Residents of North America and Europe expressed surprise and shock at the vehemence of the September 11 and other terrorist attacks, but radical Islamist hostility toward the West had a long history. Conflicts between Muslims and Christians certainly had deep roots (see Chapters 9 and 12), but modern, anti-Western Islamic militancy emerged with force only under the mandate system established by the European powers after World War I. Important factors included the legacies of European colonialism, Cold War power plays, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Radical political Islam, a mixture of traditional religious beliefs and innovative social and political reform ideas, was at first a reaction against the foreign control and secularization represented by the mandate system established in the Middle East after World War I (see “The Peace Settlement in the Middle East” in Chapter 25). Groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, called for national liberation from European control and a return to shari’a law (based on Muslim legal codes), and demanded land reform, extensive social welfare programs, and economic independence. The appeal of such ideas crossed class lines and national borders. By the 1960s the Brotherhood had established chapters across the Middle East and North Africa, and a variety of other groups and leaders advocated similar ideas about the need for Islamic revival and national autonomy. The broad spectrum of Islamist ideas is difficult to summarize, but adherents tended to fall into two main groups: a moderate or centrist group that worked peacefully to reform society within existing institutions, and a much smaller, more militant radical minority willing to use violence to achieve their goals.

Decolonization and the Cold War sharpened anti-Western and particularly anti-U.S. sentiments among radical Islamists. As the western European powers loosened their ties to the Middle East, the Americans stepped in. Applying containment policy to limit the spread of communism, and eager to preserve steady supplies of oil, the United States supported secular, authoritarian regimes friendly to U.S. interests in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere. Such regimes often played on U.S. concerns about communism or the threat of radical Islam to bolster American support.

U.S. policies in the Middle East at times produced “blowback,” or unforeseen and unintended consequences. One example was the Iranian revolution of 1979, when Islamist radicals antagonized by Western intervention, state corruption, and secularization overthrew the U.S.-supported shah and established an Islamic republic. The successful revolution encouraged militant Islamists elsewhere. So did the example of the mujahideen, the Muslim guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan who successfully fought off the Soviet army there from 1979 to 1989 (see “From Détente Back to Cold War” in Chapter 29). U.S. military aid and arms, funneled to the mujahideen during the war, also had unintended consequences. Many of the mujahideen would go on to support the Taliban, a militant Islamist faction that came to rule Afghanistan in 1996. The Taliban established a strict Islamist state based on shari’a law that denied women’s right to education and banned Western movies and music — and provided a safe haven for the Saudi-born millionaire Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

As a result of these policies, the United States, along with western Europe, became the main target for Islamist militants. During the 1990s bin Laden and al-Qaeda mounted several terrorist attacks on U.S. installations, leading up to the horrific September 11 assault. After that attack, President Bush declared with some justification that the terrorists “hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech.”12 In public calls for jihad (or struggle) against the United States and the West, however, bin Laden gave a more pragmatic list of grievances, including U.S. support for Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the sanctions on Iraq that followed the Persian Gulf War, and the presence of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia — seen as an insult to the Muslim holy sites in Mecca and Medina. (See “Primary Source 30.5: Osama bin Laden Calls for Global Jihad.”)

The Bush administration hoped that the invasions of Afghanistan — a direct response to the September 11 attacks — and Iraq would end the terrorist attacks and bring peace and democracy to the Middle East, but both instead increased turmoil there. The military campaign in Afghanistan quickly achieved one of its goals, bringing down the Taliban, and the United States installed a friendly government. But U.S. troops failed to find bin Laden or disable al-Qaeda, and Taliban insurgents mounted a determined and lasting guerrilla war. Although U.S. commandos finally killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011, the apparently unwinnable war became increasingly unpopular in the United States and among NATO’s European allies, and President Obama announced plans to withdraw American combat troops from Afghanistan by 2014.

With heavy fighting still under way in Afghanistan in late 2001, the Bush administration turned its attention to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, arguing that it was necessary to expand the war on terror to other hostile regimes in the Middle East. U.S. leaders effectively played on American fears of renewed terrorism and charged that Saddam Hussein was still developing weapons of mass destruction in flagrant disregard of his 1991 promise to end all such programs. Many Americans shared the widespread doubts held by Europeans about the legality — and wisdom — of an American attack on Iraq, especially after UN inspectors found no weapons of mass destruction in the country. Though the UN failed to approve an invasion, in March 2003 the United States and Britain, with token support from a handful of other European states, invaded Iraq.

The U.S.-led invasion quickly overwhelmed the Iraqi army, and Saddam’s dictatorship collapsed in April, but America’s subsequent efforts to establish a stable pro-American Iraq proved difficult. Poor postwar planning and management by administration officials was one factor, but there were others. Iraq, a creation of Western imperialism after the First World War, is a fragile state with three distinct groups: non-Arab Kurds, Arab Sunni Muslims, and Arab Shi’ite Muslims. By 2006 deadly sectarian conflicts among these groups and against the United States and its Iraqi supporters had taken hold. Casualties in Iraq began to decline after President Bush sent additional troops to the country in 2007, and when President Obama took office in 2009 his administration moved forward with agreements to withdraw all U.S. forces in 2011. The shaky Iraqi government continues to struggle with ethnic divisions and terrorist violence, however.

In early 2011 an unexpected chain of events that came to be called the Arab Spring further destabilized the Middle East and North Africa. In a provincial town in Tunisia, a poor fruit vendor set himself on fire to protest official harassment. His death eighteen days later unleashed a series of spontaneous mass protests that brought violence, chaos, and regime change; six weeks later Tunisia’s authoritarian president fled the country, opening the way for reform. Massive popular demonstrations in Egypt followed and forced the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, a U.S.-friendly leader who had ruled for thirty years. An armed uprising in Libya, supported by NATO air strikes, brought down the dictatorial government of Muammar Gaddafi that October. A civil war broke out in Syria in July 2011, but dragged on into 2013 as Bashar Assad hurled his army at the rebels and Western powers disagreed about what to do. Protests arose in other countries in the region as well, evoking a mixed response of reform and repression.

In summer 2013, as this was being written, the outcome of the Arab Spring was difficult to predict. The initial protests were not organized by radical Islamists, but by young activists who sought greater political and social liberties from West-backed authoritarian regimes. These poorly organized groups could hardly maintain control of the changes they unleashed, which opened power to multiple players: military leaders and old elites, liberal secularists, local chieftains representing ethnic or sectarian interests, and moderate and radical Islamists. In Egypt, the first open elections in decades brought to power representatives of the moderate wing of the Muslim Brotherhood; a year later, military leaders overthrew this elected government. In Egypt and other states, these players continued to jockey for control.

U.S.-led campaigns against radical Islamists had weakened terrorist groups, which were for the most part disorganized and scattered in remote areas. But they could still mount deadly attacks, as in Mali, where Islamist rebels took over the northern reaches of the country and briefly occupied an Algerian natural gas refinery in January 2013. French troops helped Mali’s government push them back, underscoring once again Europe’s stake in maintaining stability in the troubled but energy-rich regions of North Africa and the Middle East.