khomeini quoted in Richard 1995: 86). The future of the Iranian revolution is still in doubt. In Iran itself, democratizing and secularizing processes are clearly taking place, as the clergy has had to adapt itself to popular unrest or else risk an uprising. But abroad, Iran continues to support terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah. Certainly the polarizing influence of Israel is of central importance here, as Muslims of all stripes have become evermore willing to accept and even embrace terrorist martyrdom in the face of overwhelming Israeli force. For the Hezbollah, this stance is supported by Shi`ite theology. But whether Iran can actually serve as a model for Sunni radicals is doubtful, since the whole basis of the Iranian revolution is not only anti-secularist and anti-Israeli, but also anti-Sunni, and is founded on a mythology of martyrdom that has no place is Sunni eschatology. A more appropriate model for Sunni revolutionary activism can be discovered in Sufism, which offers the Sunni equivalent to the charismatic personalism that is at the heart of Shi`ism. Sufism is concerned primarily with achieving a mystical communion with the deity, but it accomplishes this end within strictly hierarchical and often secretive holy orders (tariqa) which are focused around spiritual leaders (Sheikhs or Pirs) whose word is absolute law for the disciples. It therefore offers a prototype organizational structure for the mobilization and inspiration of activists. And in fact, many Sufi orders did serve as centers for resistance to colonial authority. Nonetheless, modern Muslim activists have been quite hostile to popular Sufism. They maintain that Sufi practices are immoral innovations, and assert that the praise of Sufi saints and worship at saint's tombs are practices dangerously close to heresy. But despite their harsh ideological condemnation of Sufism, these radicals have nonetheless gathered around charismatic figures and organized themselves in ways that closely resemble activist Sufi brotherhoods of the past. For example, the radical Takfir wa al-hijrah (infidel and exile) group - many of whom were imprisoned and executed after their assassination of the Egyptian minister of religious endowments - advocated a complete separation from society in preparation for their millenarian revolt against what they imagined to be the diabolical Egyptian state. Members of the sect were sworn to secrecy, bound together in tightly controlled and isolated units, rigorously instructed in techniques for self-purification, and enjoined to complete obedience. All of them were under the command of an absolute leader, Shukri Mustafa, who claimed to know the secret meaning of every letter in the Quran, and whose word was regarded as sacred law (Youssef 1985). Similar patterns are found in other radical Islamist sects, including al-Qaeda, and even the relatively moderate Muslim Brotherhood developed secretive and inclusive cells (called families) that were held together by rigid discipline and a powerful faith in the spiritual supremacy of their leader, Hassan al-Banna, who himself came from a Sufi family and was given the Sufi title of murshid (See Mitchell 1969 for the Muslim Brotherhood, Roy 1994, Abun-Nasr 1985, Youssef 1985, Choueiri 1985 for other examples). As among Sufis, once the true leader has been recognized, it is the duty of the disciples to emulate him and to offer him their absolute devotion, rejecting the corrupt society around them in order to replicate, within their own band of the spiritually elite, the original umma gathered around the Prophet. A political party organized in this fashion then becomes the equivalent of the Sufi tariqa; a closed society serving as a training ground in purification of the soul. As in the tariqa, a hierarchy of dedicated disciples gain sacred knowledge through arduous study of texts written by the leader, public confession of sins, absolute obedience, and the practice of self-sacrifice. In the most extreme cases, this can mean terroristic martyrdom. Al-Qaeda is one example of this tendency. However, terrorist actions by these cultic groups would have little popular resonance if it were not for one other aspect of the Middle Eastern experience of terror - one that is more pervasive and more influential than usually thought; this is terror perpetrated by the state on its own people. In contrast to cultic terrorist organizations, state-sponsored terror very rarely makes any claim whatsoever to sacred justification. It is quite baldly the assertion of ruthless force for the express purpose of breaking and destroying any possible resistance or opposition to tyranny. Such brutal violence is in part an indicator of the very real illegitimacy of the secular state itself, which, from the earliest times, has always suffered in comparison to the history of sacred rule by the Prophet and his Caliphs. Lacking any sacred credibility, compliance in the Middle East has generally been a direct result of fear, since otherwise a man would not willingly obey another man who is, in principle, no better than he is. Under these conditions, force can easily become its own argument. As one Muslim writes, the state then is popularly understood "as a source of evil and harm, and those who hold power tend to be unjust, to break the law, and to play with other people's lives.... Injustice is the rule, the abuse of power is the rule; the proper, adequate use of power is the exception" (Muhammad Guessous quoted in Dwyer 1991: 120). In former times the violence of the Middle Eastern ruler was restrained both by traditional standards of honor and by the relative weakness of his regime. As a consequence, most Sultans (the word itself simply means `power') were content to torture, maim and kill only members of their own immediate entourage, leaving the populace relatively unscathed as long as taxes were paid and peace maintained. However, contemporary Middle Eastern rulers (whether Arabs or Jews, secular or religious, left or right) have much greater ambitions as well as greater means at their disposal for the infliction of violence; as a result, state sponsored terror has greatly increased. Iraq is the most frightening instance. A conservative estimate is that over 100,000 citizens have `disappeared' during the reign of Saddam Hussain, and the number is probably closer to 250,000. Compare this to the 30,000 who `disappeared' during the `dirty war' in Argentina. Other regimes have lesser, but equally horrifying, human rights records. We cannot understand the appearance of religiously-based terrorist movements in the modern Middle East without also taking into account the way states there maintain their power through coercion of and violence against their own people. To conclude: violence and terror has a long history in Middle Eastern Muslim societies. Whether it is more prevalent than elsewhere would require comparative work, but it is clear that a deep sense of the illegitimacy of the secular state, coupled with a millennial tradition of charismatic leadership, can favor the rise of radical groups who are willing to use terror to bring the promised land into being. The popular appeal of such groups varies greatly, fluctuating according to the degree of oppression and alienation felt by the Muslim masses. Unhappily, at the moment, it seems that both are on the rise. 5338 words Bibliography: Abun-Nasr, Jamil 1985. Militant Islam: A Historical Perspective In: Ernest Gellner (Ed.) 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