Introduction 1

Michael Butter (Freiburg) and Maurus Reinkowski (Basel)

Introduction: Mapping Conspiracy Theories

in the United States and the Middle East

Conspiracy theories hold that evil agents, the conspirators, secretly control
or are plotting to gain control over an institution, a region, a nation, or the
world. Over the past five decades such projections have received a consider-
able amount of scholarly attention. In fact, ever since Richard Hofstadter
explored “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964) in his by now
classic essay, the field of conspiracy theory research has steadily grown.1 But
whereas Hofstadter and most others who studied the attractions, mechan-
isms, and effects of conspiracism from the 1960s to the mid-1990s tended to
pathologize conspiracy theories, the past twenty years have seen a reevalu-
ation of conspiracist visions, their origins, and their cultural, social, and
political functions. As a number of recent studies have shown, conspiracy
theories have both a long history and were and are far more widely spread
than previously assumed.2 While it is still unclear since when conspiracy the-
ories have been part of Asian, Arab, and African cultures, in the western
world at least they can be traced back to antiquity.3 What is more, such the-
ories were and are not only believed on the fringes, but were and still are an
integral part of most, if not all, societies. Finally, scholars today may differ
considerably in their overall evaluations of conspiracy theory, but most
would surely agree with Mark Fenster’s assessment that conspiracy theories
“may sometimes be on to something”.4 What Fenster means is that some

1 Cf. Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, in: The Paranoid
Style in American Politics and Other Essays, Cambridge 1995, pp. 3–40.
2 Cf., for example, Barry Coward/Julian Swann (eds.), Conspiracies and Conspiracy
Theory in Early Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution, Aldershot
2004; Rogalla von Bieberstein, Der Mythos von der Verschwörung: Philosophen, Frei-
maurer, Juden, Liberale und Sozialisten als Verschwörer gegen die Sozialordnung, Wiesbaden
2008; Peter Robert Campbell/Thomas E. Kaiser/Marisa Linton (eds.), Conspiracy
in the French Revolution, Manchester 2007; Robert Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within:
The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America, New Haven, CT 2001.
3 Cf. Joseph Roisman, The Rhetoric of Conspiracy in Ancient Athens, Berkeley, CA 2006;
Victoria Emma Pagán, Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History, Austin, TX 2004.
4 Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, rev. ed., Min-
neapolis, MN 2008, p. 90.

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2 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

conspiracy theories are simply reflections of racism or anti-Semitism, where-

as others are voiced, for purely manipulative reasons, by people who do not
believe in the claims themselves. But conspiracy theories are also frequently
articulations of and distorted responses to existing problems, needs, and
anxieties. Thus, they must not be dismissed out of hand and ridiculed but
have to be taken seriously.
In this vein, historians investigate the effects of conspiracist visions in
past ages, while political scientists do the same for the present, with both of
them paying special attention to conspiracy theories’ role in stabilizing or
destabilizing political systems. Sociologists examine the shifting status of the
knowledge that conspiracy theories produce and represent and question
how the Internet eases the distribution of such theories or how they con-
tribute to the creation of counter-publics. Psychologists seek to understand
if there are personality types or groups particularly prone to conspiracy the-
orizing, and analytical philosophers are currently struggling with the ques-
tion if all conspiracy theories are intrinsically flawed, or if there are criteria by
which one could distinguish between legitimate and unwarranted suspicions.
Anthropologists and ethnologists investigate if conspiracy theories existed
in indigenous cultures before they came into contact with the western world,
how western visions of conspiracy have subsequently merged with other be-
lief systems, and how conspiracist discourse allows people to make sense of
their daily lives and to understand their position with regard to both the local
and the global. Literary critics analyze the traces that conspiracist visions leave
in fictional texts of all kinds, whereas scholars from cultural studies explore
projections of conspiracy outside the realm of the literary, conspiracy theor-
izing as a cultural practice, and conspiracy theory’s role in the formation of
individual and collective identity.5

5 It is impossible to list all relevant studies here but they are included in the bibli-
ography of conspiracy theory research at the end of this book. For historical
studies, cf., for example, Coward/Swann, Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory; Camp-
bell/Kaiser/Liton, Conspiracy; Geoffrey Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory
and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford 1993; Markus Hünemörder, The
Society of the Cincinnati: Conspiracy and Distrust in Early America, New York 2006. For
political science, cf. Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in
Contemporary America, Berkeley, CA 2003; Matthew C. Gray, Conspiracy Theories in the
Arab World: Sources and Politics, London 2010. For sociological contributions, cf.,
for example, Michael Schetsche/Ina Schmied-Knittel, “Verschwörungstheorien
und die Angst vor über- und unterirdischen Mächten”, in: kuckuck: Notizen zur All-
tagskultur, 1/2004, pp. 24–29; Andreas Anton, Unwirkliche Wirklichkeiten: Zur Wis-
senssoziologie von Verschwörungstheorien, Berlin 2011. For current research in psychology,
cf. Viren Swami/Rebecca Coles, “The Truth Is Out There: Belief in Conspiracy

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Introduction 3

This growing body of scholarly work has immensely increased our under-
standing of conspiracy theory. However, there is still a lot of work left to be
done. Since most extant research focuses on one single region or culture –
with the vast majority of studies examining various aspects of conspiracy
theorizing in the United States or drawing on American examples when
examining conspiracy theory in general – we do not yet know enough about
how conspiracist visions differ from one region or culture to the other, how
they travel from one culture or region to the other, or how this transfer af-
fects their forms and functions. We also possess only a very rudimentary
understanding of the reasons why conspiracy theories quite obviously figure
more prominently in some regions and cultures than in others. And we also
do not know for certain yet if conspiracy theories are an anthropological
given, as some scholars assume, or if, at least in their modern form, they
emerged with the Enlightenment and spread from Europe all over the world,
as the editors of and most contributors to this volume think. The situation is
further aggravated by the fact that there have not been many inter- or trans-
disciplinary efforts to study conspiracy theories so far. In fact, scholars often
seem unaware of the insights already gained in neighboring disciplines. For
example, historians and political scientists working on American conspiracy
theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have usually neither
drawn on or historicized, nor explicitly rejected what cultural studies
scholars have argued about contemporary American culture. They some-
times acknowledge their work in passing but hardly ever engage with their
findings or the theoretical models they have proposed.

Theories”, in: The Psychologist, 23/2010, pp. 560–563; Marina Abalakina-Paap et

al.,“Beliefs in Conspiracies”, in: Political Psychology, 20/1999, pp. 637–647; Ted
Goertzel, “Belief in Conspiracy Theories”, in: Political Psychology, 15/1994,
pp. 731–742. Most work done in analytical or political philosophy has been col-
lected in David Coady, Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate, Aldershot 2006.
For contributions from anthropology and ethnology, cf. the essays collected in
Harry G. West/Todd Saunders (eds.), Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of
Suspicion in the New World Order, Durham, NC 2003. For literary studies, cf., among
many others, Albert D. Pionke, Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Vic-
torian England, Columbus, OH 2004; Adrian S. Wisnicki, Conspiracy, Revolution, and
Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel, New York 2008; Samuel Chase
Coale, Paradigms of Paranoia: The Culture of Conspiracy in Contemporary American Fic-
tion, Tuscaloosa, AL 2005. For cultural studies, cf. Fenster, Conspiracy Theories; Jodi
Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace, Ithaca, NY
1998; Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to The X-Files, London 2000;
Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America,
Ithaca, NY 2000.

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4 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

Focusing on the United States and the Middle East, two regions where
conspiracy theories have been prominent for a long time, Conspiracy Theories
in the United States and the Middle East constitutes a step toward closing some
of the gaps thus left. Its perspective is both comparative and interdisciplin-
ary, as it concentrates on two different regions of the world that are never-
theless connected in manifold ways, and as it brings together scholars from
Middle Eastern Studies, Anthropology, History, Political Science, Cultural
Studies, and American Studies. Taken together, the essays collected in this
volume offer a nuanced image of the workings of conspiracy theory in the
United States and the Middle East. Because of their focus on individual cases
and local conditions, they dispel a number of myths about conspiracism, es-
pecially with regard to the Middle East, by complicating the pictures painted
by previous research. Since a number of contributions address conspiracy
theorizing prior to 1960, they add a historical perspective much needed in a
field where most research still focuses on the present. Most importantly, they
help us understand how conspiracy theories operate in different historical,
cultural, political, and social contexts, alerting us to the commonalities and
differences in conspiracist thinking both between the United States and the
Middle East and within these nations or regions.
The volume is organized into five thematic sections. Section 1, “The
United States and the Middle East”, contains four essays that explore how
the Middle East figures in conspiracist accounts prominent in the United
States and vice versa, and how (alleged) actions by actors from one region
have affected conspiracy theories circulating in the other. Aaron Winter fo-
cuses on the extreme right in the United States, Schirin Fathi on Iran, André
G. Sleiman on Lebanon, and Brian Johnsrud on Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci
Code and its relationship to post-9/11 medievalism in the United States. The
three essays in section 2, “The Politics of Conspiracy Theory”, are case
studies of how different kinds of political actors deploy conspiracy theories
consciously or unconsciously in order to achieve their goals, that is, how they
at times adapt certain theories for strategic purposes while rejecting others
for the same reason. Christopher Herbert deals with vigilante committees
in nineteenth-century California, Türkay Salim Nefes with political parties in
contemporary Turkey, and Stephan Schmid with the Lebanese Hizbollah.
Section 3, “The Promises of Conspiracy Theory”, investigates different ways
in which people utilize the knowledge offered by conspiracy theory to make
sense of their lives. Sebastian M. Herrmann explores how the epistemic crisis
to which conspiracy theory answers is dramatized in fiction, Annika Rabo
examines the role of conspiracy talk in everyday discourse in Syria, and
Christoph Herzog engages with visions of the “deep state” in Turkey. Sec-

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Introduction 5

tion 4, “Travelling Theories”, is dedicated to the transnational dimension of

both conspiracy theorizing and conspiracy theory research. Andrew McKen-
zie-McHarg explores how the Illuminati conspiracy theory traveled from
Europe to the United States at the end of the eighteenth century and how it
was transformed during this process. In similar fashion, Barbara De Poli
examines the transfer of Masonic and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to the
Arab world. Matthey Gray, by contrast, is not concerned with conspiracy
theories, but discusses to what degree theories of conspiracy theory devel-
oped with regard to the United States can be used to shed light on conspi-
racist visions in the Middle East. His contribution thus forms a bridge to sec-
tion 5, “Theorizing Conspiracy Theory”, which contains four essays that
consider the state of current research, including that collected in this vol-
ume, from a meta-position. Alexander Dunst argues that contemporary re-
search has still not gone beyond pathologizing conspiracy theories; Birte
Christ exposes the gendered biases of both conspiracy theory and conspi-
racy theory research; Mark Fenster uses recent discussions about how states
might react to accusations of conspiracy to reject calls for one singular the-
ory of conspiracy theory; and Peter Knight, finally, looks ahead and maps
areas of future research. First of all, however, the introduction lays the foun-
dation for what follows by providing an overview of the histories, forms, and
origins of conspiracy theories in the United States and the Middle East, and
the highly imbalanced relationship between these two regions.

1. The Forms and Functions of American Conspiracy Theories

From a certain perspective, the history of the United States is the history of a
series of subsequent conspiracy theories that have decisively shaped the
course of the country. In fact, more than a century before the nation was
founded, the Puritan settlers in New England saw themselves as threatened
by a devilish plot in the literal sense. Conceiving of themselves as God’s
chosen people, the Puritans believed that they were at the forefront of a cos-
mic struggle between God and Satan. Accordingly, they thought that all their
enemies – for example, Native American tribes or Catholics from French
Quebec – were secretly collaborating under the lead of the devil, and that all
hardships that befell them – for example, epidemics or natural disasters –
were moves in this battle.6 This fear of conspiracy, as Robert Levine puts it,

6 On Puritanism in general, cf. the contributions to John Coffey (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Puritanism, Cambridge 2008. On Puritan conspiracy theories, cf.
Goldberg, Enemies Within, pp. 1–4; Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies

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6 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

“helped the Pilgrim and Puritan colonists to create and define their commu-
nity”.7 As long as the enemy was located (largely) outside the community, the
conspiracy theory that the Puritans believed in stabilized their community.
However, when during the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692 the enemy seemed
to have infiltrated the community, the conspiracy theory fueled a mass panic
and shook the community to its very foundations.
During the eighteenth century, metaphysical conspiracy theories featuring
the devil were increasingly replaced by secular accounts that focused exclus-
ively on human actors. But conspiracist fears remained important to Ameri-
can culture and continued to function as means of collective self-definition.8
Indeed, one can make a strong case that the United States only came into
being because of a conspiracy theory. Bernard Bailyn already argued during
the 1960s that
[t]he fear of a comprehensive conspiracy against liberty throughout the English-
speaking world – a conspiracy believed to have been nourished in corruption, and
of which, it was felt, oppression in America was only the most immediately visible
part – lay at the heart of the Revolutionary movement.9
According to Bailyn’s influential study, from the late 1750s onward, the col-
onists increasingly gained the impression that the king, his ministers, and the
Church of England were conspiring against their and all other people’s lib-
erty – an idea that not only fueled but justified their rebellion and created a
sense of collective identity. As Jodie Dean puts it, “Distrust of British auth-
ority helped produce a new ‘we,’ a ‘we’ constituted out of those sharing a fear
of corruption and ministerial conspiracy, a ‘we’ hailed in the Declaration as
those who might believe that the king was plotting against their liberty”.10

in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville, Cambridge 1989, pp. 6–8; as well
as chapter 2 in Michael Butter, Plots, Designs, and Schemes: American Conspiracy The-
ories from the Puritans to the Present, Berlin/Boston 2014.
7 Levine, Conspiracy and Romance, p. 6.
8 For more extended histories of American conspiracy theories than the one pro-
vided here, cf. David Brion Davis (ed.), The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American
Subversion from the Revolution to the Present, Ithaca, NY 1971; Goldberg, Enemies
Within. For the Early Republic, cf. also J. Wendell Knox, Conspiracy in American
Politics 1787–1815, New York 1972; for the twentieth-century, cf. Kathryn S. Olm-
sted, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11,
Oxford 2009.
9 Bernard Bailyn, “Foreword”, in: Bailyn (ed.), Pamphlets of the American Revolution
1750–1776, vol. 1, Cambridge, MA 1965, pp. vii–xii, p. x. Cf. also Bailyn, The Ideo-
logical Origins of the American Revolution, Cambridge, MA 1967.
10 Jodie Dean, “Declarations of Independence”, in: Dean (ed.), Cultural Studies &
Political Theory, NY 2000, pp. 285–304, p. 297.

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Introduction 7

As a consequence, it is hardly surprising that the Founding Fathers saw

the newly established nation constantly threatened by plots involving inter-
nal or external enemies or a combination of both. This fear found its most
pronounced expression in George Washington’s Farewell Address of Septem-
ber 1796 in which Washington admonished Americans to stand united be-
cause their unity was “the point in your political fortress against which the
batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and ac-
tively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed […]”.11 This warning
did not go unheard but proved extraordinarily prophetic. Displaying the
“uniform vigilance”12 that Washington demanded, until into the second half
of the twentieth century, conspiracy theorists worried about exactly that
which Washington had worried about. In the 160 years after the issuing of
the Farewell Address, American conspiracy theories revolved predominantly
around alleged plots by domestic and/or foreign agents against the govern-
ment. In these conspiracist visions, the government was almost always in
great peril but had not yet fallen to the conspirators.
One prominent example of such fears occurred very shortly after the
publication of the Farewell Address: the Illuminati scare of 1798–1799.13
A number of Federalist politicians and New England ministers, most promi-
nently Jedidiah Morse, charged that the secret order of the Illuminati, driven
by the desire to abolish all religion and social order, had first caused the
French Revolution and was now, in league with the Democratic Republicans,
busy to subvert the American republic. Motivated at least in part by these
claims, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, a set of bills that
allowed the president to suppress critical opinions about the government in
the press and to deport foreigners suspected of subversion. In his contribu-
tion to this volume, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg investigates how the Illumi-
nati conspiracy theory traveled from Europe to the United States, why it fell
on fertile ground there, and how Jedidiah Morse adapted the arguments of
European conspiracy theorists in order to make them meaningful for the
new context.
In many ways, the Illuminati scare provided the pattern which most con-
spiracist fears would follow over the nineteenth century, as the idea that a do-
mestic faction was actively collaborating with a foreign power and thus com-

11 George Washington, “Farewell Address”, in: Don Higginbotham (ed.), George

Washington: Uniting a Nation, Lanham, MD 2002, pp. 137–155, p. 140.
12 George Washington, “Farewell Address”, p. 147.
13 The classic study of this scare is Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian
Illuminati, Diss. Columbia University, New York, 1918.

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8 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

mitting what J. Wendell Knox has called the “cardinal sin in the United States”
proved highly influential.14 Throughout the 1800s and 1810s Democratic
Republicans and Federalists continually accused each other of this crime. The
Federalists usually claimed that the Democratic Republicans were conspiring
with the French, and the Democratic Republicans claimed that the Federal-
ists and the British were plotting the destruction of the American republic.
The motivation of foreign powers to engage in such conspiracies was, how-
ever, only rarely seen as an anarchic desire for the destruction of social order
as such (as in the case of the Illuminati). Far more frequently (as in the case
of Britain and Napoleonic France), foreign powers were accused of planning
the destruction of the United States in order to disqualify the unwelcome
example in democracy that the country was setting to Europe where, in the
eyes of the Americans, people were slaves to autocratic regimes.
Such strategic foreign conspiracies also featured prominently in various
countersubversive scenarios that emerged from the 1820s onward. With the
exception of the rather short-lived fear of a Masonic conspiracy and Jackso-
nian anxieties about the workings of a mysterious Money Power, all major
conspiracy theories of the antebellum period revolved to varying degrees
around exactly such foreign attempts. Between the 1830s and 1850s a con-
siderable number of Americans became convinced that recently arrived
Catholic immigrants as well as Catholics who had come to the United States
before were not loyal to the republic and the Constitution but only to the
pope. The pope and the monarchs of Europe, the conspiracy theorists
believed, had devised a vicious plan to undermine the democratic system of
the United States because they were concerned that the people in their own
countries would soon demand the rights guaranteed to American citizens.15
In similar fashion and exactly at the same time, abolitionists and later
Republican politicians as well were cast by proslavery activists as the (some-
times) knowing or (usually) unwitting participants in a British plot to drive
the country into a civil war. According to these conspiracy theorists, the British
fueled the abolitionist fervor because the internal conflict it would inevitably
lead to would not only disqualify the democratic example America was set-

14 Knox, Conspiracy in American Politics, p. 316.

15 On the anti-Catholic conspiracy theory, cf. also Ray A. Billington, The Protestant
Crusade 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism, Chicago, IL 1964;
John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, rev.
ed., New Brunswick, NJ 2008; David Brion Davis, “Some Themes of Counter-
Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Lit-
erature”, in: The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 47/1960, pp. 205–224; Susan M.
Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Cambridge 2004.

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Introduction 9

ting the world but also destroy the economic threat that the South allegedly
posed for Great Britain.16
Opponents of slavery, however, also harbored a conspiracy theory. Ac-
cording to Republicans like Charles Sumner or Abraham Lincoln, an organ-
ization of slaveholders, the Slave Power, was plotting to nationalize slavery
and possibly to extend it to the white working class. The Slave Power, these
conspiracy theorists believed, had already brought the federal government
under its control. Presidents, congressmen, or Supreme Court judges were
either members of the Slave Power or its powerless puppets. In the accounts
of these countersubversives, then, we no longer encounter a conspiracy
directed against the state but one conducted by it. Apart from this deviation,
however, the Slave Power conspiracy theory has a lot in common with those
conspiracy theories of the time that regarded the state as not yet quite
captured. Even though Lincoln and others contended that the Slave Power
controlled all branches of government, they retained faith in the democratic
process and held that change for the better could be brought about by
elections. In fact, the Republican Party was founded exactly in this spirit.
This confidence in elections distinguishes the opponents of the Slave Power
from post-1960 countersubversives who usually claim that elections are only
staged by those who control the government and thus offer no possibility to
amend things. It aligns anti-Slave power activists with other conspiracy the-
orists of their time, for example with anti-Masons and anti-Catholics who
also founded new parties to further their ends.
But these national, and sometimes even international, conspiracies were
by no means the only ones that haunted the countersubversive imagination
of antebellum America. Christopher Herbert demonstrates in his essay that
the newly founded state of California experienced a series of conspiracy
scares during the 1850s. Anglo-American merchants repeatedly convinced
themselves that secret societies comprising Australian and Mexican immi-
grants, but also politicians, were trying to or had already gained control over
cities and counties. These local conspiracy theories were disconnected from
those that played out on the national stage, but they followed similar patterns
and articulated the same anxieties and convictions. As Herbert puts it,

16 On conspiracy theories revolving around slavery, cf. David Brion Davis, The Slave
Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style, Baton Rouge, LA 1970; Leonard L. Ri-
chards,“Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Riots in Jacksonian America,
New York 1970; Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination,
1780–1860, Baton Rouge, LA 2000; Michael Pfau, The Political Style of Conspiracy:
Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln, East Lansing, MI 2005; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor,
Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War, New York 1995.

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10 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

While arising out of pragmatic interests of a certain group of middle-class Anglo-

American merchants, these conspiracy theories gained widespread traction and
credibility because they confirmed what Anglo-Americans already “knew”: that
the republic depended on free independent (white) men, and that social ills were
symptomatic of challenges to the republic.
After the Civil War the fear of conspiracy diminished considerably on
both the local and the national level for a couple of decades. David Brion
Davis writes that “When compared with the stormy antebellum decades, the
period from 1865 to 1890 exhibits a façade of stability, moderation, and
pragmatic balance”17 in which conspiracist visions did not thrive. Conspiracy
theories, however, gained new prominence during the economic crisis at the
end of the century. For the next couple of decades they did not only follow
the established pattern and blamed internal and external enemies for con-
spiring against the government; in many cases they also revived old enemies.
Turn-of-the-century conspiracy theories targeted Masons, Catholics, bank-
ers, blacks, and various kinds of foreigners. But new villains were also added
to the picture. Due to a wave of immigration from Eastern Europe, anti-
Semitic conspiracy theories emerged for the first time on a larger scale in the
United States. These theories have survived until today, and because of the
genocidal history of the twentieth century they have received a lot of attention.
Unlike in Europe, however, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have, except for
the late nineteenth century, never enjoyed much success in the United States.
They have always appealed to the Ku Klux Klan and other groups on the
extreme right, but overall their importance pales in comparison with conspi-
racist fears of Catholics or Communists.
Concerns about Communists also first emerged in the final quarter of
the nineteenth century, but they only took on a conspiracist garb during
the 1930s when Americans also began to worry about infiltration by Nazis.
With the emergence of the Cold War, then, Communists became the primary
target of American conspiracy theories.18 Whereas during the Red Scare of
1918–1919 the Communists had been cast as foreigners who wanted to in-
stigate open insurrection, anti-Communists now worried about American-
born Communists who secretly plotted America’s doom in allegiance with

17 Davis, Fear, p. 149.

18 On American anti-Communism, cf. Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The
McCarthy Era in Perspective, New York 1990; Michael J. Heale, American Anticommu-
nism: Combating the Enemy Within 1830–1970, Baltimore, MD 1990; Heale,
McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation 1935–1965, Basingstoke
1998; David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy, Oxford
2005.

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Introduction 11

and directed by the Soviet Union. Thus, during the 1950s, American conspi-
racy theories still followed the pattern that had emerged at the turn to the
nineteenth century: anti-Communists fought a conspiracy that united a
treacherous faction of “un-American” traitors on the inside with a foreign
power in an attempt to capture the government.
During the 1960s, however, the thrust of American conspiracy theories
changed significantly. If earlier conspiracy theories were almost exclusively
concerned with plots against the state, and in particular the federal govern-
ment, recent visions of conspiracy have predominantly revolved around
plots by the state, and in particular the federal government.19 No matter
whether they concern the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, the
New World Order, the so-called Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG),
9/11, or the Obama presidency, post-1960 conspiracy theories usually hold
that the federal government has already fallen to the conspirators and that
they have effectively transformed the machinery of the state into an appar-
atus of oppression and exploitation. Although occasionally fueled, as in the
case of Obama and ZOG conspiracy theories, by overt racism and anti-
Semitism, these conspiracy theories invariably articulate a profound distrust
of the forces of globalization, centralized power, and the state of American
democracy in general. At the same time, they often express confidence that
the wrongs can still be righted and that the values of republicanism can be re-
stored through individual human agency.
Conspiracy theories that target the federal government and other state
agencies have left a broad mark on film and fiction. There are innumerable
movies and novels of all kinds that foster and negotiate the fascination with
plots by government officials. In his essay on Larry Beinhart’s two novels
about White House conspiracies – one of which was adapted into the film
Wag the Dog – Sebastian M. Herrmann investigates the cultural work that
these novels, and, by implication, much non-fictional conspiracy theorizing,
perform. Beinhart’s conspiratorial plots, Herrmann argues, are “indicative
of an ‘epistemic panic’, a widespread cultural anxiety about the limitations
of knowledge and the elusiveness of the ‘real’ as a fundamental social cat-
egory”. In similar fashion, Birte Christ also draws on fictional represen-
tations of conspiracy, Oliver Stone’s film J.F.K. (1991) and Sidney Pollack’s
3 Days of the Condor (1975), in order to highlight another important cultural
function of conspiracist visions: the reaffirmation of a traditional, hegem-
onic notion of masculinity that, as the plots of these films show, disem-
powers women and works to restrict them to the private sphere. What is

19 On this shift, cf. Olmsted, Real Enemies, p. 4; and Knight, Conspiracy Culture, p. 58.

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12 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

more, Christ also shows that most conspiracy theory scholarship does not
critique but unwittingly contributes to this project by dismissing female
visions of conspiracy as hysteria and ennobling male ones by considering
them interventions, however misguided and distorted, in the political sphere.
That conspiracy theory scholarship these days regards American conspi-
racy theories as symptomatic expressions of deeper anxieties shows that not
only the parameters of conspiracist visions but also their status has changed
considerably since the 1960s. Whereas conspiracy theories that saw the state
threatened but not yet captured represented a legitimate form of knowledge
that was articulated in farewell addresses and on the Senate floor by some of
the nation’s most revered leaders, those more recent theories that accuse the
government of conspiring against the people constitute what Michael Bar-
kun calls “stigmatized knowledge”.20 Whereas in previous ages, accusations
of conspiracy were an integral part of mainstream discourse, the term
“conspiracy theory” now functions as a powerful instrument of dismissal.
As Peter Knight puts it, “Calling something a conspiracy theory is not infre-
quently enough to end discussion”.21 Accordingly, while visions of conspi-
racies by the state are omnipresent in contemporary American culture, they
have also increasingly moved to the margins of society. One group among
which they thrive is the extreme right where the feeling that the federal gov-
ernment is secretly controlled by Zionists or the New World Order is par-
ticularly pronounced. Aaron Winter’s essay, however, does not focus on
these conspiracy theories directly but explores how the extreme right, before
and after 9/11, tried to forge alliances with Islamists in Arab countries and
why these attempts, which have caused much concern among liberal com-
mentators, have been almost completely unsuccessful.
The attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath are also a powerful reminder that
despite the paradigm shift of the 1960s there are still American conspiracy
theories concerned with plots by – largely – external enemies directed
against the state. While the attacks of September 11, 2001 were no doubt an
actual conspiracy masterminded by Osama bin Laden and carried out by
nineteen Arab men, the George W. Bush administration responded to these
attacks with concocting a conspiracy theory that claimed that al-Qaeda and
Iraq were secretly aligned and plotting America’s doom. As this example
shows, what is considered a conspiracy theory is not only determined by its
internal characteristics but also by the position of those who voice it in pub-
lic discourse. And while conspiracy theories that target the government are

20 Barkun, Culture of Conspiracy, p. 5.

21 Knight, Conspiracy Culture, p. 11.

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Introduction 13

usually labeled “conspiracy theories” and thus disqualified, conspiracy the-

ories that target “enemies” of the state frequently escape this designation.
Two contributions to this volume engage with this official conspiracy the-
orizing, albeit in very different fashion. By way of a close analysis of Dan
Brown’s megaseller The Da Vinci Code (2002) and Ron Howard’s movie adap-
tation (2006), Brian Johnsrud explores the medievalism that permeated both
American culture in general and the Bush administration in particular in the
first years after 9/11, arguing that Brown’s novel confirms the idea that the
crusades are essential to understanding the current conflict between the
West and the Middle East, but that it complicates the view of the Middle East
that has become an integral part of much institutional historiography and of
the Bush administration’s conspiracy theory. By contrast, Alexander Dunst
takes this conspiracy theory as the point of departure for a general critique of
conspiracy theory scholarship. Even the revisionist studies written since the
mid-1990s, he argues, continue to pathologize one form of conspiracy the-
orizing and thus overlook the omnipresence of another form in mainstream
discourse.

2. The Origins of American Conspiracy Theories

“Conspiracy theories are inseparably connected with conspiracies”, German
sociologist Michael Schetsche contends, thereby not only implying that con-
spiracy theories and real conspiracies are often difficult to tell apart but also
that they condition each other.22 Schetsche’s argument is indeed one often
made in conspiracy theory research. Trying to explain why conspiracy the-
ories occur more frequently at certain historical moments than at others and
figure more prominently in some cultures than in others, many scholars –
and for good reasons, as our discussion of Middle Eastern conspiracy the-
ories below will show – point to the existence of real conspiracies. However,
as far as the United States is concerned, it is difficult to explain the lasting
appeal of conspiracist visions in this way. Not only is the history of the
United States, especially when compared to that of Europe or the Middle
East, relatively devoid of real plots; what is more, the conspiracies that did
occur were usually small in scale and only fueled already existing conspiracy
theories, if they had any impact on conspiracy theorizing at all. The two most
prominent plots of the nineteenth century, for example – the attempt of the

22 Michael Schetsche, “Die ergooglete Wirklichkeit: Verschwörungstheorien und das

Internet”, in: Kai Lehmann/Michael Schetsche (eds.), Die Google-Gesellschaft: Vom
digitalen Wandel des Wissens, Bielefeld 2007, pp. 113–120, p. 114.

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14 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

abolitionist John Brown to instigate a slave uprising by staging a raid on

Harper’s Ferry in 1859 and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln – were
both carried out by only a handful of people and merely confirmed the con-
spiracy theories that the defenders of slavery and its opponents had har-
bored for many years.23
Accordingly, if one wants to explain “America’s special relationship to
conspiracy theory”24 one has to look elsewhere. We do not wish to foster no-
tions of American exceptionalism, but we would like to suggest that the
popularity and power of conspiracy theories in American culture from Puri-
tan times to the present can be explained by the longevity and co-presence of
the heritage of Puritanism, the ideology of republicanism, and an epistemo-
logical paradigm that presupposes a direct link between cause and effect and
thus holds that everything that occurs has been intended exactly that way. We
do not contend that these three factors are the only sources of American
conspiracism, but we consider them the most important ones. We are con-
vinced that they explain why conspiracy theories, which were as popular in
France, England, and most other European countries as they were in the
United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have retained
their appeal in America but not in Europe.25
Over the past decades, scholars from different disciplines have demon-
strated the importance of Puritanism for numerous aspects of American
life.26 Many Puritan ideas have been secularized over the centuries and thus
continue to shape American culture and identity until today. For example,
the notion of American exceptionalism has its roots in the Puritans’ self-
understanding as God’s chosen people. Much the same is true for the Ameri-
can propensity for conspiracy theorizing. Displaying the Manichean thinking

23 The perception of real conspiracies was, however, a factor, albeit not the only one,
in bringing about the shift from conspiracy theories that detect plots against the
state to those that are concerned with plots by the state during the 1960s and
1970s. As Kathryn Olmsted puts it, “government officials provided fodder for
conspiracism by using their powers to plot – and to conceal – real conspiracies”
(Real Enemies, p. 234).
24 Olmsted, Real Enemies, p. 3.
25 Within the scope of this introduction it is impossible to explore these three factors
and their complex interplay in detail. For a far more detailed version of the argu-
ment made here, cf. chapter 1 in Butter, Plots, Designs, and Schemes.
26 Cf. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, New Haven, CT 1975;
Tracy Fessenden/Nicholas F. Radel/Magdalena J. Zaborowska (eds.), The Puritan
Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality and National Identity in American Literature,
New York 2001; George McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism, New
Haven, CT 2007.

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Introduction 15

characteristic of conspiracy theorizing, the Puritans saw themselves at the

forefront of the struggle between good and evil, and they were convinced
that all their enemies were secretly aligned. Moreover, they believed that his-
tory unfolded according to a divine plan. Nothing happened by chance but
because it had been predestined by an inscrutable God. Thus, Puritan think-
ing was organized along the parameters that Michael Barkun has identified as
characteristic of all conspiracism: nothing happens by accident, nothing is as
it seems, and everything is connected.27
The major difference between the Puritans’ metaphysical conspiracy the-
ory and later secularized versions is that the Puritans believed that ultimately
God controlled the conspirators. Whereas accounts from the eighteenth
century onward usually do without supernatural actors and regard the
conspirators as those who are pulling the strings, the Puritans held that
God allowed the devil and his minions to torment the Puritans whenever
his chosen people was not living up to his high expectations. They conceived
of their affliction as a corrective punishment that was meant to make them
mend their ways and not to destroy them. Thus, for the Puritans, the detec-
tion of conspiracies was both a cause of concern and a confirmation of their
sense of election and mission. Albeit in a modified form, the same still is true
today. Contemporary conspiracy theorists worry about the plots they reveal,
but the very fact that they have been capable of detecting these plots signals
that they are different. They may not have been elected by God, but they
are elevated from the unsuspecting masses because of their special knowl-
edge and thus have the obligation to fight the conspiracy. Accordingly,
historian Robert Alan Goldberg considers the originally religious and later
nationalized sense of mission the most important source of American con-
spiracism.28
The second major influence on American conspiracy theories has been
the ideology of republicanism, which was an important element of eight-
eenth- and nineteenth-century American political culture and whose impact,
much like Puritanism’s, is still discernible today.29 The prototypical American
fear of political parties, for example, which dominated American politics far
into the nineteenth century and fueled various conspiracy theories, resulted
from this political theory which the American colonists adopted from the

27 Cf. Barkun, Culture of Conspiracy, pp. 3–4.

28 Goldberg, Enemies Within, p. 1.
29 On republicanism, cf. Gordon S.Wood, The Creation of the American Republic,
1776–1787, New York 1972; J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine
Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton, NJ 1975.

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16 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

English Whig party. Unlike liberalism, republicanism conceived of humans

as social beings that formed communities not out of necessity, but because
it was a part of their nature. Accordingly, the proponents of republicanism
demanded that everybody should have the common good in mind at all
times – a principle they saw violated by political parties. As Michael Pfau
puts it, “parties were naturally suspect because they represented only a part
of the people – a faction – that was likely to look to its own good in prefer-
ence to the good of the whole”.30
Parties, however, were only the most obvious and outward manifestation
of a danger that adherents of republicanism worried about in more general
terms: “corruption”. In the ideology of republicanism, corruption figured as
diametrically opposed to the one value the success of a republic hinged on:
“virtue”. Republican ideology postulated a perpetual struggle between vir-
tue and corruption and held that only the former could prevent the rise and
eventual triumph of the internal and external enemies that the latter would
inevitably lead to. In this rather pessimistic view, adherents of republicanism
were confirmed by the study of history. Even more so than their prede-
cessors in Renaissance Italy, whose destinies they had carefully examined,
Americans were aware that “traditionally republics were short-lived, subject
to cyclical decline, and vulnerable to the plottings of internal and external en-
emies”.31 Because of their form of government, their openness when com-
pared with autocratically ruled nations, and the absence of standing armies,
republics were seen as all too quickly destroyed through the conspiracies of
corrupted individuals and groups on the inside and outside.
The fear of plots and schmemes, then, was inscribed into the ideology of
republicanism, and since republicanism was so important for eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century American political culture, conspiracy theories were
widespread, as various scholars have observed. Robert Levine, for example,
writes that “Republican ideology and discourse […] played a crucial role in
perpetuating the fear of conspiracy in early national and antebellum culture”;
and Daniel Walker Howe even speaks of a “conspiracy paradigm” when dis-
cussing republican ideas among the American Whigs, a political party of the
1830s and 1840s.32
Levine’s and Howe’s references to the antebellum period indicate that
republicanism did not, as an earlier generation of scholars had assumed,

30 Pfau, Political Style, p. 41.

31 Levine, Conspiracy and Romance, p. 10.
32 Levine, Conspiracy and Romance, p. 40; Howe, Political Culture, p. 79.

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Introduction 17

rapidly lose in importance at the beginning of the nineteenth century.33 In-

deed, republicanism changed over the course of the nineteenth century but
it remained highly influential until the Civil War after which the fear of party
together with many other elements of republican thought slowly waned.
Republicanism’s basic tenet, however, the conflict between virtue and cor-
ruption, has survived and continues to fuel conspiracy theories until today.
As J. G. A. Pocock, one of the most influential scholars of republicanism, has
convincingly argued, it is still palpable in President Eisenhower’s warnings
against the workings of the “military-industrial complex”, a concept that is
integral to countless contemporary conspiracist visions.34
The final factor in accounting for American culture’s predilection for
conspiracy theories is an epistemological paradigm that emerged in the
eighteenth century and that also remains influential in the United States until
today. This paradigm has been most thoroughly described by Gordon Wood
in his essay “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in
the Eighteenth Century”. As Wood demonstrates, throughout this century,
conspiracy theories produced officially accepted knowledge. The most en-
lightened thinkers of the age had abandoned the idea that history was un-
folding according to a divine plan, but they were not ready yet to accept the
impact of chance, contingency, or of systemic factors. Instead they propa-
gated a mechanistic worldview in which “[a]ll human actions and events
could now be seen scientifically as the products of men’s intentions”.35 As-
suming that “cause and effect were so intimately related that they necessarily
shared the same moral qualities”,36 these thinkers dismissed the possibility
that intentions and results could be more than occasionally at odds. If a
group’s actions constantly produced effects different from those the group
allegedly wanted to produce, one was justified to assume that the group was
hiding their real intentions. Hence, when faced with series of harmful events

33 Other scholars that make a strong case for the survival of republicanism far into
the nineteenth century are Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology
in Revolutionary America, 5th ed., Chapel Hill, NC 1997; Jeffrey Ostler,“The
Rhetoric of Conspiracy and the Formation of Kansas Populism”, in: Agricultural
History, 69/1995, 1, pp. 1–27; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and
the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850, New York 1984; Jean H. Baker,
Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,
Ithaca, NY 1983.
34 Pocock, “Civic Humanism and Its Role in Anglo-American Thought”, in: Politics,
Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History, London 1971, pp. 80–103,
p. 97.
35 Wood, “Conspiracy”, p. 416.
36 Wood, “Conspiracy”, pp. 417–418.

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18 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

whose originators denied all evil intentions, people were compelled to con-
clude that a conspiracy was underway. As Wood puts it: “The belief in plots
was not a symptom of disturbed minds but a rational attempt to explain
human phenomena in terms of human intentions and to maintain moral co-
herence in the affairs of men”.37
This epistemological paradigm proved remarkably resilient in both Europe
and America. Whereas Wood suggests that it disappeared early in the nine-
teenth century, Geoffrey Cubitt (for France) and Ralf Klausnitzer (for Ger-
many in particular and Europe more generally) have demonstrated that it
continued to generate knowledge considered legitimate until the early twen-
tieth century.38 According to Klausnitzer, it only lost its influence in Europe
when the social sciences began to offer systemic explanations for effects hi-
therto ascribed to the hidden intentions of individuals. This, however, might
be exactly the reason why the paradigm retained its hegemonic position
far longer in the United States and why it continues to produce appealing,
albeit by now disqualified, knowledge there until today. After all, resistance
to structural explanations of all kinds is deeply ingrained in American culture
because they would shake one of its central pillars: the belief in the power of
individuals to shape not only their own lives but the course of history. Dur-
ing the 1950s, for instance, many social scientists claimed that brainwashing
was possible because, as Timothy Melley has shown, this assumption allowed
them to discuss systemic effects on individuals without giving up the belief
in a self-contained, autonomous self (which was seen as being manipulated
by an even stronger self, that of the brainwasher).39 Unsurprisingly, therefore,
politicians also still rejected systemic factors. As Senator Joseph McCarthy,
one of America’s most notorious conspiracy theorists of that period, put it,
“History does not just happen. It is made by men – men with faces, and the
only way the course of history can be changed is by getting rid of the specific
individuals who we find are bad for America”.40

37 Wood, “Conspiracy”, p. 429.

38 Whereas Cubitt explicitly rejects Wood’s argument (“Quite simply, this recession
[that Wood postulates] shows very little signs of having happened during the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries” [“Conspiracy Myths”, p. 18]), Ralf Klaus-
nitzer does not refer to Wood at all (cf. Poesie und Konspiration: Beziehungssinn und
Zeichenökonomie von Verschwörungsszenarien in Publizistik, Literatur und Wissenschaft
1750–1850, Berlin 2007). However, focusing on Germany, he discusses the
emergence of the same epistemological paradigm (esp. pp. 66–98) and traces its
repercussions into the twentieth century.
39 Cf. Timothy Melley, “Brainwashed! Conspiracy Theory and Ideology in the Post-
war United States”, in: New German Critique, 35/2008, 1, pp. 145–164.
40 McCarthy qtd. in Olmsted, Real Enemies, p. 107.

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Introduction 19

Since then, of course, even American culture has become more recep-
tive to structural explanations, and naïve insistence on the power of indi-
viduals to shape the course of history is no longer acceptable in scientific
as well as in parts of public discourse. But as the traditional post hoc ergo
propter hoc logic of contemporary conspiracy theories shows, the eight-
eenth-century paradigm discussed here remains attractive. In fact, as
Peter Knight has demonstrated, the idea that individuals can put their in-
tentions into practice without any unwarranted side-effects both informs
and is confirmed by the official (al-Qaeda did it) and unofficial (the gov-
ernment did it) conspiracy theories about 9/11. The two narratives of what
happened that day and who is to be held responsible for it may be diametri-
cally opposed as far as the allocation of guilt is concerned. Structurally,
though, both rely “on a traditional model of highly efficient individual in-
tentional action” and thus affirm “a vague ideological disposition toward
understanding causality and responsibility in terms of pure intentional
agency”.41
Puritanism, republicanism, and the specific epistemology just discussed
can be considered the most important origins of the American propensity
for conspiracy theorizing, especially since these three factors did not exist in
isolation next to each other. On the contrary, the epistemological paradigm,
for example, provided the underpinning for republican fears of conspiracy,
while the fact that the political theory facilitated conspiracist visions surely
stabilized the epistemological paradigm. Moreover, from the eighteenth cen-
tury onward, virtually all non-fictional indictments of conspiracy can be said
to have assumed the form of the “republican jeremiad”, a blend of the jere-
miad, the narrative mode in which the Puritans expressed their fear of de-
clension, and republican concerns about corruption.42 Republican jeremiads
bemoan the present state of society by contrasting it with the glorified time
before the conspiracy began, but they also express the hope that the conspi-
racy can still be foiled if only the people wake up to the danger and begin to
actively resist it. Jedidah Morse’s exposure of the Illuminati plot, Abraham
Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech, Joseph McCarthy’s Wheeling speech,
and the online documentary Loose Change are all republican jeremiads, and
they all assume that individuals can shape history by putting their plans into
practice. Thus, it is the combination of Puritanism, republicanism, and a par-

41 Peter Knight, “Outrageous Conspiracy Theories: Popular and Official Responses

to 9/11 in Germany and the United States”, in: New German Critique, 35/2008, 1,
pp. 165–193, pp. 176, 178.
42 Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, Madison, WI 1978, p. 128.

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20 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

ticular epistemological paradigm that accounts for the continued presence of

conspiracy theories in American culture.

3. The United States and the Middle East

The United States is both a clearly defined geographical unit and a nation
state; the “Middle East”, a term coined by Alfred Thayer Mahan, an American
historian, in 1902, is neither. It comprises a great variety of states and, reach-
ing from the Eastern Mediterranean to the western parts of South Asia, is
characterized by the blurredness of its geographical boundaries. In a certain
sense, therefore, the Middle East only exists from a western point of view.43
Thus, for the scholar of conspiracy theory, speaking of “the Middle East”
only makes sense when talking about American conspiracy theories that im-
agine the region precisely as homogeneous as the term implies, or when one is
very generally concerned with processes of transfer from the “West”, an
equally fuzzy term, to the region. If one is interested, however, in the precise
mechanisms and functions of conspiracy theories within the Middle East,
one needs to look at individual states or specific local contexts. Accordingly,
except for Barbara De Poli and Matthew Gray who seek to establish a general
(historical respectively contemporary) framework, the other six contributions
on the Middle East are dedicated to various states within the region.
What is more, a comparative approach to conspiracy theories in the
United States and the Middle East must take into account the imbalance of
power, in political, economic, academic-scientific, military, and many other
terms, between these two entities. But not only is the United States far more
powerful than the Middle East; it also exerts more power in and on that
region than any other western country. While this may sound like a truism, it
is worth remembering that the predominant role of the United States within
the region was established only relatively recently. While U.S. special envoy
Patrick Hurley noticed as early as May 1943, after visiting Egypt, that Great
Britain would soon “no longer possess within herself the essentials of power
needed to maintain her traditional role as the dominant influence in the

43 On the genesis of the term “Middle East” which in today’s usage roughly en-
compasses Syria, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, the Arabian peninsula, Egypt, Tur-
key, Iran, and possibly also Afghanistan and Pakistan, cf. Roderic Davison and his
fatalistic statement on the obvious unpracticability cum unavoidability of the term
“Middle East”: “Intentional vagueness sometimes has advantage as a tent-like
cover for unformulated possibilities of future action or inaction” (“Where is the
Middle East?”, in: Foreign Affairs, 38/1959–1960, pp. 665–675, p. 675).

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Introduction 21

Middle East area”,44 it was only at the end of the 1970s – and after some in-
termittent steps such as Britain’s renunciation of the Palestine mandate in
1947 and its disastrous involvement in the failed Suez intervention of 1956 –
that the United States, under the impression of the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, finally assumed “the lonely burden of protecting western inter-
ests in the Persian Gulf that Great Britain had shouldered” throughout the
preceding decades.45 The demise of the Soviet Union during the early 1990s
then removed the United States’ lone remaining competitor for influence
in the region. In recent years, since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the
Middle East has become more important than ever for the United States.
It has become not only the central focus of American foreign policy,46 but,
as Melanie McAlister argues, it has come to perform an important function
for America’s self-understanding: faced with its own internal diversity and
race issues, the United States “needed an ‘outside’ to mark its boundaries;
that outside was the Middle East”.47
The imbalance of power between the United States and the Middle East is
mirrored by how they figure in each other’s conspiracy theories. For Ameri-
can conspiracy theories, the Middle East is only of very limited importance.
Of course, after 9/11 the Bush administration promoted the conspiracy the-
ory that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq were secret
allies, but, as Alexander Dunst reminds us in his contribution, this fantasy es-
caped the label “conspiracy theory”. In narratives that are labeled accord-
ingly, the Middle East features occasionally, but even then its inhabitants
are bereft of agency. Many American post-9/11 conspiracy theories revolve

44 Qtd. in Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East
Since 1945, Chapel Hill, NC 2008, p. 119.
45 Little, American Orientalism, p. 147.
46 Cf. also Brian Johnsrud’s article in this volume. Emmanuel Todd argues, very
much in the vein of intellectual French anti-Americanism, that it is the military
decline of the U.S. that obliges it to make the Middle East an object of its aggres-
sion as it is a region known for its military incapabilities (Weltmacht USA: Ein Nach-
ruf, München 2003, p. 172).
47 Melanie McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle
East, 1945–2000, Berkeley, CA 2001, p. 259; she also comments on the import-
ance of the Middle East for the racialized and gendered discourse of nationalist
expansion in the United States (p. 275). What is more, even U.S. political scientists
who sympathize with the basic tenets of U.S. policy in the Middle East will agree
that in many ways not only political Islam, but also “September 11 was the price
[the United States] paid for winning the Cold War and the strategies [it] chose”
(Rachel Bronson, Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia,
Oxford 2006, p. 9).

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22 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

around the Middle East, claiming, for example, that the attacks on the Pen-
tagon and the World Trade Center were orchestrated in order to wage war
in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in these accounts the Arab terrorists, if they
are part of the scenario at all, are merely puppets whose strings are pulled by
Americans. At first sight, Arabs are given a more active role in religious con-
spiracy theories as they circulate among millennial Christians in the United
States.48 Much like the Puritans three hundred years ago, these fundamental-
ist Christians believe in a cosmic struggle between the forces of good and
evil. More precisely, they are convinced that the Anti-Christ will spearhead
a plot against Israel and the United States in which many Middle Eastern
countries will be involved. However, the Anti-Christ is rarely ever imagined
as coming from a Middle Eastern country; reflecting remnants of the Cold
War he is far more frequently imagined to be Russian, for example in Tim
La Haye’s immensely successful Left Behind series. Thus, Arabs tend to be re-
duced to mere pawns in this scenario as well.
By contrast, the United States has been crucial to conspiracy theories
circulating in the Middle East during the last decades. In fact, one might argue
that it is amply proven – for example, by many contributions to this volume –
that one cannot write a history of U.S.-Middle Eastern relations without tak-
ing conspiracy theories into account. As we discuss in detail below, the real
and alleged plots of the United States are one of the most important reasons
why conspiracy theories are so prominent in the region. Yet, before we delve
deeper into Middle Eastern conspiracy theories it must be stressed that, just
as there must be histories of the United States in which conspiracy theories
are merely a footnote, there must be histories of U.S.-Middle Eastern relations
and the Middle East itself that pay no heed to conspiracy theories.49 This is
not the right place to address in detail the question of Orientalism but we
should keep in mind Said’s remark that Orientalism can be an academic dis-
cipline, a binary way of thinking that essentializes “the West” and “the East”,
and a medium of control and dominance.50 Since conspiracy theories in the
Middle East reflect the serious imbalance of power between the United States
and the Middle East, speaking about their relationship in terms of conspi-

48 For an extended discussion of metaphysical New World Order conspiracy the-

ories, cf. Barkun, Culture of Conspiracy, pp. 39–64.
49 A number of recent works prove that this is well possible. Cf., for example, Rashid
Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle
East, London 2004; Ussama Samir Makdisi, Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of
U.S.-Arab Relations: 1820–2003, New York 2010.
50 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York 1978, p. 2.

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Introduction 23

racy theory alone runs the danger of contributing to the cementation of this
hierarchy. The same is true, however, for touching on Middle Eastern con-
spiracy theories in passing only or ignoring them altogether, which is why we
turn to them now.

4. The Origins of Middle Eastern Conspiracy Theories

If one believes Daniel Pipes, whose study The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears
of Conspiracy was until recently the only monograph available in English on
the subject, the matter is very simple indeed. For Pipes, Middle Eastern con-
spiracy theories are not the “result of political structures, which in turn are
the result of historical impacts, the effects of external dynamics, state-society
relations, and political culture”, as Matthew Gray has recently argued,51 but
the result of regional idiosyncrasies, originating from “Zoroastrian, Mani-
chean, and Mazdak sources” and a deep-seated psychological disorder, that
is, paranoia.52 Somewhat contradictorily, though, Pipes also argues that these
conspiracy theories are at the same time strategically deployed: they function
as a perilous weapon to attack the state of Israel. In order to prove this, Pipes
repeatedly unfolds a panorama of ill-founded Middle Eastern anxieties
about an alleged plan to conquer large parts of the Middle East in order to
establish a “Greater Israel”.53
As many critical commentators have observed, Pipes, a prominent
spokesman of the neo-conservative camp in the U.S., known amongst other
as founder of the inquisition-minded institution Campus Watch, does so for
strategic reasons himself. Driven by the desire to disqualify any justified
objections against Israel’s policies, he focuses only on exaggerated and ex-
tremely vicious Arab positions vis-à-vis Israel, thereby both simplifying and
distorting the complex Middle Eastern political landscape, and laying a smoke-
screen over the real reasons of the Israel-Arab conflict. In fact, while Pipes
draws on an astounding variety of sources (including many newspapers in
Arabic language) and thus presents conclusive evidence of the Middle East-
erners’ proneness to conspiracy theorizing, he comes dangerously close to
the techniques of conspiracism himself in that he uses a continuous time
frame, a universalizing geographical perspective, and assumes the ubiquity
of conspiracism. At one point, for example, he deals with Egypt in the years

51 Gray, Conspiracy Theories, p. 8.

52 Pipes, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy, Basingstoke 1996,
p. 292.
53 Cf., for example, Pipes, Hidden Hand, pp. 49, 68–69.

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24 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

1952, 1981 and 1990, with Iran in the years 1979 and 1989, and finally with
Jerusalem in 1929 and 1969 on one page.54
Pipes is right in one respect, though: Israel and the Palestine question are
of immediate relevance to the history and politics of the Middle East and in
particular to U.S.-Middle Eastern relations, and therefore also to the forms
and functions of conspiracy theories in the region. Pro-Israeli voices, anti-
Zionists and the (larger or smaller) rest may not be able to agree on much, but
they would all agree that “No matter how one turns the kaleidoscope of U.S.-
Arab relations, one always returns, or is returned to, the picture of Palestine”.55
As a consequence, much Middle Eastern conspiracy theorizing is connected
to the heated debates about Israel’s legitimacy. But, first, the matter is far
more complex than Pipes insinuates; and, second, there are other factors
that need to be taken into account if one wants to understand the promi-
nence of conspiracy theories in the Middle East.
Although the history of conspiracy theories in the Middle East prior to
the second half of the twentieth century has yet to be written, it is clear that
such theories circulated in the region before the foundation of the state of
Israel in 1948. Yet, just as with anti-Semitism and Arab nationalism more
generally, conspiracy theories became virulent and powerful only with the
rise of the Zionist-Palestinian struggle.56 Barbara De Poli demonstrates in
her contribution to this volume that conspiracy theories were absorbed in

54 Cf. Pipes, Hidden Hand, p. 14. Cf. Aaron Winter’s piece in this volume for a similar
assessment of this point. It also has to be noted that Pipes’ pro-Zionism has not
remained uncontested. It finds its counterpart in the academic world in scholars
such as John Esposito who tend to idealize or at least belittle militant Islam.
As Henry Munson pointedly puts it: “Reading Pipes, one could easily believe that
Muslim hostility toward Israel is simply a matter of anti-Semitism. Reading
Esposito, one would never know that anti-Semitism is indeed a serious problem in
the Islamic world” (“Between Pipes and Esposito”, in: ISIM [International Institute
for the Study of Islam in the Modern World ] Newsletter, 10/2002, p. 8.)
55 Makdisi, Faith Misplaced, p. 5.
56 For a general outline of the trajectory of anti-Semitism in the twentieth-century
Middle East and a rich bibliography on the topic, cf. Gudrun Krämer, “Antisemit-
ism in the Muslim World: A Critical Review”, in: Die Welt des Islams: International
Journal of the Study of Modern Islam, 46/2006, pp. 243–276. Cf. also Klaus Faber et al.
(eds.), Neu-alter Judenhass: Antisemitismus, arabisch-israelischer Konflikt und europäische
Politik, Berlin 2006; Meir Litvak/Esther Webman, From Empathy to Denial: Arab
Responses to the Holocaust, New York 2009. Recent debates in the United States have
stressed allegedly new “Islamofascists”. Cf., for example, the polemical work
by Norman Podhoretz, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, New
York 2007.

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Introduction 25

Arabic-speaking countries only slowly, but then with a sudden outburst of

productivity from the 1940s onwards. De Poli identifies two main routes of
the Arab world’s appropriation of “western” conspiracy theories: on the one
hand, anti-Masonic literature that traveled to Arab lands in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, and, on the other hand, full-blown anti-Semit-
ism injected by German Nazi propaganda from the 1920s onward. De Poli
shows that both anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic writings were initially received
only at the margins of society, but with the Jewish-Arab war and the procla-
mation of the state of Israel both became closely linked and have received
much attention from the Arab media ever since. Especially the notorious
Protocols of the Elders of Zion have since the 1950s become the centerpiece of
conspiracy theorizing in the Arab world.
It would be wrong to say, though, that the Arab world thus still clings to a
conspiracy theory that has, thankfully, long lost its mainstream appeal in Eu-
rope and North America. For once, as De Poli also shows, Arab conspiracy
discourse constitutes a unique blend of anti-Semitism and anti-Masonism
that does not only rely on European texts such as the Protocols but that has, in
recent decades, been affirmed and embellished by countless Arab texts,
many of them openly fictional, others allegedly factual. Moreover, Middle
Eastern anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have different targets and different
motivations than the ones that once thrived in Europe and North America
and continue to exist there on the margins of society. Matthew Gray points
out in his contribution that whereas anti-Semitic arguments in the United
States these days focus on Jewish banking, finance, and informal power,
Middle Eastern anti-Semitic conspiracy theories concentrate very specifi-
cally on Israel’s actions and intentions.
However, even though the Israeli-Palestinian question as the central pivot
of U.S.-Middle Eastern relations for now and for the foreseeable future is an
important engine of conspiracist visions in the regions, there are others
forces driving such visions that one needs to take into account as well. To
begin with, there are the strategic interests of the United States, as well as of
other western nations, in the region – for example, in a steady and cheap oil
supply – that exist independently of the alliance with Israel and are at times
even at odds with it. To protect these interests, the United States in particular
launched a couple of clandestine operations in the region in the years follow-
ing World War II, the most notorious of them being the CIA-led coup d’état
of 1953 that removed Iran’s prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq from
power. Unlike in the United States where, as we have argued, the impact of
real plots on conspiracy theories has been negligible, the impact of such “real
conspiracies” on the Middle Eastern predilection for conspiracy theorizing

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26 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

cannot be overestimated.57 Next to the conflict with Israel, it is the single

most important source of Middle Eastern conspiracism. The occurrence
of actual plots in the past nourishes the belief in conspiracies, as it fosters the
tendency to interpret convoluted and undesired political circumstances in
conspiratorial terms and makes the public receptive to the “exposure” of
new schemes by well-established villains. In this situation, political leaders
are naturally tempted to articulate conspiracy theories, whether they believe
in them themselves or not.
The case of Iran, a country where conspiracy theories are propagated on a
large scale by the state, illustrates well both the significance of past plots and
the strategic deployment of conspiracist discourse in the present. Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad may refer to Zionism as a major evil in the world, but he
can only do this so frequently because the history of Iran, and especially the
public memory of not only the coup of 1953 but also the coups of 1908
and 1921, which were also exerted under strong foreign influence, provides a
fertile ground for a public mobilization of this kind. Schirin Fathi, in her
contribution to this volume, shows that conspiracy theories have been part
of Iranian nationalism even before the time of the Shah. Refuting the idea
that Iran is “addicted” to conspiracy theories because of the Shia’s marginal-
ization and persecution by the Sunni majority in early Islamic history,58 she
singles out the CIA’s Operation Ajax of 1953, which has left deep scars in
collective memory, as the major influence on Iranian conspiracism.
But Iran is not only the country in the region where conspiracy theories
are handled as an important tool of political mobilization. The Lebanese
Hizbollah is another striking example. Hizbollah, a radical military-political
Shia movement that came into being in the early 1980s in southern Lebanon
as a resistance movement against Israeli occupation, defined itself from
the start as a close ally of Iran and adopted its grand theories of conspiracy.
However, as Stephan Schmid demonstrates in his essay, in particular from

57 The United States also have to shoulder the historical burden of French and British
imperialism, in particular the secret Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916 in which Great
Britain and France defined their respective spheres of imperialist control. Bassam
Tibi argues (not really convincing, though) that – when the document was diclosed
by the Soviets in 1917 – the public outrage in the Middle East was the starting
point for conspiracism in the region (Die Verschwörung: Das Trauma arabischer Politik,
Hamburg 1993, p. 3).
58 This argument is implied by Sadik J. al-Azm who writes that “power was in fact
usurped from Imamu Ali and his heirs through a series of dirty conspiracies”
(“Orientalism and Conspiracy”, in: Graf/Fathi/Paul (eds.), Orientalism and Conspi-
racy, p. 18).

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Introduction 27

the 1990s onwards, Hizbollah has put less emphasis on grand theories in the
Iranian fashion and come to use “operational” conspiracy theories, or, as he
puts it, theories that are “not the reflection of a bizarre, irrational, and in-
transigent anti-western and anti-Zionist outlook, but a very rational medium
of propaganda and political maneuvering adopted by the Party of God in
the course of its changing role in the domestic and regional political arena”.
Whereas all of Hizbollah’s conspiracy theories excoriate Israel, they are pri-
marily addressed at the internal public and meant to strengthen Hizbollah’s
political position within Lebanon and its political landscape.
Lebanon is also the subject of André G. Sleiman’s essay, which delves deeply
into the intricacies of the country’s civil war (1975–1990) and investigates how
international power politics, which regarded Lebanon as a theater for proxy
wars in the Middle East and beyond, were perceived from different Lebanese
perspectives and interpreted in conspiracist fashion. Henry Kissinger, U.S.
Secretary of State in the years 1973–1977, was identified by major Lebanese
politicians, of both Christian and Muslim denomination, as a vile manipulator.
A widespread, but unsubstantiated persuasion existed in Lebanon according
to which Kissinger had not only triggered the civil war but intended to destroy
the Lebanese model of Muslim-Christian conviviality by dividing Lebanon
into two confessional states. While the Christian narrative centers on the fatal
consequences of a Christian exodus from Lebanon, the Muslim one stresses
the potential advantages for Israel’s policy. Such a scheme, thus ran the convic-
tion of many in Lebanon, was to stabilize Israel’s position in the Middle East as
its sectarian identity would then have seemed less peculiar.
Besides demonstrating how the Israeli question and the experience of
real plots interact in fueling conspiracy theories in the region, these three
examples show that the conspiracist visions circulating throughout the
Middle East are far from simplistic or uniform, as Pipes would have it. They
are highly complex projections that are at times strategically deployed and at
others naively believed, but that are invariably adapted to the specificities of
the national, and at times even local, contexts from which they emerge and
for which they perform various kinds of cultural work. It is therefore of the
utmost importance to proceed with due caution when generalizing about the
forms and functions of Middle Eastern conspiracy theories.

5. The Forms and Functions of Middle Eastern Conspiracy Theories

Generalizing about conspiracy theories in the Middle East, one could also
assume, is so difficult because the region’s conspiracist visions have been
far less well researched than those of the United States. We may not know

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28 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

enough about American conspiracism yet, but we know far more about it
than about the Middle Eastern variant. Moreover, whereas scholars from dif-
ferent disciplines have over the past decades developed theories and models
to account for and describe American conspiracy theories, no such models
exist for the Middle Eastern context. As Matthew Gray argues in his article,
scholars can draw on concepts developed for the United States (and other
western countries) and originally applied to cases of conspiracism there, and
he encourages them to do so because it will prevent them from falling into
the trap of essentializing Middle Eastern conspiracy theories. Gray thus sees
“potential for […] the transferability and transposability of explanations for
conspiracy theories across any cultures, not least of all the U.S. and the
Middle East”. Nevertheless, he also sees “strict limitations” for such
transfers, as they run the danger of disregarding local specificities. What is
needed, one might therefore conclude, is more research that draws on de-
tailed case studies to theorize Middle Eastern conspiracism in general.
However, from our vantage point, the opposite is the case. The more we
know about specific Middle Eastern conspiracy theories, their structures,
targets, and audiences, the more difficult it becomes to identify character-
istics shared by all of them. Apart from the observations that conspiracy the-
ories are not native to the Middle East, but that this way of making sense of
the world has traveled there from Europe and has then been adapted to re-
gional circumstances, and that Middle Eastern conspiracy theories reflect
and to a certain extent cement the imbalance of power between the United
States (and “the West” in general) and the region, no generalizations are pos-
sible. The essays on the Middle East collected in the volume at hand chal-
lenge, rather than confirm existing generalizations. Thus, instead of defining
general characteristics that do not stand closer scrutiny, we wish to stress
four features that, from our current position, are integral to many, but not to
all Middle Eastern conspiracy theories, and we discuss how the case studies
presented here complicate them.
First, Middle Eastern conspiracy theories, as Ervand Abrahamian observed
almost twenty years ago, treat interior “politics as a puppet show in which
foreign powers control the marionettes – the local politicians – by invisible
strings”.59 Although Abrahamian referred only to Iran, his observation is
certainly true for many, maybe even for most conspiracy theories circulating
in the region. No matter whom or what the conspiracy theory focuses on,

59 Ervand Abrahamian, “The Paranoid Style in Iranian Politics”, in: Abrahamian

(ed.), Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic, Berkeley, CA 1993, pp. 111–131,
p. 111.

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Introduction 29

the American government, or at least parts of it, or “the West” more gen-
erally is almost always lurking somewhere in the background and usually cast
as the mastermind behind the plot. However, not all conspiracy theories fol-
low this pattern, as Annika Rabo and Christoph Herzog show in their con-
tributions to the volume. Rabo demonstrates that people in Syria share con-
spiracy narratives that articulate dissatisfaction with the malfunctioning of
the state and that blame corruption among Syrian politicians, rather than the
schemes of foreign powers. Christoph Herzog shows that despite Turkey’s
strong democratic record and viable press, conspiracy theories abound in
that country. They revolve not only around “outward forces”, but also en-
gage with the “deep state” – a concept that relates to power groups, particu-
larly in the adminstration and the military, accused of steering state and so-
ciety according to their allegedly privileged understanding of what Turkey is
meant to be. Drawing on the work of the Turkish writer and intellectual Erol
Mütercimler, Herzog admits that, of course, Turkish conspiracy theories also
occasionally accuse foreign forces of meddling with Turkey’s fate. But, for
one, Herzog argues that Mütercimler’s conspiracist master narrative of “the
West against Turkey” follows classical anti-imperialist lines of argumentation
and thus could be regarded as “essentially a nationalist vulgarization that is
ultimately derived from the Marxist theoretical debate on imperialism and
reinforced by the popularization of the Huntington thesis of the clash of
civilizations”. Moreover, even in Mütercimler’s account, not all Turkish
nationals are merely pawns; some of them are actors pursuing goals of their
own.
Second, Matthew Gray has recently argued, and indeed does so in this vol-
ume, too, that a distinguishing feature of conspiracism in the Middle East is
that conspiracy theories serve as a powerful tool of political mobilization for
the state or powerful state-like organizations. Faced with a continuously
diminishing legitimacy, Gray suggests, “[states] have adopted their own con-
spiracism also as a tool of state symbolism, legitimacy-building and con-
trol”.60 Indeed, Middle Eastern state machines frequently deploy conspiracy
theories for political ends, and the invectives of Gaddafi, Assad, or Ahma-
dinejad, who habitually blame(d) foreign agents for causing internal unrest,
are often reported on by the media in Europe and North America. However,
Gray’s valid observation has to be modified in two respects. As Alexander
Dunst reminds us in his essay, the Bush government, continuing a long-
standing American political tradition, also formulated a conspiracy theory
when it suggested that Iraq and al-Qaeda were secretly plotting against the

60 Gray, Conspiracy Theories, p. 12; also cf. chapter 5 in this volume, pp. 272–289.

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30 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

United States. He suggests that the only difference between the Bush admin-
istration’s conspiracist vision and the visions of Middle Eastern leaders was
that the former was not labeled “conspiracy theory” whereas the latter were.
Accordingly, he concludes that, as in the Middle East, conspiracy rhetoric
“has been part of mainstream politics from its beginnings, and continues to
be so today”. Moreover, conspiracy theories articulated by the state to main-
tain control are not always as successful as western news reporting tends to
imply. As Schirin Fathi shows, state conspiracy propaganda in Iran may have
strongly increased under the Ahmadinejad regime, but there are indicators
that it has at the same time lost much of its appeal among the Iranian public,
in other words, that it falls on deaf ears.
Third, and closely related to the previous point, one might think that un-
like in the western world, conspiracy theorizing is not a fringe phenomenon
in the Middle East, but that it permeates society on all levels and indepen-
dent of affiliation with political camps. Again, there is much to be said in
favor of this observation, since Middle Eastern conspiracy theories are often
uncritically believed not only by the disempowered but also by political and
cultural elites. Yet, as we pointed out above, at least as far as the United States
is concerned, the delegitimization of the knowledge produced by conspiracy
theorizing is a fairly recent development. Until the 1950s, American conspi-
racy theories, too, permeated all levels of society and all political camps, and
as the example of the Bush administration shows, this has not completely
changed until today, the only difference being that some visions do and
others do not escape the derogatory label “conspiracy theory”. Moreover,
the observation that in the Middle East conspiracy theories are ubiquitous
often implies the assessment that Middle Easterners cast themselves invari-
ably as the passive and helpless victims of foreign plots. This, however, is not
necessarily the case. As Annika Rabo’s contribution makes clear, Middle
Eastern conspiracy theories do not only occasionally revolve around do-
mestic villains. Rabo’s analysis of “conspiracy talk” in Syria, that is, everyday
talk of ordinary Syrians about conspiracies by powerful others, shows that
such talk is often quite prosaic and frequently deals with tangible threats. In
fact, many people, especially educated males, tend to invent new elements
and bring the conspiracy narratives into a direct and meaningful relationship
with their personal lives as a form of entertainment, thus giving in to what
Mark Fenster, for the American context, has described as the “conspiracy
rush”, as playful engagement with an alleged plot as if it was real.61 What is

61 Fenster, Conspiracy Theories, p. 156.

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Introduction 31

more, when people say that “It has all been planned” they stress not only
their powerlessness vis-à-vis “the system” or “the authorities” but combine
it with confessions of intense self-flagellation. “Blaming ‘us’ is the flip side
of blaming ‘them’”, Rabo concludes, and so her study confirms that conspi-
racy theories indeed permeate society, but in a fundamentally different way
than it is generally assumed.
Fourth, and finally, it has been argued that whereas western conspiracy
theories from the eighteenth century onward have been an epiphenomenon
of secularization, that indeed conspiracy theories emerged in their modern
form only because of the secularizing force of the Enlightenment, Middle
Eastern conspiracy theories are different in that they are metaphysical con-
spiracy theories because of their connection to political Islam. While it is
true that political Islam, thriving since the 1970s, has taken up conspiracy
theorizing and made it even more pervasive in the public realm, the matter is,
once again, more complex. To begin with, as the example of fundamentalist
Christians in the United States mentioned above indicates, religious conspi-
racy theories continue to exist in the western world as well. In addition,
political Islam, roughly defined as an ideology which strives to base politics
on the premises and prescriptions of the Islamic religion, emerged in the
nineteenth century. Thus, there is no natural link between political Islam and
conspiracy theorizing, as the latter became part of the former’s agenda only
recently. Moreover, political Islam must be understood as an attempt of the
Muslim world to come to terms with the challenges of modernity. “Islam”,
whatever it may mean to the individual person, is thus conceived by Muslims
as an essential part of the Muslim heritage and identity. Accordingly, “politi-
cal Islam”, far from corroborating a case of Islamic exceptionalism, is intrin-
sic to the Muslim experience of a secularizing world. Much of Islamic ideo-
logy today is nothing else but an “islamicizing” discourse that provides a
religious garb for secular themes. Finally, there is no compulsory link be-
tween political Islam and conspiray theories. Türkay Nefes’ essay on the
Dönme shows that the mainstream Islamic Justice and Development Party
(AKP), in power in Turkey since 2002, explicitly distances itself from certain
conspiracy theories. Nefes describes how the very small crypto-religious
group of the Dönme (allegedly pretending to be Muslims, but practicing a par-
ticular version of Judaism inside the group) have, because of their religious
and cultural liminality, been regarded as potentially disloyal to the Turkish
“nation-state” since the 1920s and have become a central element in Turkish
conspiracy theories. Interviews that Nefes led with important represen-
tatives of major political parties corroborate that conspiracy theories revol-
ving around the Dönme are propagated by radical parties of nationalist

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32 Michael Butter and Maurus Reinkowski

(National Action Party, MHP) or Islamist (Felicity Party, SP) leanings, where-
as the AKP has moved away from such interpretations.62
Middle Eastern conspiracy theories, then, are publicly acceptable forms
of interpreting political, economic, and social contexts within the region and
in its relation to the world beyond. They are containers or vehicles for spe-
cific arguments and specific anxieties, and they help to arouse the feeling of a
commonly shared destiny. Contrary to common assumptions, they do not
automatically render Middle Easterners the passive victims of foreign plots
but also imbue them with agency. And as everywhere else, Middle Eastern
conspiracy theories must be taken seriously and have to be studied closely
because they often “address real structural inequities, albeit ideologically,
and they may well constitute a response, albeit in a simplistic and decidedly
unpragmatic form, to an unjust political order, a barren or dysfunctional civil
society, and/or an exploitative economic system”.63 This is not to say that
conspiracy theories in the Middle East, as well as elsewhere, are not at times
vicious and dangerous. The problematic role that conspiracy theories, par-
ticularly in their many anti-Semitic variations, play in Middle Eastern so-
cieties is not to be belittled. The same, however, is true for the United States
where the media and large parts of the public accepted and helped promote
the Bush administration’s “official” conspiracy theory about Iraq in 2002
and 2003. But that conspiracy theories at times have fatal consequences is
one more reason why they have to be taken seriously by academics.

62 This is, of course not to deny that the conspiracy theories promoted by radicalized
Islam are often of the especially vicious and anti-Semitic kind. The major pro-
ducer and exporter of “classical” crude anti-Semitic conspiracy theories is Saudi
Arabia and its role in this regard would have deserved closer scrutiny.
63 Fenster, Conspiracy Theories, p. 90.

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