From 1967 To Post-9/11

The publication of Ataullah Siddiqui's Department of Education and Skills report is no doubt correct in its claim that the teaching of Islam in English universities is based on "out-of-date and irrelevant issues," being overly focussed on the Middle East and ignorant of the realities of modern Islam in multi-cultural Britain. However, if we do not understand where our post-9/11 and 7/7 world came from, then we will fail to make any progress either domestically or on the international stage. Therefore, in all that will be said and written over the coming days about the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War, with its inevitable focus on the struggle for peace in the Middle East, I hope the media will also explore the contribution made by the war to the development of political Islam.

Speaking ten days before Israel launched its pre-emptive strike against the Egyptian Air Force on 5th June 1967, Egypt's President Nasser declared, "If Israel embarks on an aggression against Syria or Egypt, the battle against Israel will be a general one and not confined to one spot on the Syrian or Egyptian borders. The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel." The trouble was, the Arabs believed him. Their resounding defeat quickly led to the belief that Israel launched the war with the support of Britain and the United States. As one Israeli historian has noted, this now deep-rooted conviction "established a direct link between the 1967 war and former imperialist attempts to control the Arab world, thus portraying Israel as an imperialist stooge."

The failure of Arab nationalism in 1967 thus opened the way for mosques to provide answers to questions that the secular leaders had been unable to deliver and bred a distrust of democracy, which was seen as the heritage of Western imperialism. The political Islamists that emerged were unable to accept the notion of sovereignty in the people for they maintain that sovereignty is only to be found in God—not in people, who are servants of God. Equally, they reject the idea that laws are made by the people, for they hold that laws are God-given in sharia—the divine, immutable Islamic law. With every attempt to "bring freedom and democracy" to the region—and with every failure to deliver on such promises—we have strengthened the hand of political Islam. So it is that just as Israel's victory in 1967 was the beginning of the end of pan-Arabism as an ideology to unite the region and define its people, Israel's defeat in last year's war in Lebanon has given added momentum to the new religious nationalism provided by the Islamist movement.

Contrary to popular myth, 9/11 did not change the world. It merely opened the eyes of many in the West to a struggle that has been brewing for decades. 1967 arguably did change the world. The "realities of modern Islam in multi-cultural Britain" have some of their roots in those defining six days and have been cultivated by our continued frequent mistakes in the region ever since. The proper study of history, not just Islam, is also a "strategic subject" if education is to have a real role "in preventing extremism."