Is it fair to blame the West for trouble in the Middle East?
So the current state of affairs in the Middle East is not simply an outcome of Western intervention and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Western foreign policy in the region has no doubt influenced the current situation. But the conditions for the spread of militant Islamism have come from attempts to deal with the crisis within: a crisis that is as much political in nature as it is religious.
Filling a power vacuum
In terms of politics, the traditional seats of power in the Arab world have been toppled, creating a void and opening opportunities for other Arab nations to vie for power.
With the decline of Egyptian power and ongoing chaos in Syria and Iraq, the Gulf states have emerged as the most economically and politically stable influences in the region.
Gulf state competition, particularly between Abu Dhabi and Doha, has become one of the defining features of the Middle East. While Doha supports the Syrian revolution as well as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, Abu Dhabi stands guarded against a foreign policy approach that strengthens Islamists.
Qatar, on the other hand, has been known to provide significant financial assistance to violent Islamist groups, including groups linked to Al Qaeda. It has also failed to act on wealthy citizens accused of financing terrorist organizations to the tune of millions of dollars.
Angered by its support for extremist groups, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia all withdrew their ambassadors from Qatar in March this year.
The political struggle for power has also played out as a struggle for religious space in the Arab world. Here, the declining role of Saudi Arabia as the traditional seat of religious authority and knowledge has contributed, as Saudi Arabia also struggles to contain extremist Islamist elements within its own brand of Islam.
Links have been made between Wahhabi Islam that originated in Saudi Arabia and the ideological frame of the Jihadist movement. Such accusations have prompted Saudi Arabia to examine the Wahhabi Jihadist connection, leading to a review of religious programs and school curricular in the kingdom.
Seeing beyond a “clash of civilizations”
The Middle East is a complex mix of culture, religion, politics and history. To continue to engage with the Arab world on the basis of flawed assumptions that neatly divide it into the camp of moderate Islam and the camp of extreme Islam feeds into an equally flawed analysis of the conflict as a clash of civilizations.
It may be tempting to oversimplify the conflict as a battle of the West against Islam, just as it is tempting to overstate its origins in the history of Western intervention and foreign policy.
However, more nuanced analyses should also take into account the various internal factors that created the conditions for the spread of extremist Islamist ideologies in the first place. Such analyses are necessary to developing understanding of how to address the ongoing threat of non-state terrorism to national and international security.
Anne Aly is Research Fellow in extremism, radicalization and online extremism at Curtin University. This story is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution/No derivatives).
