Navigating the West Asian quagmire in Talmiz Ahmad’s ‘West Asia at War’

Vivek Katju

SCHOLAR and former diplomat Talmiz Ahmad is one of India’s leading authorities on West Asia, especially the Arab world. His monumental work, ‘West Asia at War’, is a significant and timely contribution to our understanding of the developments over the past two centuries in a region with which India has had contact through history; it is also crucial to this country’s contemporary interests. Ahmad’s lucid writing makes the book very important, both for academics and policy-makers as well as the general reader. It will give them insights into the impulses that continue to shape West Asia, particularly the Arab countries.

Beginning with Napoleon’s attack on Egypt in 1798, Ahmad traces the impact of a resurgent and increasingly powerful Europe on West Asia. He seeks to place this “narrative within the framework of resistance” and explores it through five phases covering the colonial period, the consequences of the establishment of Israel as an independent state, the effect of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and other events of that fateful year, America’s Afghan and Iraq wars and the Arab Spring. He shows a masterly grasp of the flow of events and their intellectual, social, economic and political underpinnings concerning the Arab world and even Iran, but falters somewhat in respect of Afghanistan, which has always moved to a different rhythm.

European expansion from the end of the 18th century, built on the strength of its scientific and technological advances, dwelt a shattering blow to the self-esteem of the larger Islamic world. It brought forth a wide range of intellectual and theological responses as Islamic intellectuals, including the Arabs, sought answers to meet fundamental challenges. No Arab abandoned the faith but sought answers within it, stretching from a return to its most rigid doctrines to an accommodation found within its precepts for comprehensive socio-economic reform and good governance. Ahmad does well to probe this intellectual ferment, for its impact is felt in the Arab world even today as it did through the colonial age, including when the European powers physically gave shape to it after World War I to suit their own interests.

Ahmad examines at length the impact on the Palestinian people and the adjoining Arab states of the Zionist project, which culminated in the establishment of an independent and sovereign Israel. He brilliantly focuses on the decades when the current of Arab nationalism sought to cover the myriad contradictions within the nationalist fold, but ultimately failed to do so. He also studies the conservative reaction led by the Saudis to combat these forces. And this drama then was being played within the overarching Cold War competition and the politics of hydrocarbons which, beginning in the 1930s, became one of the determinants of events.

With the Iranian revolution, Islamic sectarianism came to the fore with renewed vigour, manifesting, inter alia, in Saudi-Iranian rivalry. This continues to affect every aspect of West Asian politics and Ahmad’s seeming optimism that it may abate is misplaced. Where Ahmad excels is in his exposition on the different strands of political Islam and its manifestations. This should be compulsory reading for our policy-makers at different levels, for there is a great need to gain a differentiated understanding of a phenomenon which is of vital concern to Indian interests.

The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have played havoc with the Afghans and the Arabs and Ahmad repeatedly and justifiably returns to the theme. At the same time, it would have been desirable to examine the failure of Islam to find sufficient resilience for unified, sustained, independent and non-violent agencies to throw off the interference of foreign actors, howsoever powerful they may be. This is particularly because Islam, in one form or another, comprehensively determines the national lives of all Arab states. Ahmad may see optimism in the continuing Palestinian resistance, but does their cause now really resonate in the Arab and wider Islamic world?

Ahmad’s chapter on India-West Asia ties is a fine survey of the changing contours of the relationship. It also factors in Indian-Israeli and Indo-Iranian ties. However, what would have made the analysis more valuable is examining the shadow of Pakistan and its place in the Arab and Islamic calculations on India-West Asia ties. And, this reviewer, for one, cannot go along with Ahmad’s view that India with “like-minded countries” should “lead the process” for regional peace. India should avoid the West Asian quagmire and develop bilateral ties, especially where it has major interests. In this context, its moves on Quad 2, as Ahmad notes, are perhaps ill-advised.

And finally, this reviewer may be allowed, as an old diplomatic colleague, to say: “Thank you, Talmiz, for a wonderful book which will stand the test of time.”