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

On 3 February 1997, a delegation of the Taliban government of Afghan-istan
visited Washington, D.C. Ten days earlier Taliban forces had won
control of the countryside around Kabul, and with the south and east of
the country already in their hands they were now making preparations to
conquer the north. In Washington the Taliban delegation met with State
Department officials and discussed the plans of the California oil com-pany
Unocal to build a pipeline from Central Asia through Afghanistan. A
senior U.S. diplomat explained his government’s thinking: “The Taliban
will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines,
an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”1

U.S. support for the Taliban, who received arms and financial assis-tance
from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia with the agreement of the United
States, ended within a year. But the diplomat’s reference to Aramco—the
American oil company that had financed, sixty years earlier, the creation
of Saudi Arabia—was a reminder that the United States was accustomed
to working with emirs whose power depended upon strict interpretations
of Islamic law. By the end of 1997, Washington was describing the Taliban
government as “despicable,” but this negative view was not typical of U.S.
relations with governments that claimed to rule in the name of a puritan-ical
Islam. In fact, the normal relationship was quite different.

As a rule, the most secular regimes in the Middle East have been
those most independent of the United States. The more closely a govern-ment
is allied with Washington, the more Islamic its politics. Egypt under
Nasser, republican Iraq, the Palestine national movement, postinde-pendence
Algeria, the Republic of South Yemen, and Ba’thist Syria all
charted courses independent of the United States. None of them declared
themselves an Islamic state, and many of them repressed local Islamic
movements. In contrast, those governments dependent on the United
States typically claimed an Islamic authority, whether ruled by a monarch
who claimed descent from the Prophet, as in Jordan, North Yemen, and
Morocco, or asserting a special role as protector of the faith, as in the 
case
of Saudi Arabia. When other governments moved closer to the United
States —Egypt under Anwar Sadat in the 1970s, Pakistan under Zia ul-Haq
in the 1980s—their political rhetoric and modes of legitimation
became avowedly more Islamic.

Iran might seem an exception to this pattern. Under the pro-American
government of the shah it was a secular state; after the 1979 revolution it
became an Islamic republic, opposed to America’s ambitions. In fact,
however, the shah mobilized conservative religious forces in his support,
drawing on a CIA-funded clerical leadership to help overthrow a nation-alist
government in 1953 and losing power only when the leading clerics in
the country turned against him. And many scholars of Iran would argue
that the Islamic Republic, the Middle Eastern country most independent
of the United States, is one in which appeals to religion are increasingly
unable to legitimate the exercise of power. Especially among its youth, the
Islamic Republic has created one of the most secular societies in the
region.
This pattern, once it has been noticed, lends itself to a straightfor-ward,
but unsatisfactory, explanation. The United States depends on the
support of conservative political regimes, it is often pointed out, and these
have tended to rely on religion to justify their power. In contrast, many of
the populist or nationalist regimes carried out postindependence pro-grams
of land reform, the advancement of women’s rights, industrializa-tion,
and the provision of free education and health care, and achieved
whatever legitimacy they gained through these popular social reforms
rather than the authority of religion.
This explanation is unsatisfactory because the conservative political
morality offered by certain forms of Islam is not some enduring feature of
the religion that rulers adopt at their own convenience. Its usefulness
reflects the fact that religious conservatism expresses the views of 
power-ful
social and political movements. Political regimes enter into uneasy
alliances with these movements, depending on a force they do not directly
control. The dominant school of Islam in Saudi Arabia, for example, 
rep-resents
an intellectual tradition founded in the mid-eighteenth century
and reborn as a political movement at the start of the twentieth. It has its
own legal scholars, teachers, political spokesmen, and militants. Wahhabism,
as outsiders call it, after its eighteenth-century founder, or the doctrine 
of
tawhid (unitarianism, or the oneness of God), as its adherents (the 
muwah-hidun)
prefer to call it, developed in the era of British colonial expansion
and aimed to transform and remoralize the community. The Deobandi
school in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, in which the Taliban move-ment
had its roots, was another influential social and intellectual force of
the colonial period. In Egypt, the intellectual reform movement known as
Salafism inspired the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, which
became the country’s largest popular force opposing the British military
occupation and the corruption of the ruling class.
Governments drew on the support of these movements at different times and 
with differing success. 

When Unocal and U.S. government offi-cials
decided that, along with the government in Pakistan, they could “live
with” the Taliban, they were proposing to cement an alliance with a move-ment
whose powers of moral authority, social discipline, and political vio-lence
represented forces that were to be engaged and put to work—to
enable the building of a one-thousand-mile pipeline. In Egypt, from the
1970s onward, the state (and indirectly, the U.S. government) relied on a
tacit alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood to help suppress both secular
progressive and militant Islamic opposition. In Arabia, the muwahhidun
were not just the ideologues of Saudi rule but a social force that made
possible the building of the Saudi state, and hence the operations of the
American oil industry. In every case this alliance between ruling powers
and Islamic movements was the source of considerable tension.

It follows that such religious movements have played a small but piv-otal
part in the global political economy. If conservative religious reform
movements such as the muwahhidun in Saudi Arabia or the Muslim Broth-erhood
in Egypt have been essential to maintaining the power and author-ity
of those states and if, as we are often told, the stability of the 
govern-ments
of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, perhaps more than that of any other
governments in the global south, are vital to the protection of U.S. 
strate-gic
and economic interests, in particular the control of oil, it would seem
to follow that political Islam plays an unacknowledged role in the making
of global capitalism.
It has become increasingly popular today to say that we live in an era
of what Benjamin Barber calls “Jihad vs. McWorld.” The globalizing pow-ers
of capitalism (“McWorld”) are confronted with or resisted by the
forces that Barber labels “Jihad”—the variety of tribal particularisms and
“narrowly conceived faiths” opposed to the homogenizing force of capi-tal.
2 Even those with a critical view of the growth of American empire and
the expansion of what is erroneously called the global market usually 
sub-scribe
to this interpretation. In fact, it is the critics who often argue that
we need a better understanding of these local forms of resistance against
the “universal” force of the market.
The terms of this debate are quite misleading. We live in an age, if
one wants to use these unfortunate labels, of “McJihad.” It is an age in
which the mechanisms of capitalism appear to operate, in certain critical
instances, only by adopting the social force and moral authority of 
con-servative
Islamic movements. It may be true that we need a better under-standing
of the local forces that oppose the globalization of capital. But
more than this, we need a better understanding of the so-called global
forces of capital.
The American government presented the war in Afghanistan that fol-lowed the 
attacks of September 11, 2001, as a fight to eliminate “forces of
evil,” whose violence stemmed from an irrational and antimodern hatred
of the West. More skeptical accounts pointed to the role of the United
States and its allies, from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, in sustaining
the Islamic forces fighting in Afghanistan, including Al Qaeda, the group
led by the Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden and thought to be responsi-ble
for the September 11 attacks, and in facilitating, from 1994, the rise of
the Taliban. These accounts attributed the crisis, at least in part, to the
incoherence, contradictions, and shortsightedness of U.S. policy toward
the region. 
While I agree with such criticisms, we need to see something
further: the crisis in Afghanistan reflects the weaknesses of a form of
empire, and of powers of capital, that can exist only by drawing on social
forces that embody other energies, methods, and goals.

In 1930 Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud, the ruler of what was to become Saudi
Arabia, short of funds as the Great Depression reduced the flow of pil-grims
to Mecca, a city he had conquered five years earlier, began negoti-ations
with American oil companies to sell the rights to Arabian oil. The
intermediary in these talks was an English businessman, Harry St. John
Philby. Born in British-ruled Ceylon, the son of a tea planter, Philby was
an administrator in Britain’s Indian Civil Service in Punjab and Kashmir.
He came to Arabia as a British government agent to supply Ibn Saud
with money and arms during World War I. He stayed on as a confidant of
Ibn Saud, resigned from the Indian service, and set himself up in business
in Jiddah, the trading port near Mecca, in 1925, the year it fell under Ibn
Saud’s control. He became the local agent of Standard Oil of New York
(Mobil), the Ford Motor Company, the Franklin Motor Company, and
the Singer Manufacturing Company. He also converted to Islam and to
the teachings of Ibn Wahhab. Although some suspected his sincerity, he
endured the discomforts of circumcision as an adult, and he went out of
his way to publish articles in English newspapers in London and Cairo
explaining his conviction. 

“I believe,” he wrote,
that the present Arabian puritan movement harbingers an epoch of future
political greatness based on strong moral and spiritual foundations. Also I
regard the Islamic ethical system as a real democratic fraternity, and the
general conduct of life, . . . resulting in a high standard of national 
public
morality, as definitely superior to the European ethical code based on 
Chris-tianity.
. . . I consider an open declaration of my sympathy with Arabian reli-gion
and political ideals as the best methods of assisting the development of
Arabian greatness.
Philby’s conversion may well have been sincere. But there is a sense in
which the oil companies, too, were converts to Wahhabism. By this I mean
 that the American oil companies came to depend on and support unitar-ian
Islam as the method and the means to operate in Arabia —and thus to
maintain a certain form of global oil economy.

Scholars of international political economy have devoted a lot of
attention to the political economy of world oil. This is not surprising. Oil
is said to be the world’s largest industry. It is the most important source 
of
energy for industry and transport and provides feedstock for the chemi-cals
and plastics industries. It has a critical significance for the conduct of
large-scale war. The companies that dominate the refining and distribu-tion
of oil and much of its production include five of the world’s largest
transnational corporations. Much of the scholarship on world oil had to be
rewritten after the 1970s because earlier work provided no way to under-stand
the transformations of that decade, when Saudi Arabia and other
producer states took control of local production in the Middle East and, in
collaboration with the transnational oil companies, greatly increased the
price of oil. Yet neither the earlier nor the more recent scholarship 
exam-ines
the role in the economics of oil played by the muwahhidun.

Two features are said to define the political economy of oil, but to
these we need to add another two. First, as a strategic commodity with a
low elasticity of demand (consumers depend on petroleum products and
cannot easily switch to alternative sources of energy), it offers the 
possi-bility
of enormous rents—it can be sold at one hundred times the cost of
production. Second, contrary to popular belief, there is too much of it. Oil
is the world’s second most abundant fluid, so any producer is always at
risk of being undercut by another. If all one wanted was a market in oil to
supply those who need it, this would pose no problem. But the oil indus-try
is about profits, not markets, and large profits are impossible to sustain
under such competitive conditions. The potential rents —or “premiums on
scarcity,” as they are called —could be realized only if mechanisms were
put in place to create the scarcity.

The politics of oil is usually explained in terms of the desire of the
United States to protect the global supply. But that is not the problem.
The real problem—where the muwahhidun come in—is to protect the
system of scarcity. John D. Rockefeller solved the difficulty in the 1860s,
when the oil industry first developed, by building a monopoly—not of the
oil wells but of refineries and then transportation, later building Standard
Oil into an integrated monopoly controlling refining, transportation, 
mar-keting,
and finally the wellheads themselves. In the twentieth century,
when the major integrated oil companies began to produce large quanti-ties
of oil outside the United States, they developed a different system of
scarcity: in 1929 they made a secret agreement to divide the world’s oil
resources among each company and to limit production to maintain prices —