A
core component of the United States' foreign
policy since the September 11, 2001, attacks on
the US has been educational reform in Muslim
countries to check the influence of extremist
ideologies and fundamentalism. International
obligations under the United Nations Security
Council's anti-extremism resolutions also require
curricular reform. Pakistan, as the birthplace of
the Taliban and home to many a militant Islamic
movement, finds itself at the center of policy
debates and projects on curbing extremism and
promoting "moderate Islam" through education.
A growing pile of policy proposals in the
United States, including a recent report from the
US Institute for Peace (USIP), urges continued
funding and support for such religious and
education reforms in Muslim countries. In
Pakistan, as in most other
targeted Muslim countries,
this text-based approach translates into US
funding, political support, and advocacy for
curriculum reform and government policies of
"enlightened moderation".
The US Agency
for International Development (USAID) and other US
missions engage a corps of moderate clerics - with
or without beards - who then set out to urge
ijtihad (the reinterpretation of the Koran
and Sunna) and rationalization of Islam. This
thinking has percolated up to President George W
Bush himself, who believes that the "extremists
distort the idea of jihad into calls for terrorist
murder" and quotes the Koran to counter the
ideology of Islamic terrorism.
There is a
preset belief among policymakers and think-tank
intelligentsia that all the ills associated with
the term "Islam" - extremism, terrorism,
fundamentalism - stem from a peculiar, literal,
distorted, and static reading of the Koran, the
sayings of the Prophet, and other sources of the
Islamic faith and law. Religious texts and their
interpretations are thus deemed to be at the root
of the problem. So, the argument goes, give these
texts new meanings; dig out the lost essence of
the divine word; set off theological and juridical
debates; scan the horizon for Islamic feminists
and modernists; and rephrase what is popularly
understood, gets published, or is taught in
schools as "Islam".
This might all sound
good. In practice, though, these US policies have
often come at the expense of democracy promotion.
America's partners in this effort to reform Islam
from within are medieval monarchies, military
regimes, Islamic emirates, and controlled
democracies. Whether supporting educational reform
in Pakistan or engaging Islamist parties in
Morocco, the United States may well be repeating
the same errors of the Cold War era. The
ideological attack on militant Islam resembles a
previous generation's war on communism, and the
search for responsible partners in the Islamic
world has led the United States, in the interests
of expediency, to embrace some unsavory principles
and characters.
Renewal or reaction?
The US emphasis on identifying and
supporting moderate Islam - and thus fomenting an
Islamic revival - finds its best expression in a
recent USIP report by Abdeslam M Maghraoui,
"American Foreign Policy and Islamic Renewal".
From its opening sentence to its last suggestion,
the report neatly divides the world into religious
sub-worlds of states and societies, with the
"Muslim world" problematic and significant enough
to require urgent attention and intervention. The
study is based on an analysis of the religious
jargon of Islamic clergy and jurists. USIP's
arguments as well as policy recommendations are
couched in Koranic terminology and substantiated
by religious citations.
This text-based
academic approach is inherently flawed, for it
ignores the political and social contexts in which
multi-ethnic, multilingual, and sect-ridden Muslim
communities exist. The devil is in the context,
not the text. As a result of this fundamental
flaw, the report's recommendation of supporting an
Islamic revival - at the expense of democracy
promotion - ends up causing more harm than good by
aligning US policy with a particular faith-based
outlook rather than a secular vision with
universal appeal.
Although the USIP study
notes the diversity of the Muslim world, it limits
the range of that diversity to ideological and
theological categories such as Islamists,
traditionalists, fundamentalists, modernists,
radicals, reformers, renewers, moderates,
terrorists, hardliners, etc. All of that
diversity, according to the USIP report, is
nonetheless rooted in and emanates from a single
source and its various interpretations: the divine
scriptures of Islam. Even the argument to support
a scattered chain of movements for "Islamic
renewal" across the Muslim world is substantiated
by a saying of the Prophet that "explicitly calls
upon Muslims to renew their faith at the beginning
of each century".
As such, the report
takes theological jargon like ijtihad
(reinterpretation of Islamic texts) as a useful,
even essential tool of analysis and policy
recommendations. Indeed, the report reduces the
entire political, economic, social, cultural and
historical evolution of so many disparate and
different people to a "religious and ideological
contest ... over the soul of Islam". The outcome
of this battle, says the report, "will be
determined by the balance of power and influence
between radical Islamists, bent on imposing a
puritanical form of Islam through intimidation and
violence, and moderate Muslims who aim to renew
Islam from within".
Arrayed against the
radical Islamists, according to the report, is a
"formidable politico-conceptual apparatus to
revise anachronistic rulings and legitimize
modern, accountable governance". The most
important of the Islamic concepts that support
this apparatus, the report says, is
ijtihad. But ijtihad itself is not a
guarantee of ushering in moderate Islam, as Iran's
example illustrates. It was, in fact, ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini's most significant and lasting
contribution to Shi'ite jurisprudence. Khomeini's
ijtihad turned upside down the
centuries-old established Shi'ite principle of
separation of spiritual power from political
power. The theocracy in Iran is a direct result of
Khomeini's ijtihad.
This
theological confusion leads the author of the
report - and the Bush administration more
generally - into supporting the fusion of religion
and state. Multicultural, multi-ethnic and
multi-religious states - as most Muslim states are
- establish religion as a state policy at their
own peril. Assigning political value to Islam and
favoring one religion or sect over others leads to
conflicts in society. The constitutional decree
that no laws shall be made respecting an
establishment of religion ought to apply to
America's policies toward Islam and Islamic
movements as well. The multitude of sects and
sub-sects in Sunni Islam, with none yielding to
any central spiritual or political authority,
means that binding decrees of the kind of
ijtihad the USIP envisages remains
improbable even at the academic level. The Sunni
clergy could never satisfactorily resolve the
question of eligibility (who is competent to do
ijtihad?) and legitimacy (why should a
certain jurist's ijtihad be universally
accepted?).
The suggestion to abandon
democracy promotion and focus on education and
funding "moderate" movements implies that somehow
politics in Muslim states is extraneous to other
social processes. The essentially political
questions of freedom of speech, right to
education, women's rights, the status of religious
minorities - all, says the report, can be
depoliticized, adjusted and justified according to
the Islamic discursive conventions. The Islamic
discourse of renewal - through which Muslim
thinkers, philosophers, clerics and jurists pored
over the holy scriptures to find concepts of
moderation and adapt them to modernity - would
make the ethnic, sectarian, linguistic,
socio-economic, cultural and political
distinctions irrelevant. Thus, the report implies,
feminist Islamic movements, if funded and
supported by the United States, can flourish and
outdo clerics and extremists even if the state
denies women (and indeed men) the right to choose
their leaders.
Primordial approach
The basic assumption behind this approach
of reformation by reinterpreting and rationalizing
religious concepts is that extremist movements and
organizations derive power from religious texts
only, and are insular and impervious to local,
national and international contexts. In "Origins
and Growth Patterns of Islamic Organizations in
Pakistan", Mohammad Waseem discusses the two
approaches to studying Islamic movements that have
emerged in the post-September 11 debate on
extremism: the primordial approach and the
instrumentalist or circumstantialist approach.
According to the primordial approach, the
inner state of mind of Muslim terrorists inspired
by jihadist teachings lies at the heart of the
problem. The instrumentalist approach, on the
other hand, considers Islamic ideology as a
socio-political construct sponsored by the elite
in pursuit of political objectives, says Waseem.
"While the primordial approach stresses the innate
mobilizing and inspiring strength of the appeal of
Islamic values and norms, the circumstantialist
approach focuses on state policies and
organizational goals," Waseem explains. "The
latter approach has been an obvious casualty in
the heat of debate during the war against terror."
The USIP report as well as policy declarations by
President Bush are prime examples of the
primordial approach to the problem of Islamic
extremism.
This conceptual flaw of
assigning a single identity to all people who call
themselves Muslims is fatal for policies seeking
to curb extremism. To collapse identity into one
dimension - religion - is to deny a variety of
other affiliations such as ethnicity, class and
politics. Such a single focus also ignores one of
the driving forces in the Middle East:
nationalism. As Oliver Miles, a former British
ambassador to Libya, argues, "One can hardly
accept an analysis of Middle Eastern politics that
does not mention nationalism." Not taking into
account the question of Arab nationalism - as a
whole as well as its individual, state-based,
dialect-based and tribal varieties - and focusing
instead on the single category of Islam renders
the primordialist approach incapable of describing
the Middle East reality and prescribing effective
policies.
Such simplistic classifications
even nourish terrorism. "An Islamist instigator of
violence against infidels may want Muslims to
forget that they have any identity other than
being Islamic," according to Amartya Sen, an
Indian economist and Nobel laureate. "What is
surprising is that those who would like to quell
that violence promote, in effect, the same
intellectual disorientation by seeing Muslims
primarily as members of an Islamic world."
This single-dimensional categorization of
citizens, an integral part of primordialist
thinking, is also evident in Pakistan's recently
announced curriculum reform.
Renewal in
Pakistan Influenced by such think-tanks as
USIP and pushed by the United States after
September 11, Pakistani President General Pervez
Musharraf has pledged to moderate Islam. The
Musharraf administration is undertaking reforms at
two levels: regulation and modernization of
sect-based religious seminaries, or madrassas, and
curricular reform in the government-run school
system. On both counts Pakistan has received funds
and policy input from a range of sources,
particularly USAID. On both counts, however,
Pakistan's progress has been marred by political
expediencies, a deference to the Islamic lobby of
clerics, and the state's self-proclaimed
constitutional agenda of Islamization.
The
US policy of supporting "Islamic renewal" has
legitimized the further fusion of state and
religion, also at the expense of political
democratization.
On July 24, Pakistani
Education Minister Javed Ashraf Qazi introduced a
new curriculum of Islamic studies, or Islamiyat, a
compulsory course throughout school and college
education. Qazi, a retired general who once headed
the military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI),
emphasized the point that jihad, as an Islamic
precept, would not be deleted from the new
curriculum because "it is an integral part of
Islamic teachings and Muslim beliefs".
In
defense of his assertion, the minister made use of
pedantic debates on what "jihad" means. "Jihad has
many dimensions which also include self-negation
(jihad bin nafas). We will teach students
the full concept of Jihad," Qazi said, much in
line with the USIP proposals of reinterpreting and
modernizing the traditional concepts. The new
curriculum for primary to higher secondary
students, the minister said, would still include
the eighth chapter of the Koran, Al-Anfal (Spoils
of War; booty) and other chapters over which
certain Western countries had reservations because
of their jihad-related content.
The
rationale behind this course of studies is to
present a moderate and peaceful version of Islamic
principles by renewing and rephrasing the true
meanings of the original divine message. Students
will be required to memorize verses of the Koran,
read the full book by the end of the middle
grades, study Islamic concepts such as prophethood
and faith in angels, and absorb the life of
Mohammed, including the battles the Prophet led to
"show his exemplary leadership and tolerance
toward his enemies". This attempt by Pakistan's
military regime to reform religious doctrines is
in line with the policy prescriptions being made
by such think-tanks as USIP.
This
educational reform is also based on a homogenous
idea of religion in Pakistan. The government
paints a picture of religious homogeneity to
justify adopting Islam as the official religion
and to blur ethnic identities. However, it is
generally believed that Pakistanis, of whom 96%
are Muslim, break down into 15-20% Shi'ite and 77%
Sunni. This binary Sunni-Shi'a division is
inadequate to describe the multitude of religious
traditions, denominations, and cultures found in
most Muslim states. In Pakistan, for instance, the
Sunni are further divided into four broad,
mutually exclusive categories: the Deobandis, the
Barevlis, the Ahle Hadith, and modern revivalist
socio-political movements such as the
Jamaat-e-Islami.
For US proponents of
"Islamic revival", this last party, the
Jamaat-e-Islami, may be critically important, for
it dominates most educational campuses in the
country, including the Islamic University of
Islamabad, a sister institution of Malaysia's
Islamic University, which the USIP has identified
as a potential partner. The Islamic academia and
intelligentsia in the country are bywords for
Jamaat-e-Islami sympathizers. The party is
organized along modern lines and has subsidiaries
and affiliated unions in every walk of life:
teachers, journalists, doctors, engineers, railway
workers, airline workers, farmers, trade unions,
students, etc.
An International Crisis
Group report describes the Jamaat-e-Islami as a
party that "claims a supra-sectarian stance, [but]
has evolved into a separate Sunni group around the
cult of its founder Abul A'la Maududi (1903-1979).
The rest of the Sunni family is critical of
Maududi for his modernism and lack of adherence to
any of the four Sunni schools." Despite
pretensions of modernity and moderation, however,
the Jamaat is the chief proponent of Kashmiri
jihad and the Afghan jihad before that. It also
has sponsored armed militant wings of Mujahideen.
More tellingly, the Jamaat-e-Islami and
the rest of the Islamic parties combined have
never outscored the mainstream political parties
in elections. From the first election in Pakistan
in 1970 to the latest in 2002, the overwhelmingly
Muslim people of Pakistan have opted for more
secular, less Islamic, more inclusive political
parties or ethnic movements. Extremists have
gained prominence, but not because of democracy.
Indeed, it is because of the lack of democracy
that they punch above their democratic weight and
achieve prominence.
Cold War solutions
Supporting curriculum reform in Pakistan
and specific Islamic factions would not be an
unprecedented mistake for US foreign-policy
professionals. The recent history of America's
engagement with Muslim states and societies
suggests that rather than being overlooked - as
the USIP report argues - modern Islamic movements
have received much political, financial and, in
many cases, military support from US policymakers.
Throughout the Cold War, the United States
augmented modern Islamic movements to counter the
threat of socialism and communism. As people of
faith, they were preferable as allies against
godless communists. Since Bush now likens Islamic
terrorism to communism, the search for solutions
to this problem is also taking the United States
on the familiar path of funding selected, pliable
segments of Islamic movements. During the Cold
War, the US poured money into jihad against
communism. Today, the US is pouring money into
ijtihad against Islamic extremism. The
language might be different, but the results are
likely to be the same.
The classical and
well-documented example is that of the Afghan
Islamic movements that overthrew the Soviet forces
after a jihad inspired and orchestrated by
Pakistan's Islamic-minded, US-sponsored military
dictator, Zia ul-Haq. Special textbooks were
published in local Afghan languages, designed by
the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the
University of Nebraska-Omaha under a USAID grant
in the early 1980s. Written by American
Afghanistan experts and anti-Soviet Afghan
educators, they aimed at promoting jihadist values
and militant training among Afghans.
USAID
paid the University of Nebraska US$51 million from
1984 to 1994 to develop and design these
textbooks, which were mostly printed in Pakistan.
More than 13 million were distributed at Afghan
refugee camps and Pakistani madrassas where
students learned basic math by counting dead
Russians and Kalashnikov rifles. After the war
ended, these textbooks were still used in Afghan
schools. Even the Taliban found them suitable.
Similarly, Palestinian and Egyptian
Islamic movements were once beholden to Washington
as counterweights to the socialist, secular Arab
nationalism of Yasser Arafat and Gamal Abdel
Nasser. The fundamentalist Wahhabi Saudi kingdom,
the single largest source of support and succor to
movements of "Islamic renewal" (including many of
the institutions identified by the USIP report as
"America's most obvious allies and potential
partners"), remains a close US ally even today. If
anything, the unruly movements of jihad and sharia
implementation are a direct product of America's
policy of containing and countering communism,
which in the process squeezed out the liberal,
democratic and secular discourse from Muslim
societies.
So the United States is
breaking no new ground as it adopts the policy of
funding religious-textbook reform, strengthening
"moderate" Islamic movements, and other
charitable, literary and educational institutions
identified by the USIP as capable of and eager to
reclaim the Islamic heritage from the extremists.
Since these "renewal movements", however,
are not popular with the electorate, the natural
conclusion for the USIP and others is to abandon
democracy in practice (while maintaining its
desirability in theory). As in the Cold War,
democracy has again become the favorite target of
modern Islamic movements and their supporters. The
argument now, as then, is that free elections
would likely bring to power the anti-American
movements - fundamentalists now, socialists then.
The result of employing religion as an instrument
of politics, a Cold War policy that the US
continues to pursue in its "war on terrorism",
will be as counterproductive as this history
suggests.
Fears of extremists coming to
power after free elections do not apply to
Pakistan, at least. Victories of Islamic
extremists elsewhere can be better explained with
reference to the local and national context of
those Muslims, whether Hamas in Palestine or the
Islamic Front for Salvation in Algeria. Given the
persistent and historical lack of democracy in
most Muslim states, it might as well be safe to
argue that the present prominence of extremists is
due to too little or no democracy, rather than
because of democracy.
The United States
should not be pouring money into an attempt to
reform Islam from within. It should not be
supporting faith-based, mutually exclusive
sectarian education of the various kinds of Islam.
Instead, the United States should support secular
education, particularly science education. It
should promote tolerance not in and through the
texts of Islam but through state laws and their
implementation.
The fusion of the state
and Islam has discouraged democracy and encouraged
militancy. The United States should be working to
decouple the two. Otherwise, the ghosts of the
Cold War will come back to haunt the US.
Supporting jihad in the 1980s eventually created
the blowback of al-Qaeda. Supporting Islamic
reform now, however appealing it might seem on
paper, will inevitably produce a new cycle of
blowback as the United States continues to
confront undemocratic, militarized Islamic
governments in the future.
FPIF
contributor Najum Mushtaq is a
Nairobi-based journalist.
