McJihad 
ISLAM IN THE U.S. GLOBAL ORDER
by TIMOTHY MITCHELL
Social Text 73, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Duke 
University Press.

continued...

mediated by St. John Philby, and began to switch from British to Ameri-can
protection. To win acceptance for this foreign support, he made a
compromise with the religious establishment. The muwahhidun leader-ship
would tolerate the role of the foreign oil company, and in return their
program to convert Arabia to the teachings and discipline of tawhid would
be funded with the proceeds from oil.
Thus this successful warlord depended on two different forces to
construct the new political order in Arabia. The Arabian American Oil
Company (Aramco) provided the funds as well as technical and material
assistance. The company built the country’s new towns, road system, rail-way,
telecommunications network, ports, and airports, and acted as banker
to the ruling family and investor in Saudi enterprise, especially in 
con-tracting
firms and other companies to serve Aramco’s needs in eastern
Arabia. Aramco paid the oil royalty not to a national government but to a
single household, that of Ibn Saud, who now called himself king and renamed
the country, previously the provinces of Hejaz and Nejd, the “Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia,” creating the only country in the world to be named after a
family. As a consequence of this corporate arrangement, the millions and
later billions of dollars paid for the oil each year became the private 
income
of a single kin group—albeit one that reproduced so successfully that
within three or four generations Ibn Saud’s offspring were said to number
some seven thousand. This “privatization” of oil money was locally
unpopular and required outside help to keep it in place. In 1945 the U.S.
government established its military base at Dhahran and began to train
and arm Ibn Saud’s security forces, which imprisoned, threatened, tor-tured,
executed, or exiled those who opposed the ruling family. The reli-gious
establishment, on the other hand, created the moral and legal order
of the new state, imposing the strict social regime that maintained 
disci-pline
in the subject population and suppressed political dissent.

Toward the end of the 1940s a labor movement began to emerge
among the country’s oil workers, demanding better treatment and working
conditions. A series of protests culminated in a general strike in July 1956.
The workers’ demands included the introduction of a political consti-tution,
the right to form labor unions, political parties, and national 
organ-izations,
an end to Aramco’s interference in the country’s affairs, the
closure of the U.S. military base, and the release of imprisoned workers.
Aramco’s security department identified the leaders to the Saudi security
forces, including the Ikhwan. The government had reestablished Ikhwan
militias in the 1950s, renamed the National Guard—although its mem-bers
were called mujahideen (those engaged in jihad)—to provide a coun-terweight
to the army, itself the locus of considerable dissent. Hundreds of
protesters were arrested, tortured, and sentenced to prison terms or deported 
from the country. In such events, American oil executives and
the forces of jihad worked hand in hand to keep the political economy of
oil in place.
With internal opposition to this political economy of oil silenced, the
main threat came from abroad—from the nationalist governments of
Egypt and Iraq, which in the later 1950s began to denounce the corrup-tion
of the Saudi monarchy and its misappropriation of what they now
referred to as “Arab oil.” To meet this threat, the government of Saudi
Arabia used oil money to enable the religious establishment to promote its
program of moral authority and social conservatism abroad. In particular,
they funded the revival of an Islamic political movement in Egypt, which
the government of Jamal Abdul Nasser had attempted to suppress in
the mid-1950s. And they supported similar movements in Pakistan and
throughout the region. At the same time, former Aramco employees now
working for the CIA helped hatch plots to kill the presidents of Egypt and
Iraq, whose governments had introduced land reform, women’s rights,
universal education, and other populist programs. Nasser survived, but in
1963 the Iraqi government was overthrown and the president killed in a
U.S.-supported military coup that brought to power the Baath, the party
of Saddam Hussein.(One other pillar of U.S. Middle East policy was
established in the same period, in 1958: the decision to arm and finance
the state of Israel as another agent, alongside Islamic conservatism, that
would help undermine Arab nationalism.)
Many scholars have pointed to the fact that oil money helped develop
the power of the muwahhidun in Arabia after 1930 and made possible the
resurgence of Islamic political movements in the 1970s. However, it is
equally important to understand that, by the same token, it was an Islamic
movement that made possible the profits of the oil industry. The political
economy of oil did not happen, in some incidental way, to rely on a 
gov-ernment
in Saudi Arabia that owed its own power to the force of an
Islamic political movement. Given the features of the political economy of
oil —the enormous rents available, the difficulty in securing those rents
due to the overabundance of supply, the pivotal role of Saudi Arabia in
maintaining scarcity, and the collapse of older colonial methods of impos-ing
antimarket corporate control of the Saudi oil fields—oil profits
depended on working with those forces that could guarantee the political
control of Arabia, the House of Saud in alliance with the muwahhidun.
The latter were not incidental, but became an internal element in the
political economy of oil. “Jihad” was not simply a local force antithetical
to the development of “McWorld.” McWorld, it turns out, was really
McJihad, a necessary combination of a variety of social logics and forces.
The idea of McJihad requires a different understanding not so much
of the historical role of particular Islamic movements, but of the nature of
global capitalism. Even among its critics, capitalism is usually talked about
in terms of its logic and its power. “Jihad,” in this view, stands for a 
local-ized
and external resistance to capitalism’s homoficient historical logic.

The history of McJihad, in contrast, is a history of a certain incoherence
and weakness. It is a concept that directs attention to the impossibility,
under capitalism, of securing the enormous profits of oil, except through
arrangements that relied on quite dynamic but seemingly uncapitalist
social forces. But in what sense were these forces “uncapitalist”? They
were not some precapitalist “cultural” element resisting capitalism from
the outside. Whatever their historical roots, they were dynamic forces of
the twentieth century whose role developed with the development of oil.
Yet their role in the economy of oil was a disjunctive one. By this I mean
that while it was essential to the making of oil profits, political Islam was
not itself oriented to that goal. The muwahhidun and other Islamic move-ments
had their own agendas—sometimes stemming from injustices and
inequalities that people suffered, or from threats to local ways of living
one’s life morally, or to local arrangements of hierarchy and respect, 
includ-ing
male prerogatives in family and gender relations. Seen as a process of
McJihad, capitalism no longer appears self-sufficient. Its success depends
on other forces, which are both essential to the process we call capitalist
development and disjunctive with it.
I will briefly sketch some of the history of McJihad, to bring us back
to the crisis in Afghanistan —and to a closely related crisis in Arabia. In
oil-producing states with large populations that supported popular politi-cal
movements that were difficult to suppress, workers in the oil industry
began to organize and strike against low rates of pay and abysmal work
conditions—notably in Mexico as far back as 1936–38 and Iran in 1929
and again in 1944–51. In contrast to the case of Saudi Arabia, these protests
fueled a nationalist movement among the political elite that countered the
unrest by nationalizing the foreign-owned oil industry in order to retain
more of the profits for the producing country. The multinational oil 
com-panies
responded by boycotting these countries (and in Iran, by having
Britain and the United States overthrow the nationalist government and
install a military dictatorship, backed by a religious movement) until they
were forced to sell their nationalized oil through the multinationals at
quantities and prices the latter were able to control, thus protecting the
corporate antimarket. Elsewhere, beginning in Venezuela and then in Saudi
Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait, the oil multinationals renegotiated the terms of
their concessions, agreeing to pay the host governments 50 percent of 
rev-enue.
However, the oil companies calculated this revenue share on the
basis of a fictitious low price and took advantage of a loophole in U.S. tax
law to deduct the increased payment from the taxes they owed the U.S.
Treasury. In effect, the corporations arranged for U.S. taxpayers to cover
the increased fees they were paying for foreign oil, while protecting their
own profits.
A further development occurred in the 1970s, following the rise of
OPEC, when Saudi Arabia and the other major producer states in the
Gulf demanded to take full control of Aramco and other local subsidiaries
of the multinational oil companies. The oil multinationals collaborated to
ensure, once again, that this transformation left the antimarket system —
and corporate profits—in place. They helped produce a series of price
increases, culminating in the quadrupling of the price of oil in 1973 –74.
The large increase in oil revenues was shared between the national oil
companies, which now controlled Middle East production, and the 
multi-nationals,
which continued to dominate transport, refining, and distribu-tion.

These events had two notable consequences. First, the large increase
in oil revenues was recycled into the U.S. and other Western economies,
partly through Saudi purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds and other invest-ments
in the West, but also through extensive purchases of American and
European military equipment. Arms manufacturers joined oil companies
in the increasing dependence of their profits on political arrangements in
the Middle East. Second, Western banks, awash in the flood of petrodol-lars,
embarked on a disastrous program of loans to Third World govern-ments.
When the loans failed, the banks helped devise the program known
as structural adjustment, which made the people of the global south rather
than their governments or the bankers pay for the failure. In Egypt, for
example, where the banks made especially bad loans, structural adjust-ment
reduced spending on schools, medicines, factories, and farming but
left lucrative state construction projects and large military budgets intact.

The successes in maintaining the profits of the oil industry, while
increasing the share accruing to the oil-producing countries of the Middle
East, came at a cost. In the second half of the 1970s, it became 
increas-ingly
difficult to maintain the power of the autocratic governments on
which this political economy of oil depended, and the role of political
Islam, essential to this economy, became more and more disjunctive.
The series of crises is well known. From 1975 opposition to the mili-tary
dictatorship in Iran gathered strength, and critical sections of the
religious establishment began to turn against the regime, whose resort to
violence and repression stimulated a revolutionary movement in 1978–79
that overthrew the state. In Egypt, a somewhat less repressive regime,
which had actively encouraged the Islamist movement in the 1970s as a
means of weakening secular political opposition, faced popular protest
and dissent. In October 1981, the members of a militant Islamic cell,
seeking to take advantage of this popular movement, assassinated Presi-dent
Sadat and attempted an armed uprising, which the military regime
quickly suppressed.
In Afghanistan, army officers overthrew the monarchy in July 1973
and, under the leadership of Muhammad Daud, initially promised a
program of land reform and social transformation in alliance with the
progressive and pro-Soviet People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan
(PDPA). The shah’s Iran, encouraged by the United States, launched an
ambitious program of aid and intervention to weaken the pro-Soviet ele-ments
and draw Afghanistan into the orbit of U.S.-Iranian power. In
March 1978, the PDPA removed and killed Daud, introduced by force a
radical program of land reform in an attempt to overthrow the old social
order, and turned to the Soviet Union for increased support. As political
unrest spread across the country, the United States began to underwrite
Pakistan’s efforts to destabilize the government, and in March 1979 started
discussing plans for “sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire” in
Afghanistan. On 3 July President Carter approved a secret program to
arm counterrevolutionary forces—the Islamic political parties known as
the mujahideen—attempting to overthrow the Afghan government. The
jihad was to be funded jointly by the United States and Saudi Arabia,
equipped with Soviet-style weapons purchased from Egypt, China, and
Israel, and supplied with additional recruits from the Islamic movements
of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and other countries. U.S. support for
the Islamic forces based in Pakistan was later described as a reaction to the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. In fact, it began almost
six months before the Soviet invasion, and its aim was not to oppose that
invasion but to provoke it. As U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski later confirmed, the United States hoped to provoke a war that
would embroil the Soviet Union in “its own Vietnam.”
It would be difficult to summarize the complexities of political 
devel-opments
over the following decade. One thing that stands out, however, is
the increased involvement of Washington in the prolongation of a series of
wars and political conflicts, through both the arming of protagonists and
the blocking of diplomatic solutions. Other outside powers —principally
Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—also supplied weapons, and sev-eral
local states resorted to military violence, in some cases using it 
con-tinuously
as a means of repression. But what distinguished the United
States was the breadth of its involvement in the use of violence across the
region, its increasing reliance on wars of attrition as a normal instrument
of politics, and its efforts to prevent the resolution of conflicts.