In the April 1968 edition of a now defunct English daily, Business Post, one Yaqoob Sultan wrote an article in which he described a conversation he had had with a member of an Islamist political party. Sultan identified himself as a progressive student activist who was involved in the time’s protest movement against the Gen Ayub Khan dictatorship. 

Sultan wrote that, when he met the Islamist at a wedding reception in Karachi, the Islamist told him that he (Sultan) and his like were ‘puppets of communist forces’ that were being used to destroy Islam in Pakistan. He then went on to admonish the ‘liberals’ as well, who he accused of being navigated by Western powers to promote secularism in the country. Sultan wrote that he retaliated by calling his accuser a hypocrite, because “Islamic [sic] parties were clearly being funded by the US to work against progressive forces.”

I stumbled upon this pithy piece 50 years later, during a research project in 2018. I found it rather interesting because whereas the accusation like the one made by the writer of the article became somewhat common in progressive/leftist circles, most people could not get their heads around it. 

After all, how could those who were always raging against ‘Westernisation’ and secularism ever be supported by the US? Yet, there is now enough evidence to suggest that the US (as well as the UK) were doing just that. 

The notion that the West has tried to impose Westernisation and secularism in Muslim regions in the past few decades is largely flawed. In fact, the West has done everything it could to ‘Islamise’ and, in some cases, radicalise the populations of these regions for specific geopolitical purposes

During the Cold War, Western powers, led by the US, cultivated Islamist outfits in Muslim-majority regions — especially in nation-states where progressive variants of Muslim nationalism were popular. The ideologues of these variants found more traction in striking strategic partnerships with communist countries, such as the erstwhile Soviet Union and China. Consequently, those helming these nation-states often sidelined and even repressed the Islamists. 

As a result, the Islamists were quietly receptive to clandestine gestures of support offered to them by intelligence agencies in the US and UK. Both looked to destabilise Muslim regions that were either in the Soviet orbit or even tilting towards it. 

This was before the anti-Soviet insurgency that broke out in Afghanistan in the 1980s, during which the US and UK further evolved the nature of their actions in this regard from being covert to overt. The influence and money of oil-rich Saudi Arabia were used to launch various social and cultural projects to ‘Islamise’ many Muslim-majority countries, as a way to induce perceptions of the Soviet Union as an atheistic force out to destroy Islam. 

Additionally, moderate and progressive Muslim nationalists were demonised as ‘fake Muslims’ who were inherently secular and heretical. Ironically, though, Islamist outfits that were benefiting from these manoeuvres, continued to portray themselves as anti-West. But till the early 1990s at least, they were busy launching verbal and armed attacks against left-leaning and so-called ‘fake’ and ‘Westernised’ Muslims, rather than on the West. 

The factions of the Islamist organisation Muslim Brotherhood, from which the Islamist Palestinian organisation Hamas emerged in 1987, put more effort attacking ‘secular’ anti-Israeli Palestinian groups than they did Israel. Attacks against Israel came later. In fact, in 1979, the Al-Mujamma al-Islami, the core organisation from which Hamas sprouted, was recognised as a “legitimate Palestinian organisation” by Israel, as opposed to the ‘secular’/left-leaning Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). 

In 2019, the reformist Saudi Prince Muhammad bin Salman was quoted as saying that the Saudi-funded spread of radical and stringent versions of Islam was the result of Western countries asking Riyadh to help counter the Soviet Union during the Cold War. 

This became an open secret in 2020 when the British government declassified many secret documents related to the Information Research Department (IRD) — a now defunct division of the UK Foreign Office. According to a February 2020 report in The Middle East Eye, the documents demonstrate that IRD ran covert campaigns in multiple Muslim-majority regions during the height of the Cold War, establishing contacts with Islamist organisations and funding newspapers and radio stations in the Muslim world. 

IRD also arranged for articles to be inserted in magazines published by Al-Azhar University in Cairo, to ensure that every student left the university a resolute opponent of communism. Those who were to be influenced through these projects were young people, women, trade unions, teachers’ organisations and the armed forces. 

Indeed, such ploys — especially between the late 1960s and late 1980s — by British and American governments (with the help of Saudi Arabia), did succeed in ‘Islamising’ large segments of societies in many Muslim-majority regions, successfully developing a distaste in these societies not only for communism, but even for moderate forms of progressive politics.

It was only a matter of time that even more militant expressions emerged from within these societies. After the Soviet Union’s fall in 1991, these then turned their attention towards destroying the ‘infidel West’ that was once their most trusted ally and had helped them cleanse their societies from communists, ‘fake Muslims’ and secularists. 

In 2011, the then US secretary of state Hillary Clinton claimed that the US had learned its lesson after 9/11 and would be more careful in choosing who to support. Yet, from the time of the tragic 9/11 episode, the US and its European allies unleashed hardened Islamist militant groups against ‘old enemies’ in Iraq, Libya and Syria. 

It is true that all three were being run by tyrants. However, their departure did not see the entry of fluffy democrats, but Islamist groups with fantasies of establishing totalitarian regimes; fantasies originally stuffed in their heads by conduits of US and UK intelligence agencies during the Cold War. It is interesting to recall that Ahmed Sharaa aka Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the current head of Hayat Tahrir al-Shaam, the group leading the ouster of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, was once part of Al Qaeda and was held in US prisons for five years before being let go and helping establish what would later become ISIS or the so-called ‘Islamic State’.

From the late 1960s onwards, there was no attempt as such made by Western powers to ‘Westernise’ and secularise Muslim countries. Quite the contrary. It is thus largely incorrect and a myth that the West (especially in the last five decades) has tried to impose Westernisation and secularism in Muslim regions. The truth is, it did everything it could to not only ‘Islamise’ the populations of these regions but, on various occasions, to radicalise them for specific geopolitical purposes. 

The West was one of the most prominent sources of the theocratic enlightenment that Islamists claim to have, as opposed to those they think are ignorant outcomes of Westernisation.

Published in Dawn, EOS, December 22nd, 2024