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 —