Islamic Lands Face the Problem of Succession

Disputes over succession have long troubled Islam. The very first such friction arose at the death of the prophet Mohammad: who should succeed him as leader, Ali or Abu-Bakr? The argument continues to this day.

The problem of succession has troubled many societies, from Rome and Greece to China and Cuba. When one leader dies, is there a clearly understood procedure for determining who should be the next leader?

Each civilization must confront this question. Some have answered it successfully. Other have failed.

For several generations, these succession disputes were solved by a policy imposed by Mehmed II in the mid-1400s. Michael Farquhar describes the Muslim’s solution to the riddle of “who should be the next ruler?”

Sultan Mehmed II, “the Conqueror,” devised a simple solution in the mid-15th century for the fierce sibling quarrels that had long plagued the succession to the Ottoman throne: fratricide. “And to whomsoever of my sons the Sultanate shall pass, it is fitting that for the order of the world he shall kill his brothers,” Mehmed II decreed (after having his own infant brother strangled). Nearly a century and a half later, the murderous policy had a particularly devastating effect on Mehmed III’s brothers — all 19 of them! — when he came to the throne on January 27, 1595. The young men, some of them still babies, were ritually strangled with a bowstring and then buried with all due solemnity in the same tomb as their recently deceased father.

This solution to the succession problem was, after more than a century, so thoroughly ingrained in Islamic lands that the British poet Alexander Pope, in giving advice to would-be ruler, wrote, “Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne.”

The Peopling of the World: Prehistory – 2500 B.C. (Foundational Concepts for the Study of History)

History begins with texts and writing. Prior to earliest texts, there is no history. Hypotheses about prehistoric times are not part of history, but rather of paleontology. Archeology serves both history and paleontology; archaeologists often find artifacts. Artifacts are man-made objects.

Historians take the data of past events and construct narratives. History is narrative.

Anthropologists study culture. A culture has six common practices: food, clothing, sports, tools, social customs, and work. A culture has six shared understandings: language, symbols, religious beliefs, values, art, and political beliefs. A culture has six ways to organize society: family, class structures, government, economic systems, view of authority, and the relationships between the individual and the community. Culture is learned in two ways: direct teaching, and observation and imitation. Culture is learned in seven settings: media, family, friends, government, religion, school, and workplace.

History begins in the paleolithic age; ‘paleolithic age’ means ‘old stone age’ – in this era, people made tools, jewelry, arrowheads, and other objects from chopped stone. Written records from this era are rare. The Dispilio tablet was found by archaeologists in Greece and dates to approximately 5260 B.C.; the Tartaria tablets date to approximately 5300 B.C. and were found in Romania; the Jiahu writings date to approximately 6600 B.C. in China. The people during the paleolithic age were nomadic hunter-gatherers, who made tools not only from stone, but also from wood and bone. They also began painting pictures.

The transition from paleolithic to neolithic included the emergence of professional record keepers or ‘scribes’ as a defined class: people who could read and write, spent most of their time recording data about their societies.

During the new stone age – the ‘neolithic age’ – people developed techniques for polishing stone, making pottery, and domesticating crops and animals. ‘Domesticating’ means making something not wild. Neolithic people ceased being nomadic, and began to farm. In regions with many trees, agriculture required that the land first be cleared. Trees were cut down for their useful wood, and grass and smaller plants burned off to empty the fields for planting – hence the name ‘slash and burn farming.’

As people stopped being nomadic, civilization developed with five elements: cities, specialized workers, complex institutions, record keeping, and advanced technology. Around 3500 B.C., in the city of Ur, for example, skilled craftsmen called ‘artisans’ invented both the mixture of copper and tin called ‘bronze’ and the potter’s wheel. Around 3000 B.C., the ‘bronze age’ began as this alloy became widely used.

Ur is located near where the Euphrates river flows into the Persian Gulf in the region called Sumer. The Tigris river flows parallel to the Euphrates, and the area around and between them is called ‘Mesopotamia’ – which means ‘the land between the rivers.’ Like all early civilizations, Ur conducted human sacrifices. Young men and women were killed as an offering to the city’s idols, in hopes of gaining good weather for farming or military victories. Mesopotamian rivers flooded unpredictably, and starvation could easily result from bad weather.

Mesopotamia is part of a larger geographical region. The eastern end of the Mediterranean forms, together with Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent.

Ur, and other Mesopotamian cities, had pyramid-like structures called ‘ziggurats’ for ceremonies and sacrifices. They did not yet have religions, instead having beliefs which were polytheistic and magical. Most buildings were constructed out of mud-clay bricks. Buying and selling in the city was done with barter, exchanging one item for another – coins had not yet been invented. Most of the population lived in the surrounding countryside and did farming. Reading and writing progressed as the ‘cuneiform’ alphabet was invented, used first for business records, and then for recording events in the city.

These cities are called ‘city-states’ because they functioned as independent countries. They were not part of larger countries. As the rulers handed power to their children, generation after generation, ‘dynasties’ or royal families emerged.

Early Mesopotamian societies faced several challenges: the cuneiform system of writing was cumbersome, keeping literacy rates low; the river flooded unpredictably and rain was unreliable, keeping famines and starvation as constant threats; some social classes engaged in polygamy, keeping social structures less stable; beliefs in magic and polytheism focused on manipulating nature, preventing religion from arising until later.

Many early civilizations focused their magical and polytheistic beliefs on fertility – the ability of farmland to yield plentiful crops and animals; these belief systems are often called ‘fertility religions’ although they are not religions – they are superstitions. Such belief systems are magic, because they are an attempt to manipulate nature – to determine the outcome of a course of events. Along with agriculture, they also attempted to manipulate military victories. Civilizations will move from ‘magic’ to ‘religion’ as the belief system is less about manipulating events and more about forming a relationship with the deity.

This pre-religious phase included mythology. A ‘myth’ is a story designed to explain.

In these earliest phases of history, individual political liberty, in the forms of property rights and in the forms of freedom of speech and thought, had not yet appeared, and was not even clearly articulated as a goal. Liberty was, however, a driving force, if a subconscious one, in historical development and is an innate feature of human beings.

The obstacles which humanity had to overcome at this stage were polytheism, polygamy, the lack of an alphabet, and the ubiquitous practice of human sacrifice.

As these obstacles were removed, societies embraced monotheism, monogamy, alphabetic writing systems, and a respect for human life which replaced human sacrifice.

Mind Control: Cases in Mainland China and North Korea

During the second half of the twentieth century, a bizarre and terrifying phenomenon emerged onto the stage of world history: governments and political movements using the findings of modern psychology to engage in ‘thought reform.’

In 1949, mainland China fell under the oppression of the communists. To obtain not merely the compliance, but rather the willing support of the population, the communists actively applied techniques which are sometimes termed ‘mind control.’

In 1950, when both mainland China and the USSR were assisting North Korea in attacking South Korea, Chinese military officers used ‘thought control’ techniques on soldiers and officers who had been taken captive by the North Koreans.

The startling effectiveness of these techniques have since attracted the attention of psychologists like Steven Hassan and Robert Lifton. In China, formerly free people were ‘rewired’ to embrace Mao’s dictatorship and publicly confess their previously-held affection for liberty as a crime.

The power of ‘thought control’ techniques ‘programmed’ POWs to appeared in propaganda films, praising China and North Korea. The POWs also confessed, apparently sincerely, to nonexistent war crimes.

Louis West, Harry Harlow, and I.E. Farber wrote:

Few aspects of Communism have been more puzzling and disturbing to the Western world than the widely publicized collaboration, conversion, and self-denunciation in individuals - communist and noncommunist, innocent and guilty alike - who have suffered Communist imprisonment. Such behavior in persons whose intelligence, integrity, or patriotism can scarcely be doubted has suggested to many a mysterious power or knowledge that enables Communists to manipulate the thoughts and actions of others in a manner ordinarily reserved to characters in the more lurid sorts of science fiction. Accordingly, such terms as “brainwashing,” “thought control,” “menticide,” and so on, have been applied to the process or product of this manipulation.

The ‘mind control’ techniques developed by the Chinese in the late 1940s and early 1950s became the foundation for further advances in this field, now often called ‘undue influence’ or ‘unethical influence.’

The ability of the international communist conspiracy to ‘turn’ or ‘flip’ a person’s mind in a relatively short period of time meant that individuals who had previously opposed communism could be made, against their wills, to support, and act on behalf of, the global communist movement.

At that time, the communist conspiracy was not a political movement, aimed at changing opinions. It was a terrorist organization and an espionage network. It worked to foment ‘violent’ revolution - it explicitly used that word in its documents. The communists were stealing military secrets from various nations around the world, and infiltrating governments to plant pro-communist advisors among the world’s leaders.

Some of this spy work was carried out by people who were under a form of mind control, acting involuntarily against their own wills. They were under the control of a false persona which had been installed inside their minds.

In later decades, these psychological techniques would be employed not only by communist governments, but also by ‘cults’ - groups like the Scientology movement and the ‘moonies’ of the Unification Church.

Hitler Coerces Support from Reluctant Social Classes

The German aristocrats, capitalists, and artists found Adolf Hitler to be boorish and oafish. Yet Hitler knew that he needed them, and that he would somehow have to bully them into supporting his political ambitions.

Historians have long pondered the mystery of how, and why, members of various German social classes eventually allowed Hitler to build his National Socialist government.

Getting industrialists to support a socialist like Hitler was indeed quite a challenge. As historian Jonah Goldberg writes,

While there’s a big debate about how much of the working and lower classes supported the Nazis, it is now largely settled that very significant chunks of both constituted the Nazi base. Nazism and Fascism were both popular movements.

The masses marching in the streets, carrying torches, starting fistfights, and throwing rocks weren’t from royal families or the nobility. They were the populist base of the Nazi Party.

The word ‘Nazi’ is an abbreviation for ‘National Socialism.’ The upper classes were opposed to both nationalism and socialism. The aristocracy had historically opposed nationalism, both because it placed the people’s allegiance to the nation above their allegiance to dynastic families, and because ‘nationalizing’ industries and economic sectors was a sure route to poverty.

The upper classes opposed both of Hitler’s ideological foundations, nationalism and socialism, and they opposed his tactics of intimidation, as Jonah Goldberg notes:

In Germany the aristocratic and business elite were generally repulsed by Hitler and the Nazis.

From 1919 to 1933, when Hitler and the Nazis finally seized power, it was largely a working-class mob who supported them. The ‘Brownshirts’ were not from elite classes.

After 1933, the underground opposition, which sought to hinder the Nazis and even to assassinate Hitler, had a disproportionately large number of members from the aristocracy.

Colonel von Stauffenberg, a key figure in the April 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, came from a historic noble family.

Hitler was, simply, a populist:

The Nazis rose to power exploiting anticapitalist rhetoric they indisputably believed. Even if Hitler was the nihilistic cipher many portray him as, it is impossible to deny the sincerity of the Nazi rank and file who saw themselves as mounting a revolutionary assault on the forces of capitalism.

The Nazis exploited feelings of class envy. They had no desire to allow any type of free market. They intended to burden the people with crushing taxes.

Because Hitler wanted to crush freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the freedom of thought, it was a logical and necessary extension of the Nazi program that he would also crush economic freedom.

The Nazis had no respect for the centuries-old heritage of the aristocratic families, and in fact, the Nazis harbored bitter resentment toward such families. That resentment would have, for many of the nobles, a murderous outcome.

Deciding the Future of Poland and Yugoslavia: the Teheran Conference

In November and December of 1943, the three leaders of the Allies - Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt - met at Teheran in Iran to discuss both the next phase of the war as well as how they would organize large parts of the world after the war was over.

(Teheran is also sometimes spelled ‘Tehran.’)

World War II didn’t end until late 1945, but it was already clear in late 1943 that the Allies would win, so they began to make plans for a postwar world.

Eastern Europe was a topic at this meeting. Instead of wanting to liberate these countries from Nazi oppression, the Soviet Union wanted to keep them under socialist dictatorships. In the end, these countries would not enjoy freedom at war’s end. They would simply be ruled by a different regime.

Two cases were especially important at Teheran: Poland and Yugoslavia. In order to dominate these countries, Stalin had to trick Churchill into thinking that the USSR enslaving millions of Poles and Yugoslavs was a good idea.

Churchill was typically anti-Communist and pro-liberty. But in this case, the Soviet espionage agencies had managed to plant ‘moles’ inside the government of the UK.

These Soviet agents controlled and shaped the reports about Yugoslavia: reports which went to the key policy-makers inside England.

Inside Yugoslavia during WW2, the resistance effort against the Nazis was led by General Draza Mihailovich. His men used guerilla tactics against the occupying Nazi troops.

Toward the war’s end, a second would-be resistance leader emerged: Josip Broz Tito, a communist. Tito’s forces competed with Mihailovic’s, but Mihailovic’s troops did far more damage to the Nazis than Tito’s.

Tito wanted to be the unchallenged dictator of Yugoslavia at war’s end, while Mihailovic wanted a republic with freely-elected representatives. To ensure his chances at power, Tito started spending more time fighting against Mihailovic than against the Nazis.

Stalin gave Tito some help: Stalin’s spies inside the British government began falsifying reports about the Yugoslav situation and about the Polish situation. As historian Stan Evans writes,

In both states, fierce internal conflicts were developing between Communist and non-Communist factions for supremacy when the war was over, identical in key respects to the struggle shaping up in China. At the era of Teheran, the Yugoslav battle was the more advanced, though Poland wasn’t far behind it. Making the Yugoslav contest still more distinctive, the case for Communist victory there would be not merely accepted by the Western powers, but promoted by them, with Churchill incongruously in the forefront. The way this was accomplished provides a classic study in disinformation tactics and the vulnerability of the Western allies to such deceptions.

Churchill, who normally favored liberty over communism, had been fed misinformation by the Soviets. The communist spies inside the British government told Churchill that Tito was a more effective fighter, and would establish a free nation after the war. They told him, too, that Mihailovic was actually sympathetic to the Nazis, and would establish a dictatorship after the war.

Churchill was being played.

Eventually, the misled Churchill would consent to Tito’s rise to power. Yugoslavia would not be freed, but would suffer under communism as it had suffered under the Nazis.

Stalin’s network of intelligence operatives had done their job: Stalin had tricked Churchill into giving Yugoslavia to a murderous socialist dictator, and casting aside Mihailovic, the leader who could have achieved political liberty in that nation.

This is the type of fateful dealing which happened at Teheran in late 1943.

The War after the War: Liberating Eastern Europe

The series of conferences during WW2 - including Cairo and Tehran in late 1944, Malta and Yalta in early 1945, and Potsdam in late 1945 - included among their agenda items the future of eastern Europe. Once Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany had been liberated from Nazi control, who would govern them? And how would they be governed?

While it was clear that the advancing Soviet army gave Stalin a chance to exercise his imperialistic ambitions, the other Allies felt the need to give him some leeway, because they wanted to keep the anti-Nazi coalition strongly together.

The Allies knew that, if they did not appease Stalin, there remained the possibility that he would switch sides again, and the massive resources of the Soviet Socialist dictatorship would be placed at Hitler’s disposal. Additionally, the Allies wanted Stalin’s support in the Pacific, where the fight against the Japanese was even more brutal than the fighting in Europe.

The capital city of Iran can be spelled either ‘Tehran’ or ‘Teheran,’ and it was in this city that the Allies met in late November and early December 1943, as historians Herb Romerstein and Stan Evans write:

While military matters were the immediate topics at Teheran, postwar political and diplomatic issues would be considered also. Of special interest were the states of Eastern Europe that lay in the path of the Red Army advancing west from Russia, and what would happen to them when they were “liberated” by Soviet forces. Foremost among the nations getting notice in this context were Yugoslavia and Poland, the first the subject of extended comment by Churchill, the second stressed by Stalin as a security issue for Moscow.

At Tehran, then, Churchill backed Stalin’s man in Yugoslavia: Josip Broz Tito. The nickname ‘Tito’ had appeared when Josip Broz began a Soviet-backed communist group which hoped eventually to govern Yugoslavia.

From the time the Nazis had invaded Yugoslavia, Draza Mihailovich had been leading an underground resistance group in an effort to push the Nazis back out of Yugoslavia. The group was called the Chetniks, and Mihailovic - his surname is sometimes spelled without the final ‘h’ - rallied the cause of freeing Yugoslavia.

Because Hitler and Stalin were allies until June 1941, Tito, as Stalin’s agent, offered no resistance to the occupying Nazis until Hitler broke his alliance with Stalin.

In a stunning and masterful propaganda effort, Stalin suddenly directed his radio and print media to portray Tito as a resistance leader, and to denounce Mihailovic as a traitor who’d collaborated with the Nazis. The effort was so successful that even Churchill and the British government were fooled.

While Mihailovic continued his efforts against the occupying Nazis, Tito’s guerrillas attacked Mihailovic’s fighters. Tito conducted occasional token raids against the Nazis to support the propaganda effort portraying Tito as the true resistance hero.

Churchill agreed, at Teheran, that Tito would be the postwar leader of Yugoslavia, and so unwittingly delivered the Yugoslavs from Hitler’s dictatorship into Stalin’s dictatorship. Tito would function as Stalin’s puppet from 1941 until 1948/1949.

As soon as he consolidated power at the war’s end, Tito ordered Mihailovic to be arrested and executed after a show trial. Stalin’s misinformation effort had succeeded, and the western Allies had support Tito, a communist dictator, over Mihailovic, who had been the authentic leader of the anti-Nazi resistance.

China and the USSR: Unstable Alliances

The motives of the international communist conspiracy often caused it to make moves which surprised observers during its heyday between 1917 and 1991. In hindsight, there is an underlying logic to what seemed like unexpected changes.

Leaders like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were balancing ideology and opportunism. In borderline situations, the winner was usually whichever policy option did the most to obtain, retain, and maintain power for the Soviet Socialist dictatorship.

Allies of the USSR and enemies of the USSR could exchange roles in an instant. As historians Herb Romerstein and Stan Evans write,

Understanding who stood where in the often confusing propaganda battles of the Cold War depends on knowing what the interests of the Soviet Union were at any given moment and how these could abruptly change when the global balance of forces shifted.

The most notable example, of course, was the “Hitler-Stalin Pact,” a treaty of nonaggression between the Nazis and the USSR. Also known as the “Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact” or the “Nazi-Soviet Pact,” the treaty was signed in August 1939. The Soviets and the Nazis were then allies, and cooperated in the invasion and oppression of Poland.

This came as a surprise to the rest of the world because Hitler and Stalin had publicly opposed each other prior to August 1939. Stalin had decried Hitler as an imperialist. Hitler had denounced Stalin as a communist.

Just as the Hitler-Stalin Pact reversed, in a moment, the previous opposition between the two, so in June 1941, the situation reversed itself again in a flash. Hitler and Stalin, who’d been allies only a few days before, were now at war with each other.

This was not the only situation in which the USSR’s allegiances reversed themselves suddenly. Stalin, needing an organized China to prevent Japan from attacking the USSR, backed Chiang Kai-shek, even though Chiang was sustaining free China against Mao’s communist revolutionaries.

While Stalin’s ideology should have dictated him to befriend Mao, Stalin’s instinct for power directed him to ally with Chiang:

Less often noted but equally telling was the zigzagging Communist line on China. As seen, a main Soviet concern of the later 1930s was the danger of invasion from Japan, then on the march in Asia and long hostile to the USSR. This threat dictated a temporarily friendly view of China’s Chiang Kai-shek, then pinning down a million or so Japanese who might otherwise have invaded Russia. The same Soviet interest meant blocking an American modus vivendi with Japan concerning China, as this too could have freed up the empire for an assault on Soviet Asia. In both respects, Chiang’s then-high standing with U.S. opinion trumped notions of accommodation with Tokyo in the Pacific.

As in the case of Germany, so also in the case of China. In mid-1943, Stalin would suddenly drop his relationship with Chiang, support Mao, and direct the USSR’s efforts against Chiang.

When Mao Tse-Tung, whose name is also spelled ‘Mao Zedong,’ finally defeated free China in 1949, Stalin formed an official alliance with the communist dictator of China. But like all other communist alliances, it was an arrangement of convenience, which ended in the early 1960s, when the Soviets and the Maoists decided that they didn’t need each other.