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The folly of 'containing' political
Islam
By Phar Kim Beng
HONG
KONG - It has been said that one of the most striking
innovations of Osama bin Laden's brand of international
terrorism has been a vision of a holy war, or jihad,
that excludes any possibility of compromise. Bin Laden
and his followers do not seek political advantage in a
negotiating process, affirmed Daniel Benjamin, who was
formerly the director of the office of transnational
threats in the Bill Clinton White House. Rather,
Benjamin asserted: "They want change that is so radical
as to defy any concept of negotiations. They are
conducting a war, not seeking entrance into the status
quo."
As the United States appears bent on
containing political Islam, otherwise known as Islamic
revivalism or fundamentalism, it is crucial to
understand how it has come to dominate the international
agenda.
What is evidently true is that since the end
of Cold War, the perception of Islam as a potential threat
to the West has significantly increased. Immediately
after the demise of the Soviet Union, the late
Manfred Wonner, as secretary general of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), openly identified
Islam as a source of threat, giving an important glimpse
into Western insecurity.
Among the reasons
frequently offered in the scholarly community as to why
political Islam is a threat, none is more salient than
the assertion that neither political Islam nor Islam as
a religion itself is compatible to liberal democracy.
This is the argument peddled by Bernard Lewis at
Princeton University, and supported by the likes of
Samuel Huntington in his "clash of civilizations"
thesis.
Inherent in such arguments is the belief
that political Islam constitutes both an affront to and
an assault against Western-dominated contemporary world
order.
Nevertheless, it is one thing to affirm
the incompatibility of political Islam to the world - a
reasonable intellectual argument - yet quite another to
conclude that all Islamists are totally
"irreconcilable". The latter puts Islamists immediately
out of the pale of rational discourse, almost
permanently consigning them to the margin of
international order.
As with any attempt to
sideline a political movement, such a policy entails the
risk of a possible backlash. After all, political actors
who are sidelined would want their grievances heard.
Echoing Lewis and Huntington, Peter Rodman, now
a senior member of the US administration of President
George W Bush, has attested to the importance of
containing political Islam, especially those elements
bankrolled by Iran and other radical regimes.
In
an article published in the Middle Eastern Policy Review
in 1994, Rodman had already affirmed that "Islamic
fundamentalists" should basically be confronted rather
than co-opted. By this he proposed the use of similar
strategy employed against the Soviets and the leftist
radicals in Latin America during the Cold War:
containment.
If one were to take Rodman's
argument seriously, it is clear that it has immediate
security implications. To begin with, adopting Rodman's
strategy of containment means maintaining permanent
sanctions against Iran (1979), Libya (1986), Iraq (1990)
and Sudan (1998); indeed even going to war against Iraq
to sever any potential links with al-Qaeda.
Yet
if US foreign policy toward these countries is locked
into a state of indefinite enmity, why wouldn't the
level of threat increase exponentially? Indeed, if
sanctions are permanently maintained or new military
campaigns launched, populist fury in the Muslim world
would grow more strident by the day - as, in fact, it
has. This would have been what Osama bin Laden would
have wanted too: a radicalization of Muslim opinion.
Indeed, groups identified with bin Laden's al-Qaeda now
operate in about three dozen countries; 60 countries,
according to US Secretary of State Colin Powell. They
could easily latch on to the billowing anger to gain
more support. Al-Qaeda would be lionized.
More
important, if the United States were to heed Rodman's
call for total containment, the above regimes would
seize on it as an excuse to train or house more Islamic
fundamentalists.
Nevertheless, as had been made
clear by moderate scholars such as William Graham and
John Esposito, political Islam remains a complex
phenomenon, with each Islamic group having a different
agenda and method from the other. Not all are against
compromise.
Thus, if the United States were to
adopt a belligerent posture against political Islam writ
large, anti-US elements in these movements would
conveniently coalesce into one united front.
As
such, it is only sensible that the United States try to
engage with Islamic elements that are not avowedly
anti-American. This is to increase mutual understanding
before the conflict between political Islam and America
spirals into permanent damage.
Engagement is a
task that ought to be taken up by the United States with
great vigor, barring which the geopolitical stability of
the world will be affected: there are, after all, 52
countries that claim Islam as their official religion.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
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