Down and out

To prepare for my April visit to Iran, discussed in an earlier post, I've been reading a small book about Islamic history, written by the gentleman who will be our guide. Our ambassador to Pakistan under President Clinton, he prepared this book based on a series of lectures that he delivered at Stanford about ten years ago.

I try to keep up on world events, and I actually took courses in Middle Eastern history as a student. But, like most of us, my mind gets caught up in the urgency of current events and our emotional responses to acts of terrorism. Too often, I find myself agreeing with internet comments suggesting that Muslims -- or, at best, radical Muslim terrorists -- are uniquely evil, and that terrorism is a movement that has emerged from something peculiarly violent about Islam itself.

In his book, our guide puts today's events in historical context. An academic specialist in both Islamic and Eastern European civilizations (he also has served as ambassador to Poland), he draws parallels between today's Islamic terrorism and the terrorism -- anarchist, socialist, Marxist -- that threatened governments throughout eastern Europe, and especially Russia, just one century earlier.

Both Russia in the late 19th century and the Middle East in the late 20th century saw economic changes that caused massive migrations from rural areas to large cities. A rapid decrease in infant mortality also led to enormous population growth and to a consequent demographic bulge of young people. Educational improvements, in combination with demographics, produced a far larger class of educated young people than their backward societies could absorb and use productively. As a result, large cities contained -- and in the Middle East still contain -- a large under-class of bitter, well-educated, unemployed young people, youth who see no hopes for their future.

In both Russia and the Middle East, pre-existing utopian idealogies embraced by intellectuals had the potential to threaten existing repressive and inept governments -- anarchism, socialism, Marxism threatened the czarist government in Russia; restoration of Islamic purity as it existed in its Arabian origins threatened "Arab socialist" governments in the more advanced areas of the Middle East. These utopian ideals appealed strongly to impoverished urban youth; they provided young people with intellectual vehicles for their opposition to forces they saw as oppressive, forces they believed were denying them their dreams for the future.

In both Russia and the Middle East, the tinder was in place for the explosions that actually occurred.

The writer asks us to remember the protagonist in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment -- the impoverished, bitter, student intellectual who contemplates and finally commits a shocking and violent crime, the ax-murder of an old woman in order to use her money for idealistic purposes. How different from the student Raskolnikov, really, in their underlying psychology, were those young men and women who blew themselves up in Iraq, and who caused the 9-11 tragedy? To what extent is Islam the cause of today's terrorism, and to what extent is it merely an intellectual or emotional justification for it? To what extent should we be fighting Islamic fundamentalism, and to what extent should we be fighting the social and economic conditions that make it so attractive?

Lots to think about, and several other strongly recommended books to read, before I leave for Tehran.