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necessarily partial and provisional
response to 11 September... A response
to these events can and should be based
not on supposedly distinct cultural or
civilizational values, but on an
internationalist approach...” (p. 27).
Readers familiar with Halliday’s past
work, particularly Islam and the Myth of
Confrontation (I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd,
1995), will understand Halliday’s
fundamental theses that conflicts
between the Islamic and Western worlds
are neither a necessity, nor a function of
the peculiarities of those two societies.
In fact, Halliday correctly asserts the
absence of a unitary Islamic world or a
unified West, capable of having a single
conflict-ridden relationship. Rather, the
conflicts between Islamic and Western
societies may be studied using the same
approaches as any other conflicts.
After a review of his
approach—including a deliberate
admonition for the intellectual to
exercise responsibility, rather than to
inflame and profit from conflict—
Halliday begins his discussion of the 11
September attacks by asserting they
were the latest battle of a long-running
conflict, “A battle, global in intent and
extent, was joined well before 11
September 2001. Its course is by no
means certain.” (p. 29) In his first
chapter, he identifies historical and
conjunctural causes for the 11
September attacks. The historical
causes fall into two broad categories:
Long-term antecedents and immediate
causes. The former include the
Crusades by Western Christians on the
Muslim Middle East that began in the
late 11 th century; the expulsion of the
Arabs/Muslims from Spain, completed
in 1492; and the Islamic concept of
Jihad, literally exertion, or mobilization
for the faith, which has acquired the
popular interpretation of literal (holy)
war.
Halliday identifies three
immediate historical causes for the 11
September attacks: the legacy of
colonialism, the Cold War, and
100
economic globalization. Colonialism
(ending circa 1945) left a series of
unresolved issues in the Middle East,
causing generalized resentment of the
West. The Cold War between a US-led
West and a Soviet-led East (1945-90)
made Afghanistan its last battlefield,
resulting in a US-supported call to
Muslims worldwide to fight Soviet
“infidels,” ultimately leading to the
Taliban government, and its policies
enabling the emergence of Osama bin
Laden and the institutionalization of the
al-Qa`ida network. The movement
toward economic globalization is the
seminal outcome of the end of the Cold
War; its attendant inequities amplify
existing resentments.
The conjunctural causes of 11
September, Halliday stipulates, are based
in a “Greater West Asian Crisis” with
three general features. The first is the
new pattern of linkages between
previously separate conflicts, such as the
political and rhetorical linkage of the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict to regional
crises as diverse as the 1973 oil
embargo, the Lebanese civil war that
erupted in 1975, the 1979 Iranian
Revolution, Iraq’s 1990 invasion of
Kuwait, and Osama bin Laden’ call for
jihad against the West. The second
conjunctural cause is the crisis of the
state in West Asia, where nationalists or
Islamists are seeking to take power away
from those who control the state, using
terrorist tactics. Halliday highlights bin
Laden’s use of the Quranic term
“hypocrite” (munafiq) to denote Muslim
leaders and regimes who appear to back
the cause of Islam, but do not; they and
their association with the US are,
according to Halliday, the principal
targets of 11 September. He points out
that al-Qa`ida emerged and succeeded in
places where the state was particularly
weak. Sudan, Afghanistan and, most
recently, Yemen are the best examples.
The third feature of the West Asian
crisis is the emergence of a
transnational, fundamentalist, and
militant Islamism, based on the
Vol. 5, Fall 2005, © 2005 The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies