Islamic Imperialism: A History (review)

Karsh leaves no doubt about which side of the contemporary Western–Muslim and Arab–Israeli disputes he takes in Islamic Imperialism. The message contained therein is that the Arab–Muslim kettle has no business calling the Western pot black when it comes to imperial ambitions. Karsh's foray through the rise of Islam to the present, which gives more attention to recent events than to the distant past, is intended to demonstrate the deep-seated, virtually irrepressible expansionist impulses of Islam from Muhammad to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He begins with four quotations. The first is an injunction from Muhammad, "I was ordered to fight all men until they say 'there is no God but Allah.'"1 Similar words from other Muslim stalwarts—Saladin, the Ayatollah Ruhollal, and Osama bin Laden—follow. All of them are certain to make the hair of any non-Muslim stand on end. They proclaim Islam's message to have been universalistic and militant, aspiring to bring all peoples under the sway of Muslim rule.

The book is timely as well as polemical. Its polemics and its obvious intention to arouse strong responses should not deter readers, since it is a work deserving to be read for its penetrating analyses of the long history of Islam as an expanding and proselytizing faith. The terms empire and imperialism, however, are anachronistic for much of the history of Islam as treated in this book. Until the nineteenth century and contact with European imperialists, Muslims did not have a word that translates easily into empire and certainly no word for imperialism, even though the early Muslim leaders were surrounded by, and quickly conquered, other states that referred to themselves as empires (the Roman, Byzantine, and Persian empires). In contrast, Muslims designated themselves as members of an umma, a community of believers. They called the Muslim lands dar al-Islam, or the abode of Islam, to distinguish them from the areas not yet ruled by Muslims, referred to as dar al-harb, or the abode of war. The closest classical Arabic word to the idea of empire and imperialism is dawla, which implies a turning, and, thus, in some cases, can suggest that the time or the turn has come for a new group to exploit power at the expense of others. But the fact that the book does not engage at any level with the Arab–Muslim terminologies for empires and imperialism is clearly a significant oversight.

This work has two powerful messages. The first, which occupies the first half of the book, argues that from its birth, Muslim leaders have sought nothing less than world domination. No Muslim hero escapes the charge of being a self-aggrandizing imperialist. For Karsh, the events that were critical in rendering Muhammad's message savage and cruel were the difficulties that he encountered with the Jewish people living in Medina and elsewhere in the Arabian peninsula. Instead of embracing his message and seeing him as a worthy successor in a long line of God's prophets—though, in this case, the final and definitive messenger—the Jews spurned his tenets and caused Muhammad no end of vexation. Karsh also deals critically with Saladin, disputing the flattering treatments often presented in Western accounts of the crusades. In Karsh's view, Saladin had his own personal, expansionist agenda, within which the Christian crusaders, ensconced in Jerusalem and various other parts of the Holy Lands, were not a prime concern.

Nonetheless, Karsh's chapters about the militant, expansionist—even imperialist—nature of Islam cannot be swept aside by his dismissive style. The Umayyad rulers, who held sway over the Islamic territories from 660 to 750, would probably fit any modern definition of imperialists. Their empire favored Arabic-speaking peoples of the world; non-Arabs were expected to pay taxes and were not encouraged to become Muslims. This description would sound familiar to historians of the modern British Empire, in which citizenship was reserved for Britons born at home and subject status for peoples...