| |
Now 'political Islam' draws
fire
By Ehsan Ahrari
Spin
meiesters of the American media are busy conjuring up a
new twist for an old phrase, "political Islam", that is
reported to be gaining a "seductive voice" among Muslim
masses. And that twist appears to be "our war is with
political Islam". Political Islam will be the new target
of verbal barrages and even military attacks of the
United States. It is given a high visibility in an essay
in the New York Times of October 26. Briefly defined as
"stridently anti-Western and anti-modern", political
Islam, according to that essay, "portrays itself as the
strongest ideological counter to democracy and
capitalism". A sociologist from Williams College is
quoted as saying that political Islam comprises ".... a
fanatical group, a fringe element that have been able to
command the media and have been able to propagate a
series of fantastic world images and a series of
fantastic conspiracy theories".
However, like
most current writings on Islam, the description of
political Islam tends to over-extrapolate about its
extremist aspects or capabilities, without much emphasis
on the fact that there is also a significant support for
democracy in the Muslim world, and that Muslims
consistently make a very important distinction between
the policies of the US administration of President
George W Bush and their overall respect and, indeed,
admiration and preference for what the US stands for as
a country. These distinctions are important because they
explain that Bush's "hot war" in the world of Islam has
intensified anti-Americanism. The Bush administration
might not be fully aware of the "cold war" it is waging
against Muslim countries through its constant use of
such phrases as "civilizational clash", "enemies of
civilization", or "evildoers". This fledgling cold war
might be lasting in the sense that it is becoming a
sharp two-edged sword. Islamists are also attacking the
US through the use of similar phrases.
As the US
occupation of Iraq is facing an uphill battle due to
worsening security situation - a fact that even
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has acknowledged in
a recently leaked memo to his top Pentagon aides - the
Bush administration was also jolted by the derisive
remarks made against Islam by an Evangelical Christian
uniformed officer, Lieutenant-General William "Jerry"
Boykin, who heads the hunt for, among others, Osama bin
Laden. At the same time, there is a continued
astonishment in the US about the intensity of Muslim
anger worldwide. Even Bush is reported to have expressed
his "surprise" by the depth of suspicion that moderate
religious leaders expressed during his recent brief
meeting with him in Indonesia. He is reported to have
asked his aides, in dismay, "Do they really believe that
we think all Muslims are terrorists?"
In the
course of human development, the global community is
going through a phase in which we only seem to
understand, empathize, and feel the pain of our own
losses, failures, miseries, and get elated by our own
feelings of happiness or victories, but not those of
others. In an information age, perhaps, only by living
in these imaginary cocoons that we learn to feel good
about our own morality, religious faiths, and even get
carried away by our own righteousness. At the same time,
we seem to be compelled by some inexplicable urge to
berate others' morality and faith.
Western
civilization is demonstrably smug about the superiority
of its own current material being and looks down on the
Islamic world because of its economic and military
downtroddenness. The Islamic world, on its part, is
finding refuge in a different type of "feel good"
environment. It does not have any doubt regarding the
righteousness of its own faith. On the contrary, there
is such a powerful feeling of correctness and
completeness of Islam that there has been little support
for ijtihad (religious reformation). Even though
the absence of a widespread support for ijtihad
is a problem created largely by the Sunni religious
establishment, the Sunni populace should also be blamed
for going along with it. Therein lies part of the blame
for the politico-economic backwardness of the world of
Islam.
Like all faiths, Islam needed periods of
internal debates, and series of reformations to
challenge the notion of fusion of sacred and temporal
authorities into one. Instead, the door of
ijtihad was closed a long time ago. That
tradition continues. Today, instead of having internal
debates about the urgency of ijtihad, Muslim
countries are being pulled in the direction of
obscurantist Islamists who wish to take their societies
back to the seventh century, the days of the
aslaf (pious ancestors). For the Islamists,
religious piety is eminently preferable over economic
development, as if they are mutually exclusive.
Anger toward the US is not related to Muslim
backwardness, but it has become a source of Muslim
resentment in the post-September 11 era. This is an era
when Islamists and the US came face to face. This is an
era when the Bush administration has defined the
parameters of a larger struggle in which it is fighting
with religious extremism. It cannot afford to lose this
fight, for its defeat may mean victory for the forces of
obscurantism in the world of Islam. The West cannot
remain unaffected by such a tragedy.
The US, at
least the current administration, is not exactly an
entity whose certain post-September 11 actions are as
free of blame for Muslim acute criticism, if not fury,
as its officials pretend them to be. How should a Muslim
differentiate between the US policies to fight terrorism
and the US Patriot Laws - that are closely identified
with its most ardent proponent, the Christian
fundamentalist Attorney-General of the US, John Ashcroft
- that are so single-mindedly focused on non-citizen
Muslim youths residing in this country and visiting it?
I fully recognize the need to be vigilant and the
primacy of the security of the US; but there is also a
need of equal significance for outlawing racial
profiling, or viewing followers of Islam with suspicion
because of their faith. In the post-September 11 era the
great American tradition of respect for privacy - one of
the cornerstones of democracy - is systematically being
eroded.
While it should be noted that the US has
been much more conscious of being fair toward Muslims
than its European counterparts, from the perspectives of
citizens of Muslim countries, the Bush administration
has unfairly focused, not on Islam, but certainly on
Muslims. That focus has resulted in severe restrictions
on granting educational visas for young Muslims to visit
the US to get higher education. It bears repeating that
there is the need for security filters to make sure that
potential terrorists do not slip through. However, one
can still balance US national security with the
necessity of allowing Muslim students to enroll in
educational institutions. If Muslim countries were to
make progress in an increasingly globalized world, they
should be able to educate their youths in the US and
other Western countries. Modern education has become an
important tool to fight the forces of obscurantism in
Muslim countries.
I am sure Bush has not read a
latest publication entitled, "Arab Human Development
Report 2003", written under the auspices of the United
Nation's Human Development Program. It states that the
extreme security measures in the US and other Western
European countries in the post-September 11 era
diminished "the welfare of Arabs and Muslims living,
studying or traveling abroad, interrupting cultural
exchanges between the Arab world and the West and
cutting off knowledge requisition opportunities for
young Arabs".
Muslims don't know what to make of
the current militarism of the Bush administration toward
their world. They have watched the US policies of
blindly supporting tyrannical and autocratic rule in
their native countries during the Cold War years and
even until September 11. Immediately thereafter, they
heard from Bush that his administration's policy toward
their countries was transformed. And that transformation
will be brought about by implementing the Bush doctrine
of preemption and regime change. If the US invasion of
Iraq were a standard for the application of that
doctrine, then it would be implemented in the future by
using misinformation and even disinformation as
rationales for regime change.
As the Senate
inquiry regarding the quality of intelligence that was
used to invade Iraq is coming to surface, Muslims all
over the world have no choice but to think that minds in
Washington were made up to topple Saddam Hussein's
regime regardless of whether he possessed weapons of
mass (WMD) destruction at the time of the invasion. In
other words, the chief US objective was regime change,
and the reason for doing so was the brutal nature of his
regime, not the possession of WMD or the purported
imminent use of those weapons, as claimed by both Bush
and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair prior to the
Iraqi invasion. Both American and British peoples were
lied to in terms of offering the reasons for invading
Iraq.
Why should even the American people
believe any future rationale that their government
offers for bringing about any more regime change in
Muslim regions in the coming months or years? And if the
American people should not believe their government
about that issue, why shouldn't Muslims believe that
military invasion of Iraq or any other country in the
future would be part of a larger war against Islam?
Someone in Washington ought to be paying a lot of
attention to these highly contentious issues, rather
than just showing their dismay or by asking such
seemingly naive questions as, "why do they hate us?" or
"why do Muslims think the war on terrorism is really a
war against Islam?"
The world of Islam needs
moderation and moderate Islamic democratic governments.
However, such systems can only be established from
within. Perhaps the newest and most significant measure
the international community ought to consider is the
imposition of sanctions on all autocratic regimes for
democratic change. I know that it is a difficult
proposition to materialize, since no measure of that
nature will be passed in the UN General Assembly, where
autocratic regimes have a large presence. At the UN
Security Council, all permanent members, save the US and
the UK, will veto such a measure.
Of the two
potential supporters of such a measure, the latter has
an iniquitous legacy of being an imperial power. As
such, it also bears at least partial responsibility for
the absence of democracy in its former Muslim colonial
possessions, and is not on solid grounds now for arguing
for democracy. The US, by invading Iraq, is perceived by
a very large number of people in the world as the newest
imperial power. As such, its own credentials of claiming
to be the latest advocate for democratic change are
tainted. The need of our time is moral leadership for
the promotion of moderation and eradication of
autocratic rule if Muslim polities are to make true
progress toward modernization and industrial
development. The US has the potential to be a moral
force. Muslims are sure that the Bush administration
does not.
While the Bush administration is
aspiring to transform the Muslim Middle East, it has
remained a strong supporter of the regimes of Central
Asia, whose record of tyrannical rule and political
repression has already been a target of regular and
intense criticism, soon after they became independent in
the early 1990s, by such groups as Amnesty
International, Transparency International, Human Rights
Watch and International Crisis Group. That strong
support emanates from the newly-formulated nexus between
the US and at least three Central Asian republics -
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan - that have agreed
to base US forces in order to fight Bush's "war on
terrorism". In Central Asia, pragmatism drives America's
foreign policy, while the autocratic regimes continue to
brutalize their citizenry.
Thus Muslims are
still faced with the dilemmas of how to democratize
their respective countries at a time when their
collective sense of humiliation at the hands of the US,
their anger at their brutal, highly corrupt, nepotistic
(witness how many dictators are grooming their sons to
take over the dictatorships all over the Muslim world,
and how many have already succeeded in doing so), and
economically inept regimes is also at an all time high.
For Muslims all over the world, how to bring
about democratization of their polities is a question
that constantly begs for practical answers. Any
qualitative change of that nature is likely to be
violent, unless it is gradual and closely managed. Even
then, there is no guarantee that forces of violence will
not overwhelm the forces of change at some stage.
Besides, which current Muslim autocratic regime is
willing to systematically remove itself from office?
Imagine the intricacy of the Muslim dilemmas for
democratic change. What strategy is to be adopted; where
to start; which leader should become the next Mikhail
Gorbachev of the Muslim world? It is hard to expect that
type of an about-face from crusty leaders like Hosni
Mubarak of Egypt, Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia or
Muammar Qaddafi of Libya.
The newly-arrived
dictators or kings - such as Bishara Assad of Syria,
Mohammad VI of Morocco or King Abdullah of Jordan - may
have the potential, but they are too dependent on the
old autocratic order of their fathers for their own
survival to be challenging it at this time in their
careers. Even if they were to take a bold move toward
democratization, there is no telling whether they would
succeed, or the old order would replace them with
another young leader with an autocratic bent of mind.
Even where the young autocrats are at the helm, the old
order remains as the greatest impediment to democratic
change. But that is not the end of the Muslim tragedy.
Mubarak is reported to be grooming his son, Jamal, for
succession in Egypt, and Qaddafi has plans for his son,
Saif al-Islam, to be his successor in Libya. President
Haider Aliev's son Ilham has already become prime
minister of Azerbaijan.
Is an outside power
expected to play an important role in bringing about
democratic change for Muslim countries? After invading
Iraq, the US has lost whatever credibility it had as an
advocate for democracy worldwide. As the staunchest
supporter of Israel in the Middle East, the US was
resented by the Muslims in the pre-September 11 era. In
the post-September 11 era, the current administration
did nothing to alleviate the Palestinian resentment of
America. Bush even urged the Palestinians to elect a
leader other than Yasser Arafat. It spoke volumes about
his notion of democracy for the Palestinians.
The alternative, in the estimation of a large
number of Muslim youths, is reliance on Islam. Thus,
"Islam is the solution" has remained a powerful slogan,
and it gets support of a voluble portion of the populace
in several Muslim countries. However, considering the
fact that Islamic government in Iran has not exactly
been a shining example for emulation, one remains leery
about any suggestion that Muslims really want to see the
creation of Islamic government in their countries.
Muslims also know that mere slogans do not improve the
economic lot of their countries or the plight of the
Muslim ummah (community at large) in the global
arena. They need specific measures for promoting
political pluralism, institutionalizing political
moderation, and improving their acute state of economic
backwardness that has remained a hallmark of their
societies for centuries. They also know that Western
economic progress and political pluralism hold
considerable promise for emulation. But there has not
yet been an outcry for modernism in any Muslim country.
Turkey, whose military has consistently shown a strong
rejection of Islamism, has not emerged as a strong
source of emulation for Muslim countries. In fact, I
would argue that Turkey's tradition of secularism is
viewed with suspicion in a number of Muslim countries.
But if Turkey were to emerge as an economic power, its
example will be given serious consideration.
The
Jadidst tradition, that argued that there is no conflict
between Islam and modernity, was never systematically
pursued or promoted in any Muslim country. Its original
resurgence in India became a victim of the mega-struggle
for winning independence. Once the sub-continent was
divided after independence in 1947, Jadidism was never
pursued in Pakistan, which emerged as the spiritual heir
to that tradition. Alas, the nefarious practice of
military intervention in politics became the sine qua
non of that country soon after its existence. Then
emerged the Islamist regime of dictator Zia ul-Haq, who
used Islamization to promote his autocratic rule over
Pakistan. Islamization, as opposed to an enduring
integration of Islam and modernism, became the battle
cry in Pakistan. The US also did its own bit for
Islamization in Pakistan during the 1980s, by promoting
the militant version of Islam and jihad to win against
its archenemy, the USSR, in Afghanistan. Islamic
radicalism has remained a powerful force in Pakistan
ever since.
The tradition of Jadidism also
resurged in Central Asia, but was brutally suppressed by
the Russian czars and then by the communist czars, both
of whom were solely interested in subjugating the
contiguous Islamic countries of Central Asia and the
Transcaucasus region. Even after gaining independence
after the implosion of the Soviet Union, Muslim
countries in both those regions are still ruled by
brutal and acutely anti-democratic regimes.
One
always wonders how industrially and economically
developed Muslim countries would have been today if
Jadidism were to be systematically pursued as the
intellectual basis for Islamic development and
modernization. Considering the fact that economic
pluralism creates a highly conducive environment for
political pluralism, it can be argued that under those
conditions, Muslim countries could have also become
Islamic democracies.
There is a longing for
democracy in the world of Islam, a fact that all critics
of Islam should always remember. The Pew Research Center
has demonstrated that Muslims in 44 countries of its
survey "place high value on freedom of expression,
freedom of the press, multiparty systems and equal
treatment under the law". What is of equal significance
is that in "religiously diverse countries", such as
Nigeria and Lebanon, "Muslims generally favor keeping
religion a private matter at the same rates as
non-Muslims". That speaks volumes for the potential
evolution of a politically pluralistic society in the
world of Islam.
Yes, anti-Americanism has risen
significantly in the Islamic part of the world; however,
the media are terribly wrong in their ability to
correctly identify it. What is off-handedly and in a
cavalier manner called the rising spirals of
anti-Americanism in the Muslim world these days, in
reality is a rising anger toward the Bush administration
and its policies toward Muslim countries. The US
invasion of Iraq has highlighted for Muslims, rightly or
wrongly, that the current administration is bent on
waging military campaigns in the name of its "war on
terrorism" to weaken Muslims - a charge long made by
radical Islamists. Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research
Center writes, " ... Majorities in seven of eight Muslim
populations surveyed expressed worries that the US might
become a military threat to their countries."
However, values that America stands for are
consistently given favorable reception in Muslim
countries. Kohut states, "While the postwar poll paints
a mostly negative picture of the image of America, its
people and policies, the broader Pew Global Attitudes
survey shows wide support for the fundamental economic
and political values that the Untied States has long
promoted." He adds, "The postwar update finds that in
most Muslim populations, large majorities continue to
believe that Western-style democracy can work in their
countries. This is the case in predominantly Muslim
countries like Kuwait (83 percent) and Bangladesh (57
percent), but also in religiously diverse countries like
Nigeria (75 percent)."
The modalities of the
next phase of these hot and cold wars against Islamists
or political Islam will be determined by two events.
First, what happens to Iraq, and second, whether Bush is
reelected in 2004.
If Iraq becomes a success
story of democracy, then autocratic rulers will come
under increased pressure from within either to pluralize
their polities or enter the dustbin of history. Whether
democratic change will come to the Middle East and the
rest of the world of Islam depends on how willing those
autocratic regimes would be in their reaction to popular
demands for democratic change. If Iraq gets bloodier
than it is now, then the US might be forced to pull out.
Despite all the bravado, the Bush administration's
capacity to absorb casualties in Iraq is not infinite.
However, if the US were to withdraw, Islamists will have
a free hand not only in their attempts to establish the
kind of government they want, but also in terms of using
their presence in Iraq to topple surrounding regimes.
Thus, the current move toward the involvement of the
global community in the reconstruction of Iraq is a
positive one, and should be pursued with full vigor.
If Bush were reelected, the US presence in Iraq
would still be of a short duration. In all likelihood,
the US would not want to remain in charge of Iraq for a
long period of time. If Bush is defeated in 2004, his
successor will have to redefine the rules of America's
future presence in Iraq. A lot will also depend on what
is happening in that country's neighborhood.
Considering the fact that America's cold war
against Islamists or even Muslims is of a rhetorical
nature, a considerable amount of a cooling off period is
needed for reflection and reexamination. If the source
of Muslim anger is their politico-economic plight,
remedial programs can be developed. The problems of
societal development, no matter how obdurate, are still
resolvable. However, if this cold war is about the
superiority of one religion over the others - and I for
one believe that it is not the case - then we are in for
a several long hard winters of "civilizational clashes".
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an Alexandria,
Virginia, US-based independent strategic analyst.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
