Category: Morgue

The price tag of alliance with the US

Dawn – Editorial
August 26, 2005

IN HIS Independence Day message President Pervez Musharraf reiterated his vow to defeat terrorists and extremists. He took that vow after the United States began its war against “Islamic terrorism.” On July 18 Benazir Bhutto accused him again of not “doing enough to combat terrorism.” The message: She can do the job better.

Never in Pakistan’s history has its military and political leadership competed so openly for an American mandate to rule Pakistan. Never has Pakistan identified so completely with an American agenda that rejects Pakistan’s key values and threatens to undermine its integrity.

Today’s Pakistani campaign to combat Muslim terrorism reminds me of the days Muslim youth fought Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan and Indian forces in Indian-held Kashmir. We called them mujahideen and bowed our heads when we ran into them or heard of their martyrdom.

A peace process is underway in Kashmir, and one hopes the Kashmiris’ nightmare will someday be over. Many Afghans think they can’t do much about their president’s American tutelage or about the American troops and bases on their soil. But there are youth in Kashmir and Afghanistan who believe they should keep the pressure on the occupation forces, and many Pakistanis support them.

Americans call them terrorists, as they do in case of Muslim freedom fighters everywhere else. The delegitimization of Muslim struggle for rights and freedom is an interesting development, which was spotlighted by an American bureaucrat.

John R. Bolton, then US deputy secretary of state (now UN ambassador), was briefing journalists and went at a tangent about Iran’s complicity with the Lebanon’s “Hezbollah terrorists.” I mentioned that Hezbollah had expelled Israeli troops from southern Lebanon in the manner “Minutemen” guerrillas chased British colonial troops in Massachusetts.

“How would you define terrorism?” I asked. The neoconservative’s eyes blazed as he looked at me. “I know a terrorist,” he growled, “when I see one.”

America doesn’t bother to define terrorists. It decides who’s one and just goes after him. Arabs resisting Israeli occupation of their lands have long been called terrorists by Americans. A more discriminating attitude prevailed awhile towards people fighting occupation forces in other parts of the world. In the 1980s, at the Washington Times news desk, I would be editing a dispatch from Peshawar about “mujahideen” shooting stinger missiles at Soviet troops. Later that evening I would receive another story from Jerusalem about Palestinian “terrorists” attacking Israeli troops. We called Kashmiri, Sikh, Tamil, Kurdish and East Timorese guerrillas “rebels,” “insurgents,” “militants,” or “fighters,” but not “terrorists.” The US government hadn’t taken positions on many of those insurgencies, and we believed journalistic ethics didn’t permit making value judgments on their struggles (except in the Palestinian case).

The end of the Cold War gradually changed the yardsticks of values of American elites, including most media managers, as America emerged as the sole superpower. In 1992 a group of mostly Jewish neoconservatives conceived a grand mission to preserve America’s sole-superpower status. They got the then Defence Secretary Dick Cheney to approve of it. After much preparation, the Project New America Century (PNAC) was launched in 1997 and became the foreign policy guide for this administration. The core PNAC goal is to maintain US global domination by preventing any nation or ideology from “challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” China and Islam are viewed as the main obstacles to that mission.

For the neocons, 9/11 confirmed the prognosis about the Islamic threat, and they viewed it as an opportunity to eliminate that threat. They think Muslim anti-Americanism stems from an “ideology,” and Wahhabi and Deobandi madressahs and “Islamist” political organizations are spreading it. Pakistani madressahs are particularly suspect because many of them follow Deobandi curricula.

The neocons viewed Iran and Iraq as the states most hostile to their Middle Eastern agenda and subsequently masterminded the Iraq war, but they believe that the real challenge to their mission comes from non-state Muslim groups from around the world. To work people up against these groups, they gave them a blood-curling name: “Islamic terrorists.” Because “Islamic terrorism” calls for a global war, America needed allies worldwide. Calls went out to nations of the world to decide “whether you are with us or with the terrorists.” Among the first to come aboard were countries facing Muslim insurgencies: India, China, Russia and the Philippines.

As the price of their collaboration, the United States slapped the “terrorist” label on Kashmiri, Chechen, Uighur and Abu Sayaf guerrillas. Muslim monarchies and autocracies such as in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria and Morocco, which are facing domestic challenge to their repressive rule, also jumped on the bandwagon and got America to designate their dissidents as “terrorists.”

Pakistan is important for America’s global anti-terrorist and strategic agenda for two broad reasons. First, its proximity to Afghanistan, its madressahs and its youth with Islamic fervour supposedly make it a hub of international “terror infrastructure.” Second, Pakistan’s location makes it attractive for the US strategic planning. The PNAC mission calls for the US military presence in the oil-rich Gulf and Caspian Sea basin. Pakistan is at the junction of both, and its importance has increased with the Iraq disaster and budding Russo-Chinese alliance.

The Iraqi mayhem has unsettled US plans to make that country the bastion of American military power in the Middle East. Meanwhile, China and Russia, operating through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, are poised to challenge US bases in their neighborhoods. They already have got Uzbekistan to ask Washington to fold up its Karshi-Khanabad airbase.

Useful as Pakistan is to America’s strategic interests, its political fluidity is of concern to American policy planners. Attempts on Musharraf’s life has heightened those concerns, which can be allayed by his partnership with Benazir. In order not to antagonize the Pakistani president, they’ve kept Benazir at arm’s length but know she has embraced their agenda. Two weeks after 9/11 she wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal citing her clashes with “many of these people, including Osama bin Laden” and her crackdown on “their madressahs that turned children into fanatics and criminals.”

During her frequent US visits she has blasted Muslim terrorism and applauded Bush for overthrowing Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. One interesting refrain in her statements: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” The emphasis obviously is on “all your eggs,” as she knows that the United States, despite its rhetoric about democracy, wouldn’t want her as the substitute for its ties to the Pakistani military. The Pakistan Muslim League being divided, Americans expect the Pakistan People’s Party to win the 2007 elections handily. And Benazir knows that electoral victory in Pakistan doesn’t guarantee getting or keeping the prime minister’s job; American blessings will.

A Musharraf-Bhutto partnership could make Pakistan the kind of dependent ally of the United States it never was. Pakistan has historically been schizophrenic about American tutelage. Washington was always able to lure Pakistan’s military and bureaucratic brass with aid and other favours, but its political leadership usually held out.

The schizophrenia began in 1953 when the Eisenhower administration offered Pakistan a package of military aid in return for its joining an anti-Communist alliance. The alliance wouldn’t commit America to defending Pakistan against foreign (read Indian) aggression. Gen. Ayub Khan, the commander-in-chief, and Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad, a former bureaucrat, jumped at the offer. Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin didn’t “see much in it for Pakistan” and decided to sit on it. One afternoon Nazimuddin was summoned to the governor-general’s house and was “pleasantly surprised” to see Ayub Khan in a portico. Minutes later the prime minister was fired by Ghulam Muhammad and soon afterward-replaced, unsurprisingly, by Mohammad Ali (Bogra), Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington.

Nazimuddin didn’t challenge his unconstitutional dismissal. He was warned, he told visiting East Pakistan Chief Minister Nurul Amin that such a “foolish step” would trigger martial law. Nazimuddin had played a major role in the Muslim League’s historic victory in the 1946 elections in Bengal that facilitated the creation of Pakistan. Martial law and regional feud, he explained to Nurul Amin, could tempt India to wreck “the infant state.”

The last of this breed was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who resisted relentless American pressure to abandon Pakistan’s nuclear programme and, according to Benazir, paid for it with his life. In her autobiography, she writes that then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had warned of making her father “a horrible example” for defiance of America. A year later, she adds, the CIA conspired with Gen Ziaul Haq to have him overthrown. In any case, Z.A. Bhutto ended the era in which America coddled Pakistan’s military and military-backed dictators while democratic forces were held at bay.

If Pakistan continues to pursue the American agenda, with or without a Musharraf-Bhutto partnership, it could pay a price for it. Already, Musharraf’s support for the Afghanistan war, campaign against Islamic institutions, etc., have spawned regionalism in Pakistan.

Have a moderate Islamist over for coffee

The Daily Star – Lebanon
August 26, 2005

My wife was griping about having to pay $2.58 a gallon to fill up her gas tank. The significance of her complaint began to sink in when I heard about the rocket attack against U.S. warships at Jordan’s Aqaba port and then received a phone call from a friend in Amman. Munim Nasr had encountered several Saudi jihadis on their way to Iraq. They told him that Iraq would be their “second victory over the Crusaders.” “Second after the Crusades?” I asked.

 “No,” he replied, “after the American [military] pullout from Saudi Arabia” in April 2003. Osama bin Laden had cited the presence of U.S. troops in “the land of Mohammad” as the first of several reasons behind the attacks of September 11, 2001.

These Saudis bragged that “terror is winning the global war on terror,” and cited Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza as more proof of their success. They said that after Iraq they would go after American troops and bases in Bahrain and Qatar and demand elections throughout the Persian Gulf. Democracy would bring “Islam to power” there as it has in Iraq.

Last week, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Arab Islamist party, called on Egyptians to participate in Egypt’s upcoming presidential election. The Middle East is facing an Islamist tsunami, which will take time to recede. Nothing fuels this wave more powerfully than foreign intervention or domination. It began in the Muslim world during the colonial era but tapered off under mostly secular post-colonial governments. Now it’s rising again, partly because many Muslims believe they’re confronting American and Israeli “hegemony.”

In May 1995, I bumped into a closed-door meeting of Arab youths at Amman’s Amra Hotel. The 30 or so members of the “Historical Society” came from several countries, and according to a participant they discussed what to do about “American hegemony” in the Arab world. One irate delegate proposed “burn[ing] the oil wells.” In October 1991, when a Desert Storm T-shirt still hung at a boutique window in Jeddah’s Mahmal shopping mall, three Saudi college students told me that the Americans needed to be expelled from the Middle East, otherwise, they would not be able to get rid of their own “corrupt and repressive” governments, which America was “baby-sitting.”

I told my wife to be thankful for the $2.58 gas price, and that I didn’t know if we would be driving two cars when the jihadists hit the oil-rich Gulf, chanting: “Yankee, go home!”

U.S. President George W. Bush says: “The establishment of a democratic constitution will be a landmark event in the history of Iraq.” Well, Iraq did adopt a democratic constitution in 1925 and had 10 parliamentary elections and nearly 50 cabinets. And look, where it has ended up.

Iraq was stitched together by the British, who combined disparate ethnic and sectarian patches to serve their colonial interests. Hence the country is teeming with Shiite and Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen – but has few “Iraqis.” This reality was further confirmed this week in the draft constitution, which, if it is approved, will divide Iraq along sectarian and ethnic lines.

The chimera of a unified Iraqi state held together because Iraqis weren’t asked or allowed to choose their identities. Today the American invasion, Iranian and Saudi jihadist intervention, and power struggles among Iraqi elites have sent them groping for their basic identities, which remain religious and ethnic. No wonder they’re voting and fighting along denominational and ethnic lines.

Iraq previews the Islamization of most other Arab lands, including the oil-soaked Gulf, through a two-pronged process: anti-American, and perhaps sectarian, violence and elections. The first may have been foreshadowed by the missiles of Aqaba, and the second by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s embrace of the electoral process.

The Bush administration must change gears and think about bringing about d?tente with moderate Islamists, who make up the bulk of Islamist movements. America sold grain to Soviet communists and buys toys and furniture from Chinese communists. It may as well start working on a strategy to buy oil from Arab Islamists so it can be spared a recession, if not depression.

The next time U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stops in Egypt to meet with Foreign Minister Ahmad Abu al-Gheit, she may as well have Muslim Brotherhood leader Mehdi Akef over for a cup of coffee. The brotherhood renounced violence a long time ago.

The Problem is Occupation, not Islamic Ideology

The Daily Star – Lebanon
August 1, 2005

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has waged quite a campaign against a so-called “evil ideology” and the Pakistani madrasas, or Muslim religious schools, which supposedly teach it. In the course of his efforts, British special police have killed an innocent Brazilian electrician who probably looked to them like a madrasa-educated terrorist of Pakistani descent.

Blair borrowed the Bush administration’s dubious intelligence to join the disastrous Iraq war. Now he’s reaching for the administration’s tendentious polemic about Muslim terrorism to wash his hands of the consequences of that war. U.S. President George W. Bush and his neoconservative mentors insist that anti-American terrorism has been spawned by “Islamic extremism,” which Muslim terrorists learn in madrasas and from Islamist ideologues imbued with it.

But there are those in Britain challenging this sophistry, while supporting tough anti-terror measures. Several backbenchers in the British Parliament attributed the terrorist acts in London to Blair’s “involvement in Iraq.” Britain’s leading think tank Chatham House concurred. So do two out of three Britons, according to a poll in The Guardian newspaper.

I worked as a journalist in London in the 1970s, and John Wilkinson, a Conservative member of Parliament from Bradford, the city with Britain’s largest Pakistani population, used to tell me that his Pakistani constituents were “poor but peaceful,” unlike some other minorities who had created a “law-and-order problem.”

The attitudes of Pakistani – and Muslim – youths have since changed dramatically, as I observed during trips to Europe, and Britain in particular. Almost every interview revealed a deep resentment against Western “anti-Muslim” policies. They were especially indignant over the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq, hegemony” over Afghanistan, and U.S. support for the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.

No sane person would condone, let alone justify, the ghastly crimes committed by the terrorists in London, Madrid or New York and Washington. But bashing madrasas or Islamic “ideology” for these tragedies is a disservice to Westerners as it diverts their attention from the real causes of Muslim terrorism.

Three decades ago I reviewed the curricula of several Pakistani madrasas to write an article for an education supplement of the Pakistan Monitor newsmagazine, published in Lahore. I was troubled to note that they didn’t include any “secular” subjects such as math or science. Today many Pakistani madrasas offer limited secular courses.

In any case, anti-Americanism among Pakistani madrasa students is a new phenomenon. I was a student in Pakistan in 1961 when Lyndon Johnson visited Karachi. His motorcade was applauded by waiting crowds among whom were rows of madrasa students, who were excused by their teachers to welcome the American vice president. The current generation of Pakistani madrasa students is rabidly anti-American and anti-British. But so are most other Pakistanis. Polls show that more than 90 percent of Pakistanis resent the American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and its support for Israel and for their own military dictatorship.

Like British Muslims, their most common grievance is against American occupation or support for foreign occupation of Muslim lands. A British Home Office study leaked recently to The Times of London found British Muslims show “strong opposition to terrorism and loyalty to Britain,” but are anguished by “a perception of ‘double standards’ in British foreign policy, where democracy is preached but oppression … practiced or tolerated, e.g. in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechnya.”

Foreign occupation and domination is the real wellspring of terrorism, especially suicide terrorism. In the most comprehensive study yet of suicide terrorist attacks during 1980-2004, Robert Pape found that 95 percent of them were targeted at what the terrorists considered foreign occupation of their or their allies’ homelands.

In his book “Dying to Win,” Pape says Arabs have learned suicide terror techniques from Sri Lankan Tamils and Marxist Kurds in Turkey. Terrorists use religion as an inspiration when they have “a religious difference” with their adversaries.

Blair said recently that he plans to tackle “the roots of terrorism.” If he’s serious, he should heed the findings of the Chatham House, his Home Office and The Guardian poll. Occupation of Muslim lands – and not an Islamic “ideology” or the madrasas – is what is breeding Muslim terrorism.

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam

Middle East Policy
Summer 2005

This book is a sociohistorical narrative of Islam in which author Reza Aslan debunks many Orientalist myths about the faith. Then he argues that the uplift of Muslim societies calls for their democratization and “the interpretation of Islam that yields to the reality of democracy” (pp. 265-66)–which leaves you wondering what the book was all about! Is democratization really the most important task awaiting Muslim societies?

No god but God will hurt the feelings of many devout Muslims. A sell-described (Shiite) “apostate,” Aslan dismisses the Muslim belief that the Quran is the word of God revealed directly to the Prophet Muhammad. He mentions Muhammad’s continual bouts with “aural and visual hallucinations” and suggests that his “attainment of prophetic consciousness [might have been] a slowly evolving process” (p. 37). Salman Rushdie also challenged the authenticity of the revelation of the Quran in his novel The Satanic Verses, and it triggered Muslim protests in many countries. No god but God may not send Muslims parading in the streets, however. For, while Rushdie, besides questioning the revelation, crudely maligned the Prophet and his wives, Aslan extols Muhammad as the epitome of morality and human sensitivity and the “message of the Quran [as the] message of revolutionary social egalitarianism” (p. 71).

In No god but God the author rebuts the Orientalist characterization of Islam as a backward, misogynist faith that has spawned terrorism and political repression. Islam was the first confessional creed, he says, to proclaim human equality and women’s rights and to institutionalize charity for the poor. It also was the first religious tradition to introduce popular government. Recalling the selection of Abu Bakr as the first caliph through consultation among Muhammad’s associates, Aslan says that “from the Nile to the Oxus and beyond, nowhere else had such an experiment in popular sovereignty even been imagined, let alone attempted” (p. 118).

Echoing Emile Durkheim, he argues that all religions have evolved from their social environments to answer moral questions and set social standards. Prophets had historically “redefine(d) and reinterpret(ed) the existing beliefs and practices.” Muhammad was “influenced as a young man by the religious landscape of pre-Islamic Arabia” (p. 17), where monotheistic Judaism, Christianity and Hanifism coexisted with polytheism.

Revolutionary as the Prophet was, he was “still a product of Meccan society” (p. 63). He knew that in order for his reforms to take hold, they could not make a total break with the Arab social paradigm. This fact gets lost on many Westerners, who criticize Muhammad for having several wives, not establishing total equality of the sexes and allowing revenge to settle crimes. Aslan points out that Hebrew prophets from Abraham to Jacob to Moses to Hosea, Israelite kings from Saul to David to Solomon, and “nearly all” Christian and Zoroastrian monarchs of the time “had either multiple wives, multiple concubines or both” (p. 64).

The Quranic verses allowing polygamy, the author says, were meant partly to provide for women’s sustenance and the continuation of the Muslim community when the male population had been decimated by wars. In reality, Islam’s marriage reforms were pioneering. In pre-Islamic Arabia, a man could have as many wives as he wished. The Quran not only barred Muslim men from having more than four, but set such stringent conditions for polygamy as to make it practically impossible. Women in Arabia used to be considered men’s personal property. Muhammad took the momentous step of stipulating women’s marital and property rights, which enraged many Arab men.

Muhammad continued the law of retribution as the only tool available to deter crime and protect society. But he reformed the law as part of his plan to build a society “on moral rather than utilitarian principles” (p. 59). The Quran, while allowing retribution, proclaimed that God prefers and will reward forgiveness. And in a breathtaking departure from the practice followed around the world, Islam equalized criminal penalties across class boundaries. The Quran declared that retribution for an injury cannot be more than “an equal injury,” even if the injured is a king and the offender a pauper. The Prophet did not budge from the principle of equal justice, despite protests from powerful Arabs, at least one of whom renounced Islam over the issue.

Aslan is amazed by Western scholars’ proclivity to portray Islam as a “military religion [with] fanatical warriors” (Bernard Lewis), “a warrior religion” (Max Weber) and, more commonly, a religion that promotes “holy wars.” He says the Quran only allows defensive wars and that jihad, which Western writers misconstrue as “holy war,” actually means one’s struggle to overcome sinful impulses and other forms of offense to one’s self and society. “In fact, the term ‘holy war’ originates not with Islam but with Christian Crusaders…. War, according to the Quran, is either just or unjust; it is never [emphasis in original] ‘holy'” (pp. 78-81).

The author looks into Islamic theological and philosophical schools through the same sociohistorical lenses and argues that, although Islam is meant to promote moral and spiritual living, Muslim societies need to evolve by adapting Islam’s social principles to changing times and environments. He insists on adapting Islamic values, not jettisoning them. He says reformist campaigns of Muslim modernists such as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan of India (1817-98) failed because they discounted the importance of Islamic values to Muslim life. On the other hand, ultra-orthodox Islamic “fundamentalists” such as the followers of Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab (1703-66), known as the Wahhabis, are also doomed to fail because they refuse to evolve.

Aslan gives pan-Islamists such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-97) the credit for realizing that Muslim societies need to modernize without forswearing Islam. He argues, however, that the pan-Islamists erred in thinking that Muslims could transcend their ethnic and national roots and organize into a global polity. Arab nationalists saw that religion alone could not galvanize Muslims into a strong enough force to roll back Western colonialism and “opted for the more pragmatic goal of racial unity.” But the movement failed because “there is simply no such thing as a single Arab ethnicity. Egyptian Arabs had practically nothing in common with, say, Iraqi Arabs” (pp. 233-34).

“Apostate” that he is, Aslan would disappoint neocons and other Islamophobes. He appreciates Islamist movements, which he says strive for social justice in Muslim societies and freedom from foreign domination. These movements include the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East, Jamaat-i-Islami in South Asia and the eighteenth-century Indian Sufi movement led by Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762). He differentiates these modernizing Islamists from the Wahhabis and Taliban, who seek to shield Islam against modernity. He does not have much use for the traditional Sufi (mystic) movements that preach that “if the world does not agree with you, you agree with the world.” Aslan admires the Sufi reformer Wall Allah because of his principle that “if the world does not agree with you, arise against it” [emphasis original] (p. 219). If the author criticizes Muslim fundamentalists and some Muslim modernists, he also denounces the rapacious European colonialists for taking advantage of the weaknesses of Muslim societies–conquering and plundering them and massacring their citizens, while hypocritically proclaiming these crimes as part of their “civilizing mission” (p. 223).

So what should Muslims do now? Aslan’s answer is a disappointing anticlimax to his instructive work. Muslim societies, he says, should usher in the democratic political process based on “religious pluralism” and engage in “rational interpretation of Islam that yields to democracy, not the other way around” (pp. 262, 265-66). He draws this recipe from the writings of Iranian scholar Abdolkarim Soroush, whom he quotes admiringly over and over. To his credit, Aslan’s diagnosis of Muslim societies is more realistic than that of Soroush, who discounts Islam’s role in Muslim political and social life. Soroush advocates the rationalist interpretation of scripture that led to church-state separation in the West. Aslan rejects the notion of separating Islamic values from Muslim statecraft. He says secularism, which assumes the separation of a “religious” sphere from a worldly one, is alien to the Muslim worldview. But his prescription for the rationalist explanation of Islamic texts would inevitably lead to secularism.

Hence Aslan leaves me confused. For rationalism deals only with facts and phenomena that can be examined by rationality; it rejects “irrational” comprehensions such as love, empathy, imagination and other inexplicable perceptions. Religious beliefs are based on “irrational” understanding. Muslim philosophers from Al-Kindi (d. 866) to Al-Farabi (870-950) to Ibn Sina (980-1037) to Ibn Rushd (1126-98) struggled mightily to reconcile the two categories of understanding. Eventually they all failed. Soroush appears to be reinventing the wheel.

Soroush’s argument–quoted by Aslan–is that “people’s satisfaction,” supposedly achieved rationally, signifies “god’s approval,” and that it makes democracy a veritable synonym for “religious government” (pp. 253,265-66). This is nothing but sophistry. I am disappointed by Aslan’s reliance on it in an attempt to give a rationalist basis for what he calls “Islamic democracy” (p. 264). He does so perhaps out of epistemological schizophrenia: he intuitively understands the basic dynamics of Muslim societies because of his upbringing in Iran. But he is repelled by Iran’s revolutionary Islamic regime, which he calls “Fascist.” This may partly explain his foray into rationalism, if not apostasy. Or he may simply be trying to couch his thesis in the idiom of the rationalists, who, though a dwindling breed, still abound among the Western intelligentsia. In either case, the rationalist argumentation tends to undercut his otherwise cogently developed thesis that Islam cannot be rinsed out of Muslim polities.

The idea that democracy is what Muslim societies need most desperately confuses me the most about No god but God, an otherwise serious study. The argument puts Aslan in the company of American neoconservatives, among the last people with whom he would wish to associate. Democracy in everyday parlance means choosing governments through free and fair elections. The system originated in the West, and in its early stages it produced non-egalitarian governments that suppressed women and racial, ethnic and religious minorities. It did not prevent slavery, racism or the Civil War in America. It still fails to prevent Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay or to alleviate interethnic tensions in Northern Ireland, Belgium or Spain. In most Western countries, however, economic prosperity and the evolution of the institutions of freedom through centuries of trial and error have led to the maturation of democracy, which most of the rest of the world is now trying to emulate.

Democracy is America’s political religion as much as Islam is Iran’s. Most Americans like it to be promoted among other peoples. The neocons and other American “empire builders,” capitalizing on these American sentiments, are peddling democracy to justify the overthrow of inconvenient Muslim regimes and make Arab Muslim societies amenable to U.S. and Israeli hegemony. They believe, if naively, that democratic America and israel would find it easier to manage democratically elected Muslim governments because democracies supposedly hate to fight among themselves. The argument reminds you of the Crusaders’ campaign to save Arab souls as they invaded the Levant and built their states there. And it conjures up the slogans of European colonialists to which Aslan has alluded: “civilizing” their subjects. Of course, thanks to globalization and the information revolution, Muslim societies are modernizing and developing economically, and their literacy rates are increasing steadily. As a result, democratic movements in these societies are picking up steam, albeit at different speeds in different countries. The process will take time to mature, though not nearly as long, one may hope, as it did in the West.

The most important challenge facing the Muslim Middle East today is not just democracy, but freedom. A democratically elected government can be repressive, as in Russia, where the press is muzzled, political repression abounds and oligarchs loot resources while the public wallows in poverty. Democracy can also be the tool of foreign occupation or hegemony. My native India was ruled by freely and fairly elected ministries for two centuries while British colonialists held us in subjugation and exploited our wealth. Today Afghanistan and Iraq are under foreign occupation but ruled by democratically elected governments, protected around the clock from their own people by foreign troops. These are classic examples of democracy without freedom. Aslan and other Muslim-world intellectuals need to focus their attention on Muslim freedom from foreign hegemony and domestic repression, not just the “free and fair election” of Muslim governments, the slogan of hegemonist neocons.

Muslim Europeans find their place

The Record
March 15, 2005

Earlier this month, a 31-year-old Moroccan-born immigrant to Belgium quit her job at a prepared foods factory in the small town of Ledegem.

Her decision was the result of several months of intimidation, beginning in November when her employer, Rik Remmery, received an anonymous letter. It claimed to be his “death warrant” unless he fired his “fundamentalist” Muslim employee — or made sure she removed her head scarf.

A few days later, a second letter arrived, repeating the threat. Another came, putting a $326,000 bounty on Remmery’s head. When a further envelope showed up containing a bullet, Remmery and his wife became truly worried.

Although they had stood by Naima Amzil, their employee decided to ditch her head scarf while she worked. It was a wrenching decision for her. “A piece of me has been taken away,” she cried.

It wasn’t the end of her ordeal, though. After two more bullets showed up in the mail, Amzil finally decided to quit the job she had held for eight years rather than endanger either her life or her employers’.

During two recent research trips to Europe, I saw how a story like this could capture people’s imaginations. It represents one of the most radical cases of what Germany’s newspaper the Sueddeutsche Zeitung has called anti-Islamic “hysteria,” which makes many Europeans see “every head scarf as a political emblem, every Muslim (as) an extremist, every mosque (as) a seething hotbed of hatred.”

And it shows what I have come to see as a dangerous failure in Europe to distinguish between threats from an extremist fringe and symbols of Muslims’ rich cultural heritage.

Unless Europeans learn to make that distinction, I am afraid their societies risk being torn apart.

Such a possibility was reflected in a study of 11 European Union states released last week by the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, which warned that some Muslims feel as if they are viewed as “an enemy within.”

Islamophobia is a new phenomenon in modern Europe.

In the early 1970s, when I lived in Britain, Muslim women in France used to tell me how their neighbours admired their “stylish turbans.” Turkish women in Berlin and Cologne would flaunt their head scarves, which their own country’s ultra-secularist government had banned from many public places.

Some Arab women arriving at Paris’ Orly Airport would take off the veils they were obliged to wear in their homelands. But they did so of their free will, not because of Europeans’ negative reactions.

In fact, 30 years ago, Muslims were rarely recognized in Europe as a religious group at all. In Britain, Muslims were usually identified by ethnic and national labels — Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Kashmiris and so on.

It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Britons began to refer to them as Muslims. In the last five years, the cultural symbols that distinguish Muslims have come to be mistakenly viewed as symbols of Islamic extremism.

Islam has been put on Europe’s social map by these increasingly visible cultural symbols: Halal butchers’ shops (which sell ritually slaughtered meat), Arabic and Urdu store signs, women in head scarves, men in Arab robes, mosques and Islamic schools abound in Europe’s traditional power centres.

These symbols reflect the rapid growth of the European Union’s Muslim population. In 20 years, between 30 and 40 per cent of the populations of about a dozen European cities will be Muslim.

These changes have prompted fears among Europeans that their continent is becoming “a colony of Islam,” as Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci put it.

Such fears have been stoked by a few dramatic acts of violence by Muslim extremists, such as last November’s brutal murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, which exposed the fissures between Muslim immigrants and the indigenous population.

Security services have since been monitoring thousands of mosques across Western Europe, especially in the Netherlands, France and Germany.

Imams — or prayer leaders — have been fired under government pressure for making “extremist” comments. Among them is Yakup Tasci of Berlin, who appeared to me to be nothing but a traditionalist cleric during an October 2000 conversation at his Mevlana mosque. A hidden tape recorder later caught him saying that “German infidels” who had attacked a mosque “will burn in hell.” The literalist imam was apparently referring to an admonition in the Koran that consigns “infidels” to hell to float in “boiling water” and suffer other forms of punishment, much as a literal reading of the Bible supports the belief that the unrighteous will be condemned to eternal fire (Matthew 25:41).

The imam wasn’t advocating violence here on Earth.

Meanwhile, in Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands, programs have been launched to assimilate Muslims into national mainstreams.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has demanded that Muslims learn “Enlightenment values” and not live in “parallel societies.”

Other European politicians and intellectuals agree, excoriating proponents of multiculturalism and advocating instead an assimilationist policy.

The assimilation of ethnic or racial groups has historically meant their merger through marriage, friendships and socialization.

Most Europeans, however, can’t imagine having those kinds of relationships with minorities of non-European origin. The Germans still call third-generation Turks Gastarbeiter, or guest workers.

Britain, a multicultural society, has been more hospitable to Muslim immigrants than oil-rich Arab Muslim countries. Yet a BBC survey found that 94 per cent of native Britons don’t have “close friends” among Muslims or other minorities of non-European origin.

What’s more, surveys show that six out of 10 European Muslim youths insist on keeping a Muslim cultural identity. Marriages between Muslims and non-Muslims range only from three per cent in Britain to 17 per cent in France.

For many Europeans, Muslim assimilation means ridding Muslims of their distinctive lifestyles. Recalling that children of religious Italian, Polish, Spanish and Portuguese immigrants to northern European countries gave up strict religious adherence before they assimilated into host societies, some European intellectuals are predicting that European-born Muslims will “assimilate over time.”

They see extremism and estrangement as symptoms of Muslim religiosity.

These prognoses show an almost wilful ignorance of Muslim history and contemporary culture. The two European-born generations of Muslims are, in fact, secularizing fast. An unscientific survey of about 200 Muslim youths that I conducted in 2000 shows that only five to 12 per cent of them pray regularly, which is on par with other Europeans’ church attendance.

But Islam didn’t go through a church-state power struggle, an Inquisition or a Thirty Years’ War, all of which make some Europeans disdain anything associated with religion.

Secular Muslims cherish key Islamic symbols as part of their cultural traditions, and they are very upset by the vilification of these symbols. Hence many European Muslims, religious and secular, railed at van Gogh for having “smeared” the Koran in his controversial movie, while condemning his killing. Sixteen years ago, they denounced Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses because it portrays the prophet Mohammed as an impostor.

Ties to their transnational Islamic community, the umma, are also cushioning Muslims against assimilation. This solidarity is helping them remake their ethnic communities throughout Europe.

During a 2003 visit to England, my Bangladeshi friend Reaz Ahmed told me about his daughter’s wedding: The groom’s father was a Pakistani and his mother Indian. The guests included Muslims of Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi and Arab origins.

European-born Muslims like these people are gathering into new ethnic melting pots of their own. And once embedded in these communities they show little urge to assimilate into native Christian societies.

Ethnic Muslim communities, not Islam, pose the real challenge to European societies.

The best way to preserve democratic order in Europe, thereby lessening the chance of cross-cultural clash, is to stop trying to expect Muslims to give up their cultural traditions and instead adopt a multicultural policy.

In Marseille not long ago, Abdel Aziz Mehdi, a retired linguistics professor, told me that he sees “multiculturalism (as) Europe’s destiny.”

One in four residents of that wind-swept Mediterranean port city is a Muslim of North African origin. Its expansive Canebiere avenue is lined with Muslim shops. In late afternoons the restaurants tune in their TV sets to Algerian channels and play North African music. Outside, men relax on chairs chatting in Arabic or reading Arabic- language newspapers.

Over a couscous meal at one of the restaurants, Mehdi explained that the rapid growth of their communities had heightened European Muslims’ “cultural sensitivity (to a degree) I couldn’t imagine 10 years ago.”

European societies will be “torn apart,” he added, unless Muslims are allowed to nurture their cultures and are accommodated in a multicultural setting.

Without it, he said, there would be no social stability in Europe.

The best that can be hoped from Europe’s assimilation campaign is its early demise.

Because, as Naima Amzil and Rik Remmery would both attest, a head scarf should not be seen as anything more sinister than a simple symbol of cultural affinity.

Mustafa Malik, a Washington journalist, was born in India and lived and worked in Bangladesh and Pakistan before immigrating to the United States in 1974. He has spent years studying Muslim cultural patterns in Europe, most recently as a fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Summary – “The cultural symbols that distinguish Muslims have come to be mistakenly viewed as symbols of Islamic extremism. “

A Woman’s Head Scarf, a Continent’s Discomfort

The Washington Post
March 13, 2005

Ten days ago, a 31-year-old Moroccan-born immigrant to Belgium quit her job at a prepared foods factory in the small town of Ledegem. Her decision was the result of several months of intimidation, beginning in November when her employer, Rik Remmery, received an anonymous letter. It claimed to be his “death warrant” unless he fired his “fundamentalist” Muslim employee — or made sure that she removed her head scarf.

A few days later, a second letter arrived, repeating the threat. Another came, putting a $326,000 bounty on Remmery’s head. When a further envelope showed up containing a bullet, Remmery and his wife became truly worried. Although they had stood by Naima Amzil, their employee decided to ditch her head scarf while she worked. It was a wrenching decision for her. “A piece of me has been taken away,” she cried.

It wasn’t the end of her ordeal, though. After two more bullets showed up in the mail, Amzil finally decided to quit the job she had for eight years rather than endanger either her life or her employer’s.

During my two most recent research trips to Europe, I saw how a story like this could capture people’s imaginations. It represents one of the most radical cases of what Germany’s newspaper the Sueddeutsche Zeitung has called anti-Islamic “hysteria,” which makes many Europeans see “every head scarf as a political emblem, every Muslim [as] an extremist, every mosque [as] a seething hotbed of hatred.” And it shows what I have come to see as a dangerous failure in Europe to distinguish between threats from an extremist fringe and symbols of Muslims’ rich cultural heritage. Unless Europeans learn to make that distinction, I am afraid their societies risk being torn apart. Such a possibility was reflected in a study of 11 European Union states released last week by the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, which warned that some Muslims feel as if they are viewed as “an enemy within.”

Islamophobia is a new phenomenon in modern Europe. In the early 1970s when I lived in Britain, Muslim women in France used to tell me how their neighbors admired their “stylish turbans.” Turkish women in Berlin and Cologne would flaunt their head scarves, which their own country’s ultra-secularist government had banned from many public places. Some Arab women arriving at Paris’s Orly Airport would take off the veils they were obliged to wear in their homelands. They did so of their free will, not because of Europeans’ negative reactions to their cultural peculiarities.

In fact, 30 years ago Muslims were rarely recognized in Europe as a religious group at all. In Britain, Muslims were usually identified by ethnic and national labels — Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Kashmiris and so on. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that Britons began to refer to them as Muslims. In the last five years, the cultural symbols that distinguish Muslims have come to be mistakenly viewed as symbols of Islamic extremism.

Islam has been put on Europe’s social map by these increasingly visible cultural symbols: Halal butchers’ shops (which sell ritually slaughtered meat), Arabic and Urdu store signs, women in head scarves, men in Arab robes, mosques and Islamic schools abound in Europe’s traditional power centers. These symbols reflect the rapid growth of the E.U.’s Muslim population. In 20 years, between 30 and 40 percent of the populations of about a dozen European cities will be Muslim. These changes have prompted fears among Europeans that their continent is becoming “a colony of Islam,” as Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci put it.

Such fears have been stoked by a few dramatic acts of violence by Muslim extremists, such as last November’s brutal murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, which exposed the fissures between Muslim immigrants and the indigenous population.

Security services have since been monitoring thousands of mosques across Western Europe, especially in the Netherlands, France and Germany. Imams — or prayer leaders — have been fired under government pressure for making “extremist” comments. Among them is Yakup Tasci of Berlin, who appeared to me to be nothing but a traditionalist cleric during an October 2000 conversation at his Mevlana mosque. A hidden tape recorder later caught him saying that “German infidels” who had attacked a mosque “will burn in hell.” The literalist imam was apparently referring to an admonition in the Koran that consigns “infidels” to hell to float in “boiling water” and suffer other forms of punishment, much as a literal reading of the Bible supports the belief that the unrighteous will be condemned to eternal fire (Matthew 25:41). The imam wasn’t advocating violence here on earth.

Meanwhile, in Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands, programs have been launched to assimilate Muslims into national mainstreams. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has demanded that Muslims learn “Enlightenment values” and not live in “parallel societies.” Other European politicians and intellectuals agree, excoriating proponents of multiculturalism and advocating instead an assimilationist policy.

The assimilation of ethnic or racial groups has historically meant their merger through marriage, friendships and socialization. Most Europeans, however, can’t imagine having those kinds of relationships with minorities of non-European origin. The Germans still call third-generation Turks Gastarbeiter, or guest workers. Britain, a multicultural society, has been more hospitable to Muslim immigrants than oil-rich Arab Muslim countries. Yet a BBC survey found that 94 percent of native Britons don’t have “close friends” among Muslims or other minorities of non-European origin. What’s more, surveys show that six out of 10 European Muslim youths insist on keeping a Muslim cultural identity. Marriages between Muslims and non-Muslims range only from 3 percent in Britain to 17 percent in France.

For many Europeans, Muslim assimilation means ridding Muslims of their distinctive lifestyles. Recalling that children of religious Italian, Polish, Spanish and Portuguese immigrants to northern European countries gave up strict religious adherence before they assimilated into host societies, some European intellectuals are predicting that European-born Muslims will “assimilate over time.” They see extremism and estrangement as symptoms of Muslim religiosity.

These prognoses show an almost willful ignorance of Muslim history and contemporary culture. The two European-born generations of Muslims are, in fact, secularizing fast. An unscientific survey of about 200 Muslim youths that I conducted in 2000 shows that only 5 to 12 percent of them pray regularly, which is on par with other Europeans’ church attendance.

But Islam didn’t go through a church-state power struggle, an Inquisition or a Thirty Years’ War, all of which make some Europeans disdain anything associated with religion. Secular Muslims cherish key Islamic symbols as part of their cultural traditions, and they are very upset by the vilification of these symbols. Hence many European Muslims, religious and secular, railed at van Gogh for having “smeared” the Koran in his controversial movie, while condemning his killing. Sixteen years ago, they denounced Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” because it portrays the prophet Muhammad as an impostor.

Ties to their transnational Islamic community, the umma, are also cushioning Muslims against assimilation. This solidarity is helping them remake their ethnic communities throughout Europe. During a 2003 visit to England, my Bangladeshi friend Reaz Ahmed told me about his daughter’s wedding: The groom’s father was a Pakistani and his mother Indian. The guests included Muslims of Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi and Arab origins. European-born Muslims like these people are gathering into new ethnic melting pots of their own. And once embedded in these communities they show little urge to assimilate into native Christian societies. Ethnic Muslim communities, not Islam, pose the real challenge to European societies.

The best way to preserve democratic order in Europe, thereby lessening the chance of cross-cultural clash, is to stop trying to expect Muslims to give up their cultural traditions and instead adopt a multicultural policy. Indeed, in Marseille not long ago, Abdel Aziz Mehdi, a retired linguistics professor, told me that he sees “multiculturalism [as] Europe’s destiny.” One in four residents of that wind-swept Mediterranean port city is a Muslim of North African origin. Its expansive Canebiere avenue is lined with Muslim shops. In late afternoons the restaurants tune in their TV sets to Algerian channels and play North African music. Outside, men relax on chairs chatting in Arabic or reading Arabic-language newspapers.

Over a couscous meal at one of the restaurants, Mehdi explained that the rapid growth of their communities had heightened European Muslims’ “cultural sensitivity [to a degree] I couldn’t imagine 10 years ago.” European societies would be “torn apart,” he added, unless Muslims were allowed to nurture their cultures and unless they were accommodated in a multicultural setting. Without it, he said, there would be no social stability in Europe.

The best that can be hoped from Europe’s assimilation campaign is its early demise. Because, as Naima Amzil and Rik Remmery would both attest, a head scarf should not be seen as anything more sinister than a simple symbol of cultural affinity.

Iraq’s elections and the paradoxes of Arab reform

The Daily Star – Lebanon
January 11, 2005

The foreign ministers of several Arab regimes met in Jordan recently and issued a call to Iraq’s Sunni Arabs to participate in the January 30 parliamentary elections. Turkey and a reluctant Iran signed on to the appeal. The Sunni Arabs in Iraq have threatened to boycott the vote unless it is delayed and their concerns are addressed. After several pro-American Sunni and Shiite politicians voiced sympathy for this demand, interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi telephoned President George W. Bush for his advice. Bush told him to stick with the election deadline, no matter what. Arab governments in Iraq’s neighborhood rushed to Amman to plead with Sunni Arab Iraqis to forget about their grievances and get on with the vote. Whether the elections are delayed or held on schedule, Iraq and the region are entering a long era of turbulence that will lead to the evolution of democratic or populist governments in key Arab states. But what does one make of the sudden fervor for Iraqi democracy displayed by autocratic Arab regimes? It reminds me of a picnic that Allied troops were having at the end of World War II on the German-Polish border. A courier brought a copy of a telegram. It said that President Harry Truman had congratulated the Allied forces on their victory over Adolf Hitler’s army and ordered U.S. troops home. Several Americans threw their lunch plates away, got up and began celebrating. “Calm down, Yankees!” A Soviet soldier admonished his American friends. “You don’t need to go crazy over it.” “Commie,” retorted an American, “You won’t know what it means to be back in a free country. I can stand in front of the White House and yell: ‘Truman is an idiot!’ You can’t imagine such a thing.” “Is that a big deal?” replied the Russian. “I too can stand in front of your White House and yell: ‘Truman is an idiot.'” The Russian might have fancied a moment of freedom in America because he couldn’t have it in the U.S.S.R. Today Arab autocracies want the democratic process to work in Iraq because they do not want it spread to their countries. Amr Moussa, the Arab League secretary general, explained earlier that a Sunni boycott of the vote would “destabilize” not just Iraq, but the whole Middle East, meaning the monarchies and autocracies he represents. Iraq is about finished as a unified country. The Kurdish north will not give up the de-facto independence it has been enjoying since the U.S. began protecting it as a “no-fly zone” after the 1991 Gulf War. The Shiites make up 60 percent of the Iraqi population, and they will almost certainly go through with the vote, form a government and write a constitution. But the writ of that government won’t extend to the so-called “Sunni triangle.” Sunni Arabs, many of whom supported Saddam Hussein, are believed to make up about 20 percent of the Iraqi population. They say the elections, for which they weren’t consulted, are an American trick to do two things: let the Kurds, who are on good terms with Israel, practically secede and serve as Israel’s fifth column against the Arabs; and punish Sunni Arabs for supporting Saddam by placing them under permanent Shiite domination. Some Sunni Arabs have suggested a Lebanese-type arrangement, stipulating power sharing among ethnic and sectarian communities.

The Bush administration is in no mood to heed them because it’s busy trying to salvage its broader objectives in the Iraq war. Last May, as John Negropante was getting ready to take up his post as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, I asked him during a meeting at the State Department about the aims behind having the world’s largest U.S. embassy and largest CIA station in Baghdad. “We consider Iraq very important,” he replied. But he didn’t say why. However, Jay Garner, the first U.S. proconsul in occupied Iraq, did, on another occasion. Garner said America’s interests in the region would require it to have a military presence in Iraq “for the next few decades.” He recalled that the United States had maintained bases in the Philippines for nearly a century. But it’s not working out that way. The Sunni Arab insurgency apart, Shiite leaders told the Bush administration last year that they did not want American troops hanging around Iraq for too long. So the U.S has been trying to create conditions that would persuade them to change their minds. Leaving the “Sunni triangle” in ferment could do just that. An embattled Iraqi government, they believe, wouldn’t last without U.S. military protection. Hence, why would Bush allow the Iraqis to pursue Shiite-Sunni rapprochement now?

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell explained his boss’ position: The “people in Iraq want democracy;” only the “terrorists” don’t. And the U.S. can’t let that nation down and let the terrorists win. Powell knows the American saying: “Beware of what you wish for, you may get it.” Democracy is on the Arab horizon; it may take a generation to unfold. But will the U.S. and the Arab autocracies like it when they see it?

America’s divide-and-rule policy and military excesses in Iraq are fueling opposition to the U.S. not just in Iraq but also in the entire Arab world. Islamists are in the vanguard of these movements, though one should clearly distinguish between Islamist reformers and those, like Al-Qaeda and others, who engage in the wanton killing of innocent human beings, trampling Islamic principles and repelling every sensible Muslim.

In their effort to liberate Arab societies from domestic political repression and outside hegemony, Muslim reform movements could have the same impact as the 16th century Protestant Reformation in Europe and the 18th century Great Awakening in America. Both began as religious revivalist movements but eventually led to democratic reforms. The Reformation initiated the process that liberated Europeans from the tyranny of the Catholic Church and secular monarchies. The Great Awakening (1720-1740) gave birth to the revolution that ended British rule and ushered in democracy in America.

“If democracy arrives in the Middle East,” write Marina Ottaway and Thomas Carothers in the current issue of Foreign Policy, “it will not be due to the efforts of liberal activists or their Western supporters, but the very Islamic parties that many now see as the chief obstacle to reform.” I agree.

Whose war is it now?

Boston Globe
December 23, 2004

WASHINGTON – A TIGER killed a fawn and began munching on it, according to a popular Bangladeshi folk tale. A hungry bear jumped on the tiger to snatch the carcass away. The two fought until both lay mortally wounded, unable to move. A fox, which was watching the fight from a bush, scampered to the dead fawn and feasted to its heart’s content.

The United States overthrew Saddam Hussein only to be overwhelmed by a Sunni Arab insurgency. But Sunni Arabs, being a minority, can’t come to power through the Jan. 30 elections. This is why most of them are boycotting the vote. A pro-Iranian electoral alliance of the Shi’ite majority is predicted to win a majority of parliamentary seats and form the government. The Iranians are helping the alliance with money and volunteers, ignoring President Bush’s warnings against “meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq.”

During an appearance on an Iranian TV show the other day, I was asked what gave “invaders from the other end of the world the right to question our help and support” to his fellow Shi’ites in Iraq. Iran had been sheltering Iraqi exiles, the interviewer added, since before Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former New York congressman Stephen Solarz “were making pilgrimages to Baghdad [in the 1980s] with your presidents’ goodwill messages to Saddam.”

The war to overthrow Saddam, a bitter enemy of Israel, was masterminded by a group of neoconservatives, and Patrick Buchanan and others accused them of dragging America into “Israel’s war.”

Now Arab commentators are saying that America is fighting “Iran’s war.” The US invasion has, besides facilitating the creation of a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, wrecked the military power of Iraq, Iran’s historic adversary. Iraqi Shi’ites aren’t a monolith, and the elections could be followed by an intra-Shi’ite power struggle, alongside a broader one among Shi’ite Arabs, Sunni Arabs, and Sunni Kurds.

The United States is deepening the Shi’ite-Sunni divide. President Bush got his Sunni Arab proteges King Abdullah and interim Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawar to denounce Iranian “interference” in Iraqi affairs.

Also, the Americans are prodding interim Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi to try to put together a Sunni-dominated party to counter the pro-Iranian Shi’ite alliance.

All these are alienating America from Iraqi Shi’ites, prompting them to align more closely with Iran. If ethnic and sectarian strife splits Iraq, the Shi’ite south would be the natural ally of Shi’ite Iran. If Iraq stays in one piece, the Iranians are likely to exert influence on its politics and policies through its Shi’ite majority.

Iran isn’t the only “fox” making hay from the fall of Saddam. The war has mobilized anti-American and anti regime forces in the region to an unprecedented level. Muslim guerrillas from neighboring countries have joined the Iraqi insurgency. Islamist activists have ratcheted up their campaign against Jordanian and Saudi Arabian monarchies, citing these regimes’ tacit support for the US invasion of Iraq.

An Arab-American friend who has returned from a tour of the region tells me that in Jordan’s cafes and college campuses King Abdullah II is being “openly denounced” as America’s “lackey” and “collaborator.” My friend had not seen Jordanians criticize the monarchy so harshly and publicly before.

Unprecedented, too, was the recent attempt to stage anti government demonstrations in Saudi Arabia. The London-based Movement for Islamic Reforms, which US intelligence sources suspect is linked to Osama bin Laden, called for the protest. Hundreds of activists were preparing to pour into the streets of Riyadh and Jeddah when police dispersed them.

Meanwhile, the US consulate in Jeddah came under a brazen attack from “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” and bin Laden was quick to release an audio tape commending the guerrillas. More ominous is his call to supporters to target America’s oil supplies, which prompted a series of attacks on Iraq’s oil infrastructure. Bin Laden may have set his eyes on the most vital US interest in the region, which seemed to be safe before the Iraq war.

Maybe America is fighting bin Laden’s war, too.

Sectarian electoral maneuvers may break Iraq apart

The Daily Star – Lebanon
November 27, 2004

In Iraq they are comparing it to Hulagu Khan’s carnage. In the past year, following the U.S.-led war and the mayhem that followed, about 200,000 Iraqis have perished, according to a survey by the Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg school of public health. Fallujah lies in ruins, while death, devastation and anarchy engulf Mosul, Ramadi, Baquba, Buhriz, Beiji and other Iraqi cities and towns.

There is no reliable estimate of the death and destruction visited on Iraq by Hulagu’s forces in 1258, although legend has it that the Mongol invasion was the most catastrophic in Iraqi history. But the havoc wrought by the American occupation forces is more tragic in that these new invaders, unlike their 13th-century predecessors, are doing it with the active collaboration of Iraqis – mainly the Shiite and Kurdish elites.

Iraq has been one of my favorite haunts for decades, and the conduct of its Shiite leadership today reminds me of a concern that an Iraqi intellectual shared with me on my first visit to Baghdad in November 1971. Mohammed Khidir Abbas, then editor in chief of the Baghdad Observer newspaper, said: “The Sunnis have ruled Iraq badly, but the Shiites wouldn’t know how to keep Iraq together to rule it better.”

Sunni-led regimes have been ruling what is now Iraq since the Ottoman conquest of southern Mesopotamia in 1534, and Saddam Hussein’s was among the most repressive of these. Iraq is where civilization was born, and Iraqis are among the brightest and kindest people anywhere. But unlike people in most other regions, and like Arabs elsewhere, they don’t seem to have the motivation and skills to rid themselves of repressive regimes. Instead, Shiites like Ahmed Chalabi and Iraqi interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi stooped to collaborate with the United States in its invasion of Iraq.

As if that wasn’t disgraceful enough, Shiite expatriates and some local Iraqis have allowed themselves to be used as America’s tools to suppress the Iraqi struggle against the occupation. Allawi’s U.S.-sponsored government ordered the bloody American military crackdown on the Sunni insurgency in Fallujah and elsewhere, while the country’s Shiite and Kurdish leaders looked the other way. As a result, the Shiite-Sunni divide in Iraq has deepened as never before and endangers the country’s future.

The one man in Iraq who could have spared Iraq this agony is Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. The U.S. has never dared to cross the widely respected cleric, who is the top spiritual leader of the Shiite community internationally. However, the Iranian-born Sistani has been obsessed with the idea of Shiite domination of Iraq. He has turned a blind eye to the Iraqi tragedy, apparently hoping the Americans would help put together a Shiite-dominated government through the elections scheduled for Jan. 30, 2005.

Except for “rebel” cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, few other Shiite leaders have a political base in Iraq, and their public image has been tarnished by their collaboration with the U.S. Most of them are unlikely to be returned to power through a free and competitive election. Hence, at America’s prodding the Shiite leadership has crafted a scheme to unite all Shiite and Kurdish political groups into an anti-Sunni Arab electoral alliance. The allies would put up a joint slate of candidates to avert competitive elections in Shiite and Kurdish regions. Sadr, whose anti-American insurgency unnerved the U.S. and its Iraqi prot?g?s, is giving the idea serious consideration.

Under the scheme, Sadr’s supporters would be allotted 25 percent of the seats, Al-Daawa 15 percent, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq 10 percent, the Kurdish Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan 20 percent, and so on. The Americans believe that a government emanating from this legislative process would be in trustworthy hands. So much for the neoconservative plan to usher democracy into Iraq and the Arab world.

This strategy would spell disaster for Iraq. Sunni Arabs make up less than a fifth of Iraq’s population of 25 million, but the country’s Sunni Arab heartland has been the bastion of its economic, military and political power for a millennium. There will of course be a Shiite majority in any elected Iraqi parliament, but translating head count into political domination overnight is another matter. The Shiites have been far behind the Sunnis economically, educationally and professionally, and any political arrangement that seeks to ignore that reality and marginalize the Sunni Arabs would not only fail, but could also unravel the fragile state.

The stubborn Sunni Arab insurgency is partly a response to the Shiite-Kurdish-American alliance. The widening insurgency, the decision by the (Sunni Arab) Muslim Scholars Association to boycott the January elections, and the (Sunni Arab) Iraqi Islamic Party’s withdrawal from the Allawi government, are loud warnings to Shiite leaders that their power grab could break the country apart along religious lines. They would do well to heed Khidir Abbas’ warning that they need to “keep Iraq together to rule it.”

The biggest challenge to keeping “Iraq together” is, however, Kurdish separatism, which is bound to revive if left unresolved. Iraq’s British colonial rulers annexed Kurdish territory to Iraq after oil was discovered in Kirkuk. Kurdish leaders have since been pushing for real or virtual independence from Iraq. To pursue a resolution of the thorny issue, a rapprochement between Shiites and Sunni Arabs is a necessary first step. The Shiite leadership must stop supporting the American war against the insurgency and engage Sunni Arabs in a dialogue over Iraq’s political future.

The problem is that the Shiite leaders directly collaborating with the Allawi regime and the Americans don’t have the standing to initiate such a dialogue. Would Sistani please step up to the plate?

The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization

Middle East Policy
2004

What went wrong in Iraq? Bernard Lewis, the author of the book What Went Wrong? and other promoters of the Iraq war got it all wrong when they thought that Muslim societies need to be and can be remade in the Western image.

Few American intellectuals have argued this point as forcefully as Richard W. Bulliet in The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization. America’s policy toward the Middle East, the author says, is driven by hubris, which has blinded its political and intellectual establishments to the cultural realities of Muslim societies. Cultural insensitivity characterized the American missionary campaign in Muslim lands prior to World War II. It was a colossal failure. That blinding hubris now threatens to undermine the so-called “war of freedom against tyranny” (p. 119) in the Middle East, of which Iraq is supposed to be the first phase.

Bulliet’s refreshing insights into Muslim societies derives from extensive fieldwork in the Middle East that began a half-century ago. His substantive research on different facets of Islamic civilization has produced several titles that are both highly readable and intellectually nourishing. A professor at Columbia University, the author says U.S. policy in the Muslim world betrays a naive aspiration to be loved by others. The problem is that those who proclaim that aspiration want Muslims to love them “for our values” without entertaining the “thought of loving them for their values” (p. 116). This mindset stems from the notion that the West has found the ultimate recipe for happiness and fulfillment, not just for Westerners, but for all humanity. This Orientalist perspective was the hallmark of the Middle East studies program launched during the Cold War. The avowed purpose of the program was to win “hearts and minds” in the Middle East, where Soviet communism had posed an ideological challenge to America. The Americans who participated in that program seldom bothered to inquire about the values and aspirations of Arabs and Muslims and were firmly convinced, as Daniel Lerner famously put it, that “what the West is… the Middle East seeks to become” (p. 104).

That jingoist attitude continues to underpin most of American intellectual analysis of Muslim-world events and shapes the U.S. government policy toward the Muslim world. Mainstream American intellectuals view Islamic values as pernicious for Muslim well-being; Bernard Lewis discovers “the dead hand of Islam in every [Muslim] failure” (p. 55). (Lewis personally lobbied President George W. Bush to invade Iraq, an act which, the historian believed, would help spread Western democratic values among Arab Muslims.)

But the American quest “for love in all the wrong places” (p. 95) looks hypocritical, as it accompanies an overriding drive for political and economic domination. To the Muslim world it conjures up European colonialism; the colonialists also presented themselves as do-gooders to their colonial subjects. In the same vein, the American invasion and occupation of oil-rich Iraq has been labeled the “liberation” of Iraqis from the rule of a ruthless dictator and a prelude to the democratization of the Middle East. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1898, recalls the author, he also proclaimed that he was “liberating the Egyptians from the tyranny of their rulers” (p. 68).

Hypocrisy apart, the campaign to transform Muslim societies into Western-style secular democracies betrays the denial of a basic sociological reality. Freedom is, of course, a universal human aspiration, but its expression has historically been mediated by local cultures, and cultural norms and values are largely the products of the environment. American establishment intellectuals spurn just about all non-Western cultural values. They refuse to recognize that the Enlightenment and liberalism evolved from a specific cultural environment. And they assume that American or Western institutions (e.g. secular government, church-state separation) should be introduced in Muslim societies for their own good, if necessary by force of arms. So even though Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter proclaimed “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live,” the George W. Bush administration and its neoconservative mentors are professedly committed to fostering secular democracy through military aggression.

What eludes their Orientalist antenna is the starkly different roles that Islam and Western Christianity have played in the social and political lives of their adherents. In the West, Catholic theocracy and early Protestant fundamentalism presented religion in the role of an impediment to human freedom. Islam, on the other hand, has been “a bulwark against foreign and domestic authoritarian rule” (p. 72). It has galvanized Muslims into struggles to repel the Crusaders, roll back colonial rule, resist foreign aggression and overthrow regimes that are subservient to alien powers or interests.

Islam, too, provides the cultural resources to sustain economic and political institutions that are meaningful for Muslims. Muslim modernizers such as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) in Turkey and Reza Shah (1878-1944) in Iran saw their reforms flounder because of their failure to appreciate the vitality of Islamic values and institutions. They sought to speed economic development by Westernizing Muslim cultural symbols and norms. But their Westernization campaigns, instead of bringing prosperity, blocked freedom and democracy, the core values of Western modernity.

Bulliet underscores this point by quoting a group of “unquestionably secular” Arab intellectuals who put out the “Arab Human Development Report” in 2002. The report’s authors, who are among the Who’s Who of the Arab intelligentsia, deplored economic backwardness and called for “democracy and human rights” in their countries. But they emphasized the need to adapt economic and political reforms to their indigenous cultural tradition.

“Culture and values,” they wrote, “are the soul of development. They provide its impetus, facilitate the means needed to further it, and substantially define people’s vision of its purposes and ends…. [T]hey help to shape people’s daily hopes, fears, ambitions, attitudes and actions …. [V]alues are not the servants of development; they are its wellspring” (pp. 121-22).

The report explains further that democracy, in order to be meaningful in Arab societies, has to resolve the “differences between cultural traditionalism and global modernity” and strike “a balance” between individual liberty and popular institutions (p. 122). In other words, economic and political reforms in Arab and Muslim societies can use outside support, but these reforms have to evolve from within, mediated by local institutions. The Arab intellectuals’ plan for Arab freedom and well-being in effect rebuffs that of the neocons and the Bush administration who would teach Arabs Western-style democracy at gunpoint.

While Professor Bulliet has made a powerful case for the value of Islam in Muslim life, his “case” for an “Islamo-Christian civilization” could have been developed more fully. He argues that Islam and Christianity should be able to evolve as a common civilization because the two faiths share many common values and are “siblings” in the Abrahamic religious tradition. But in real life sibling relationships are often marked more by conflict than harmony. The religious history of Europe (until after the Holocaust) has been dominated by Protestant-Catholic, Christian-Jewish and Muslim-Christian conflicts and tensions. Today the American-Israeli-Russian “war on terror” has, for all practical purposes, pitted the Judeo-Christian civilization against Islam. The forces and strategies that may foster a rapprochement between these religious “siblings” remain to be explored.

The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization is an insightful analysis of what ails Islamic civilization, what makes it tick, and how Americans could handle it for their own good and that of the Muslim world.