Whose Thanksgiving?

These words of Thanksgiving last week from Bagram Air Force Base outside Kabul: “We’ve seen how poor, how little the Afghans have,” said Capt. Stan Gajda, 33, of Williston, Vt. “They’re grateful for what they have, and we see how little they have. It makes you all the more thankful.” Well said, Captain, and also well done. Afghans thank your 450th Civil Affairs Battalion with its crack CHICLET teams (see this column, May 22) for the most efficient form of humanitarian assistance provided in Afghanistan.

But let’s think Muslim rather than Afghan. Worldwide religious community rather than fragile nation-state. What’s the current index of Muslim gratitude, both in Afghanistan and across the Islamic world? Are Muslims grateful at this moment in history?

A 2002 calendric coincidence helps address this question of gratitude. Thanksgiving, fixed in November, falls this year within Islam’s revolving month of Ramadan. Each event says much about its host culture. Each is central to its culture’s sense of history.

First Thanksgiving. Our holiday acknowledges religious roots – and, for some, entails thanks to God – but the main rituals speak to secular American success, epitomized by consumption (food) and competition (football). We’re never more American than on Thanksgiving: munching the turkey and crunching the quarterback. And our story since that first November chow-down in 1620 amounts to an unmatched cumulative triumph … except for the folks (Native Americans) who provided the picnic. No wonder the rest of us are grateful. Compared with bitter histories elsewhere on earth, ours has tasted mostly of cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie.

Now Ramadan, which lasts longer than Thanksgiving and, generally, goes deeper in terms of religious acknowledgement. Gratitude plays a part, but other values are also foregrounded: abstention, reflection and intensification. Sensory pleasure takes a backseat to soul. For one lunar month each year, the Faithful exist within a kind of spiritual prism. Muslims are never more Muslim than during Ramadan.

Ramadan’s main date, like Thanksgiving, recalls a specific and seminal event: the first Qur’anic transmission to Mohammed in 610 CE. Like the early New England colonists, Mohammed and his first followers endured life-threatening hardship. Both communities persisted, survived, then thrived to miraculous extent in subsequent centuries. A thousand years ago Islam dominated more of the world than any other culture. God’s will, Muslims say, was manifest in that early history. Like modern Americans, Muslims back then had much to be thankful for.

Their dominance lasted – despite Mongols, plagues, dynastic squabbles and feckless Crusaders – for another half millennium. Nothing shook Muslim belief in their system’s God-given superiority: thematically coherent, doctrinally consistent, and contiguous in a horizontal band linking the extremes of Eurasia. And so travelers like Ibn Battutah (see previous column) could meander from Spain to Sumatra “within [in the words of historian Ross Dunn] an interregional network of cities whose literate inhabitants shared not only a religious confession but also the same moral values, legal norms, cultural standards, and social manners.” In the words of Muslims, “al-humdu li-Llah – praise to God.”

But then, about five centuries ago, Muslim history began going wrong. At first the trend was deniable because its key dates were far apart: 1492 (final surrender of Islam in Spain), 1571 (disastrous naval battle at Lepanto), 1683 (failure of a last attempt to capture Vienna). These defeats occurred, paradoxically, during the era of greatest Islamic medieval splendor. Thus such setbacks on the periphery, while severe, could be ignored. Muslims took their cues instead from the grandeur of three empires: Ottoman, Safavid, and Mogul. Their respective capitals – Istanbul, Isfahan, and Delhi – seemed to promise endless power. Allah-u-Akbar – God is great!

Islam’s Sept. 11 came in 1798. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, followed swiftly by British occupation, shocked the Muslim world. And worse, unlike America in 2001, Islam lacked effective means to resist, let alone counter attack. These new European forces were utterly different from the hapless Franks whom Islam had repulsed centuries earlier. Now residents of Cairo, whose name means Victory, found themselves in stunned defeat. How could such things happen to God’s own people? Like downtown New Yorkers on that awful Tuesday morning, their emotional world was transformed: secure one moment, incredulous and then furious the next.

Suddenly Islam was in full retreat on all fronts. France and England were joined by Russia, Holland, Italy, and Spain in the drumbeat of conquest. For the next 125 years – culminating in what author David Fromkin calls The Peace to End All Peace at the end of World War I – European powers usurped Muslim control everywhere except deepest Arabia and (you guessed it) Afghanistan. Flintlock and saber jihad stood little chance against Gatling guns. In some cases (French Algeria and parts of Russian Central Asia) the non-believers came as colonists. In others (British India, the Dutch East Indies) their impulse was more mercantile. And then the crowning incentive: In 1906 an Australian mining engineer named William Knox Darcy discovered oil in Iran.

Muslim leaders reacted with both canniness and bewildered despair. This mood is captured, remarkably, by Victorian poet Alfred Lyall, whose full text of “The Amir’s Solilloquy” has kindly been sent to me by Cathie Welch of Caribou, Maine. The amir (Muslim military leader) in question is Abdur Rahman, ruler of Afghanistan from 1880-1901. He found himself squeezed by two expanding Christian empires, at odds with each other in what for them was The Great Game. For Abdur Rahman the stakes were scarcely playful: The lord of the English writes, “Order and justice and govern with laws.” / And the Russian, he sneers and says, “Patience, and velvet to cover your claws.” / And the nations of Islam, they tremble – around me a voice ever rings / Of death, and the doom of my country. Shall I be the last of her kings?

(In fact, “The Iron Amir” fared much better than any of his 15 successors. He has some tips to share with current Afghan President Karzai. Stayed tuned for a letter – “To Hamid from Abdur Rahman” – next in the Bangor Daily News.)

Since then, in some ways, Muslim humiliation has been redeemed. Western imperialism lost force and fashion after World War II. Most – but not all – of Islam’s old territories were returned, albeit in the fragmented nation-state form. That many of these are ill-governed, according to our standards, is beside the Muslim point. Better the rule of any Believer, no matter how brutal and/or corrupt, than control by outsiders. And so most Muslim majority regions stagger along, badly run but without the obligation to wage religious jihad.

But not all. Islam’s periphery still roils with unrecovered enclaves. And here the phrase “God is great” conveys a less grateful, more aggressive tone. These zones have become familiar in violent headlines: Chechnya, parts of Indonesia, the southern Philippines, China’s westernmost Xinjiang province, the Muslim-Christian fault lines in Africa, the Pakistan-India “Line of Control” in Kashmir. And Israel/Palestine – most violent of all because it’s located not on the outskirts of Islam, but smack dab in the middle.

Given this background, how grateful are Muslims during Thanksgiving/Ramadan 2002? On a personal level, they express thanks to God for life and family. Most Afghan Muslims are grateful for their new quasi-government. But history lingers, and perceived wrongs remain. As long as such perceptions exist – as they already have, some with good reason, for decades and centuries – Muslims worldwide will regard that history with less than unmixed gratitude. What’s more, they’ll keep trying to redeem it however they can.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract.