HOW TO LOSE
THE WAR ON TERROR PART 4: Acts of
faith By Mark Perry and
Alastair Crooke
(For earlier articles in
the series, please click here.)
That
talking and listening would now seem so difficult
is not the result of some inherent inability of
differing cultures to understand one another, or
of Islam's long-standing religious or political
incompatibility with the West, nor of some
inevitable and irrepressible clash of
civilizations.
Rather, the decision not to
talk and not to listen is the result of a
purposeful political choice made by political
figures in the West (who believe that democracy is
"ours", while "the arc of violence" is "theirs")
and by Salafists in the Islamic world (who believe
their cause is "sacred" while ours is
"idolatrous").
While the roots of this
mutual intolerance are only now becoming
clear, both Western
takfiris and Islamic Salafists adhere to
similar doctrinal principles and, at least in
part, are rooted in the fear that their values are
under siege not simply by "terrorists" (in the
views of the West) and "hegemonists" (in the views
of the Salafists) but more prominently from
dissenters in each society whose lack of moral
certainty is viewed as a weakness.
Neo-conservatism ... In 1996,
prominent conservatives William Kristol and Robert
Kagan wrote that the United States had a special
role in spreading democracy; the nation should not
simply be "a benevolent hegemon", but should "go
abroad in search of monsters".
And why
not? they asked. "Because America has the capacity
to contain or destroy many of the world's
monsters, most of which can be found without much
searching, and because the responsibility for the
peace and security of the international order
rests so heavily on America's shoulders, a policy
of sitting atop a hill and leading by example
becomes in practice a policy of cowardice and
dishonor." Kristol and Kagan called themselves
"neo-Reaganites", but those who espoused their
policies soon began to describe themselves as
neo-conservatives.
That modern Western
political thought has been unduly influenced by
the writings and teachings of University of
Chicago Professor Leo Strauss - said to be the
original "neo-conservative" - is by now a
fashionable, if exaggerated and reductive, popular
convention. Paradoxically, the convention is made
use of most prominently by the unconventional:
followers of Lyndon LaRouche, anti-Zionists,
marginalized libertarians, irritated conservatives
and a range of conspiracy theorists that span the
political spectrum.
Prominent
neo-conservative David Horowitz rejects the
category outright ("'Neo-conservatism' is a term
almost exclusively used by the enemies of
America's liberation of Iraq"), while former
deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz (one of
Strauss's students) says the term is used in the
Middle Eastern press as "a euphemism for some kind
of nefarious Zionist conspiracy".
Then
too, there is a tendency to "read back" into
Strauss from the neo-conservatives, a simple
enough task of finding in his works echoes of
current political thinking. That said, the
godfather of neo-conservatism, Irving Kristol (the
founder of The Public Interest and author of
Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an
Idea), embraces the term, describing
neo-conservatives as "liberals mugged by reality"
- that is to say, those liberals whose formerly
naive view of the world was transformed by
communism's deeply rooted and obvious evil.
If conspiracy-oriented, the
neo-conservative label nevertheless accurately
describes a thread of beliefs that unite a core of
former liberals and militant anti-communists who
dominate Western foreign-policy thinking. While a
handful of neo-conservatives dismiss the label,
many others have willingly and proudly adopted it
as a moniker of their set of beliefs or, while
rejecting it, have followed neo-conservative
precepts and associate themselves with its
promoters.
Those neo-conservatives
comprise a current "who's who" of the Western
power elite: Horowitz, Wolfowitz and Irving
Kristol, as well as US Deputy National Security
Adviser Elliott Abrams, former secretary of
education William Bennett, author and historian
Max Boot, American Enterprise Institute
foreign-policy expert Thomas Donnelly, former US
under secretary of defense for policy Douglas
Feith, author Frances Fukuyama, former US
assistant secretary of defense Frank Gaffney,
historian and political theorist Robert Kagan,
father and son authors (While American
Sleeps) Donald and Frederick Kagan, former US
ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne
Kirkpatrick, Washington Institute for Near East
Policy fellow Martin Kramer, editor and columnist
William Kristol, American Enterprise Institute
analyst Michael Ledeen, and American-Israel Public
Affairs Committee editor Michael Lewis (the son of
Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis).
Others
are think-tank founder Clifford May, former New
Republic editor Martin Peretz, former US assistant
secretary of defense Richard Perle, former
Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, Middle East
Quarterly editor Michael Rubin, Washington
Institute for Near East Policy official Robert
Satloff, former US Central Intelligence Agency
director James Woolsey, Hudson Institute scholar
Meyrav Wurmser, and US Vice President Richard
Cheney's Middle East adviser, David Wurmser -
among many others.
The reach of these
policymakers, pundits, intellectuals, authors and
government officials is breathtaking; their works
have appeared in closely read neo-conservative
publications (Commentary, Policy Review, The
National Review, The New Republic, The Public
Interest, The American Spectator, The Weekly
Standard), and they control or substantially
influence a number of respected Washington
think-tanks: The Heritage Foundation, the American
Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for the
Defense of Democracies, the Project for the New
American Century, and the Hudson Institute.
How far is their reach? In the course of a
conversation with the foreign minister of
Hezbollah, Nawaf Mousawi, he let slip that he was
reading Karl Popper. We were impressed with this
seemingly offhand tidbit (that a Hezbollah
official would be reading a Western philosopher we
found of passing interest) until we realized that
Popper's influential The Open Society and Its
Enemies had been a target for some of Leo
Strauss's most pointed political critiques.
There is as broad a political spectrum within
the neo-conservative movement as there is in the
US in general. Our identification of particular
individuals as a part of the same political
current is not to say that neo-conservatives agree
on each and every issue. Then, too, it is as
important for us to differentiate between trends
inside the movement as it is important for
neo-conservatives, we argue, to recognize the
diversity of currents inside of political Islam.
It is difficult, for instance, to list
Michael Ledeen and Paul Wolfowitz as a part of the
same political line. A resident scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen is known in
Washington for his extreme statements - he once
accused US senator and Vietnam combat veteran
Chuck Hagel of "appeasement", said that the
"Franco-German" opposition to the Iraq war
identified those countries as America's "strategic
enemies", and regularly advocates the overthrow of
"the murderous mullahcracy" in Iran.
Wolfowitz, on the other hand, seems a
wrongly maligned figure: while he bears some
responsibility for the Iraq debacle, he has
consistently called for a recognition of
Palestinian aspirations (which drew raucous "boos"
from a pro-Israel rally held after September 11,
2001) and is said to be privately angered by the
Bush administration's current policy of cutting
funding to the Hamas-run Palestinian Authority.
It would be as impossible to accuse
Wolfowitz of the same off-hand
just-below-the-surface ugliness that characterizes
Michael Ledeen as it would be to suppose that
Ledeen would ever advocate the recognition of
Palestinian grievances.
Even so, while
there are disagreements among neo-conservatives
over the minutiae of some foreign-policy issues,
there is broad agreement on a core set of
principles: that the United States not only
"possesses the means - economic, military,
diplomatic - to realize its expansive geopolitical
purposes" (in Thomas Donnelly's phrase), but that
it has a moral obligation to do so.
The
attacks of September 11 are seen as the result not
of overweening US ambitions ("the reason their
terrorists are over here is because our soldiers
are over there", in conservative Patrick
Buchanan's famous phrase), but because the United
States and its allies have not been vigilant.
"The September 11 attack was a result of
insufficient American involvement and ambition;
the solution is to be more expansive in our goals
and more assertive in their implementation," Max
Boot wrote just one month after the attacks.
Unashamedly, and bluntly, Boot's liturgical
flourishes have become a part of the
neo-conservative catechism: "The most realistic
response to terrorism is for America to embrace
its imperial role." Boot's apparent embrace of
empire, however, is ladled by neo-conservatives'
nearly apostolic faith in the power of democracy -
a faith first enunciated by Wolfowitz at the
height of the Cold War: "The best antidote to
communism is democracy," he wrote in April 1985.
While Wolfowitz's formula caused
discomfort among some neo-conservatives (Wolfowitz
supported the shah of Iran, but only - as he
explained - because Iran did not have
"well-established institutions of democracy"), it
has become the principal sacrament of the
neo-conservative creed.
The genius of
neo-conservatism is that its adherents have
unblinkingly adopted the kind of metaphysical
absolutism that Paul once reserved for his savior
- and so are invulnerable to the kind of
Fallujah-induced moral vertigo that so
relentlessly stalks the rest of us. The power of
this unshakable faith not only remains the major
(or only) political current in the United States,
it continues to gain adherents among America's
once-wobbly allies. A newly elected
conservative government in Canada has reinforced
its commitment to America's foreign policy, and
neo-conservatives are now among the most
influential voices in the French cabinet. And
recently, British Prime Minister Tony Blair
emerged as one of neo-conservatism's most
articulate supporters: "This is not a clash
between civilizations. It is a clash about
civilization," he said in March. "It is the
age-old battle between progress and reaction,
between those who embrace and see opportunity in
the modern world and those who reject its
existence; between optimism and hope on the one
hand and pessimism and fear on the other. That is
what this battle is about; it is a battle of
values and progress; and therefore it is one we
must win."
Blair's message was an
unmistakable confirmation of neo-conservatism's
central, and now all but canonical, tenet: in
expanding the US empire it is promoting its
values; if some oppose the empire, it's only
because they oppose US values - or have none.
...and its discontents Neo-conservatism is more than simply a set of
ideas - it is a kind of political theology. Its
major political principles derive from a critique
of modern liberal and secular society. Deeply
influenced by the fall of Germany's Weimar
Republic, Leo Strauss (a German who emigrated to
the US) critiqued Weimar's leaders as being
insufficiently ruthless in suppressing the Nazis;
they played by the rules and were defeated.
"The Weimar Republic was weak. It had only
one moment of strength if not greatness: its
violent reaction to the assassination of the
Jewish minister of foreign affairs, Walter
Rathenau, in 1922," Strauss wrote in 1966. "All in
all, Weimar showed the spectacle of justice
without force, or of justice incapable of
resorting to force."
The Weimar metaphor
is much-repeated and points to our naivety - the
implication being that we are talking with Nazis
who, it is said, came to power as a result of an
election. This position was on prominent display
during a briefing that we gave at the Middle East
Institute last October, when an analyst from a
leading Washington, DC, think-tank pointedly
claimed that our promotion of democracy for
Islamist groups could lead to "another Weimar".
After all, this critic claimed, "Hitler came to
power through a democratic election."
The
same claim has been made by a host of commentators
and senior foreign-policy makers, most but not all
of whom are neo-conservatives, including: L Paul
Bremer (who claimed, in November 2004, that
Weimar's huge debt "led to Adolf Hitler's
election"), Daniel Pipes (who wrote last January
that "Western capitals need to show Palestinians
that - like Germans electing Hitler in 1933 - they
have made a decision gravely unacceptable to
civilized opinion"), and even Donald Rumsfeld (who
criticized Venezuela's people for electing Hugo
Chavez "just like Adolf Hitler, who was elected
legally").
The only problem with this
historical position is that it is wrong: Hitler
did not come to office as the result of an
election. In fact, he was soundly defeated in
Germany's presidential election of 1932, but was
appointed chancellor in 1933 by Paul von
Hindenburg. Hitler took dictatorial powers in 1933
as the result of a "soft coup", when the Nazi
leadership engineered the Reichstag fire, blamed
the communists, and suspended all future
elections. (Weimar official Franz von Papen was
later tried at Nuremberg for his role in
engineering Hitler's appointment as chancellor of
Germany - and was acquitted.)
In
emphasizing the flaws of the Weimar Republic,
Strauss struck at what he identified as the three
pillars of modern liberal thought: "moral
relativism", "multiculturalism" and
"utilitarianism". Of the three, moral relativism
(Strauss wrote) constitutes the greatest threat to
the strength of Western society. If all views are
held to be equally legitimate and all views have
equal value, Strauss believed, then no person's
view can be an expression of the "truth". German
National Socialism was not just another point of
view, it was an absolute evil.
Gulled by
their liberal secular beliefs, by the bankrupt
notion that all ideas are equally credible, and
yearning for the rewards of a sleep-inducing
materialist society, the leaders of Weimar passed
out of office - and into the camps.
"Moral
relativism", Strauss believed, would lead
inevitably to the eclipse of idealism in the West,
undermining the sense of national sacrifice that
motivates any society. The atomization of social
life through the adoption of "multiculturalism"
and the softening of social strength by providing
the greatest good for the greatest number would
allow people to retreat into their own consumerist
bubble.
Bereft of beliefs, adrift in a sea
of multiple cultures, fed on the hedonism that
followed from the accumulation of material goods,
the West would implode. Inevitably "moral
relativism", "multiculturalism" and
"utilitarianism" will so undermine any society,
Strauss argued, that a government's first and only
priority would be economic management. The danger
of "moral relativism" is that it inevitably leads
to political acquiescence.
Strauss was
convinced he was right, and for good reason. He
looked on aghast as Weimar's intellectual
inheritors (Neville Chamberlain, Charles
Lindbergh, the Bund and others) transformed their
moral relativism into political appeasement -
which led to the deaths of untold millions.
Strauss's answer was that modern societies
must shun moral relativism. By implication,
Strauss seemed to be saying, the only way for
secular and democratic societies to stimulate
idealism and national sacrifice is for political
leaders to cast national goals in terms of good
and evil. Because tyrannies do not hold the same
values as republics, the tyrants are always wrong,
we are always right, and there can be no excuse,
no justification, and no reason behind a tyranny's
actions.
The enemies of those with values
are those who have none. Only by understanding
this threat - and insisting that the response to
it be uncompromising - can evil hope to be
defeated. Strauss argued, further, that
international politics was a perpetual struggle
between states and that, in this struggle, deceit
was a common currency. But deceit, in Strauss's
view, can be a weapon in the struggle of values.
Secular societies need not recoil from deceit, as
the triumph of their values far outweighs the
damage such deceit might cause.
Nor,
Strauss argued, should secular societies recoil
from the necessity of "regime change". Strauss
believed that the customs, habits and institutions
of a society give it its character. For secular
societies to triumph, Strauss wrote, it would be
necessary for them to change the customs, habits
and institutions of tyrannies. In the face of
political evil, regime change remains the only
means open to secular societies to transform
tyrannies to republics.
Then too, as
political conflict is embedded in political acts,
the transformation of tyrannies would actually
strengthen democratic societies: "Because mankind
is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed,"
Strauss wrote. "Such governance can only be
established, however, when men are united - and
they can only be united against other people."
We note that while Leo Strauss did not
know the uses to which his students would put his
scholarship, his disciples have taken his most
important ideas as a starting point for their own
political views. Strauss believed that the human
condition is governed by a singular choice: to
live a life of inquiry or to live a life in
obedience to law. This choice - between "Athens"
and "Jerusalem" - is the choice that has faced all
humans: whether to remain in Plato's cave (where
reality appears as mere shadows on a wall) or
whether to ascend into the sunlight of full
knowledge.
The awful price of making a
choice is that while in the cave we remain
ignorant of the way things really are - but if we
ascend into the sunlight we, like Socrates, might
well forfeit our lives.
So far so good,
but Strauss also believed that this fundamental
choice was distorted by the Enlightenment, whose
thinkers "were hostile to theological-political
authority". The "waves of modernity" that resulted
from the Enlightenment (including the subversive
ideas that the universe is intelligible, that
human thought holds the key to unlocking its
mysteries, that rights are inalienable and that
all human lives have equal value), dampened the
tensions between Athens and Jerusalem.
"Seen in this light," commentator Mark
Lilla notes, "Strauss's seemingly scattered
historical studies and their unique approach take
on coherent philosophical meaning. They are all
based on the large assumption that we are living
under some sort of spell in the 'second cave' of
Enlightenment illusions, and on the enticing
thought that escape is possible."
Strauss's ideas had a powerful influence
on his students, many of whom openly described
themselves as his disciples. One of these
self-proclaimed disciples was Allan Bloom, a Plato
scholar whose masterful translation of The
Republic is judged by some as the closest
approximation to Plato's original.
Bloom
spent much of the 1960s at Cornell University,
where Wolfowitz was one of his students and where,
as a result of the sometimes violent on-campus
protests over the Vietnam War, he began shaping
his own ideas about the "moral relativism"
infecting US society. The result was the eventual
publication of The Closing of the American
Mind, a critique of US higher education.
Bloom argued that the decay in teaching
and scholarship was directly attributable to US
academia's adoption of academic programs that
devalued the brilliance of "the great books" as
simply the product of "dead white men". Devaluing
the worth of the West's great thinkers, Bloom
wrote, was leading to the erosion of values among
American students, creating a crisis akin to that
which had infected the Weimar Republic: "The
American university in the '60s was experiencing
the same dismantling of the structure of rational
inquiry as had the German university in the '30s,"
Bloom wrote. "Whether it be Nuremberg or
Woodstock, the principle is the same."
The
erosion of values was being deepened by a
misconceived multiculturalism: "The point is to
force students to recognize that there are other
ways of thinking and that Western ways are not
better," Bloom wrote. "But if the students were
really to learn something of the minds of these
non-Western cultures - which they do not - they
would find that each and every one of these
cultures is ethnocentric."
Bloom's
solution to these problems caused enormous
controversy, as they were couched in "Straussian"
political terms: what was needed, Bloom argued,
was an end to "educational appeasement" and to the
intellectual distortions of "moral relativism".
Americans must emerge from their cave of illusion
where all ideas have equal weight.
St
Paul and St George The idea that
non-Western cultures are nativist, closed and - in
Bloom's phrase - "ethnocentric" is rooted in the
same ancient Greek inheritance that gave us Plato
and Aristotle. The Greeks also gave us the word
"barbarian", because the uncivilized people on
their shores were viewed as "babblers" who spoke
an incomprehensible language, who literally
"baba'd" or "stammered" and so could not be
understood.
The Greeks soon put this term
to political uses, accusing their Persian enemies
of rejecting the values promoted by the
city-state, where free citizens could live in
peace while the Persians were slaves to a king -
they were "barbarians". The inimitable Paul of
Tarsus expanded the meaning of the term, likening
non-believers to "barbarians" who remained in
darkness: when he spoke of "Christ crucified" they
refused to listen, when they spoke of "the gods"
he refused to hear: "Therefore I know not the
meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that
speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall
be a barbarian unto me." Paul refused to listen
not because the pagans could not be heard, but
because they had nothing to say.
That
Paul's refusal to speak or listen has been passed
down to us in the West and is a part of our
religious and political heritage is the subject of
Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western
Mind. Freeman's narrative is seen by many as a
response to Allan Bloom's overheated condemnation
of "moral relativism" and "multiculturalism".
While Freeman never responds directly to Bloom's
thesis, the similarities in titles are hard to
miss.
While Freeman's work uncovers the
role of orthodox Christianity in suppressing Greek
rationalism in the wake of Paul's testimony, he
implies that just as faith gained prominence over
reason in the 5th century, so too now our
inability to view other cultures as anything other
than "ethnocentric" has gained ascendancy in
Western political circles. The battle between
faith and reason is still alive today, Freeman
argues, but it was Paul who "declared the war and
prepared the battlefield".
Indeed, Western
officials have quite unconsciously adopted Paul's
language, describing Islamists as a class of new
barbarians whose words are without content. When a
US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
counter-terrorism official was asked for his views
on Ayman al-Zawahiri's April 27 video, he
responded with a shrug: "It's the same old
jihadist rigmarole," he said. "Rigmarole" is a
slang expression first used in the late 1770s that
is derived from "ragman roll", the name of a
children's game filled with incomprehensible
words.
More properly, the FBI statement
was used to describe "a string of incoherent
statements; a disjointed or rambling speech,
discourse, story; a trivial or almost senseless
harangue". It did not matter what Zawahiri said -
he was a barbarian unto us, he was "babbling".
There is little subtlety in the West's
presentation of Islam as a religion of barbarians:
Christian evangelical programs have regularly
described Islam as a "religion of violence" that
"rejects our value system". Franklin Graham, the
son of the popular American preacher Billy Graham
(and a regular visitor to the Bush White House),
was outspoken in condemning Islam in the wake of
the September 11 attacks, conflating the faith of
the attackers with Islam in general: "We did not
attack Islam, but Islam attacked us. The god of
Islam is not the same god. He's not the son of God
of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It's a
different god, and I believe it is a very evil and
wicked religion," he said.
Graham is not
here posing as an expert on Islam, but as a man of
faith - for, as Paul made eminently clear,
expertise is not necessary where faith is present.
That the Bush administration was comfortable with
Graham's certainty was never in doubt, as the
faith-based certainty he articulated had already
arrived in the White House just after the
inauguration of President George W Bush in 2001.
New York Times essayist and journalist Ron
Suskind has noted that even in the earliest day of
the Bush presidency, the administration showed a
disturbing "disdain for contemplation or
deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a
retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying
impatience with doubters and even friendly
questioners".
The emergence of Bush's
faith-based certainty was applied initially to
church-based community programs, which were
granted the status of community-service
organizations that could receive government monies
- and were also free from taxation. The same
approach to government was given greater life
after September 11, where Bush's certainty took on
a disturbing messianism.
"He [Bush] truly
believes he's on a mission from God," one former
administration official notes. "Absolute faith
like that overwhelms the need for analysis. The
whole thing about faith is to believe things for
which there is no empirical evidence." Another
official told Suskind that he believes that in the
wake of September 11, Bush emerged as "a messianic
American Calvinist". In fact, Bush showed
indelicate impatience with anyone who claimed that
September 11 presented the West with a complicated
test that required a nuanced, careful and patient
response.
Bush dismissed that view. His
was a patented neo-conservative approach -
September 11 had nothing to do with America's role
in the region. "America was targeted for attack
because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and
opportunity in the world," Bush said one month
after September 11. When people began to ask what
the US and its allies might have done to spark the
attacks, Bush responded immediately. The attacks
had nothing to do with US policy. "He wanted to
cut that off right away," a former speechwriter
notes, "and make it clear that he saw absolutely
no moral equivalence."
Ataturk's
advocate But for the West to engage in
what Tony Blair called "the age-old battle between
progress and reaction, between those who embrace
and see opportunity in the modern world and those
who reject its existence; between optimism and
hope on the one hand and pessimism and fear on the
other", it was not simply necessary that the
neo-conservatives battle the monster of militant
Islam, it was essential that the West also provide
a model for change, for political transformation -
and an expert standard-bearer whose knowledge of
the Islamic world would give the Western program a
patina of legitimacy.
The Bush
administration found such an expert
standard-bearer in Bernard Lewis, readily adopting
Turkey as a model for the kinds of changes that
could be wrought through the imposition of modern
Western-style secularism. Lewis's The Emergence
of Modern Turkey was published in 1961. Lewis
was then an increasingly respected scholar, a
graduate of the University of London, and a
prolific writer and linguist.
The
Emergence of Modern Turkey was Lewis's foray
into an interpretive view of Islam as a religion
at war with itself and at war with the West's
conception of secular civilization. Lewis was
transfixed by Kemal Ataturk's forced
secularization of Turkey: the abolition of the
Caliphate, the imposition of puritanical
secularism, the closing of religious schools, the
banning of Islamic dress, and the purging of the
Turkish language of its Arabic vocabulary.
For Lewis, Ataturk's "reforms" seemed to
confirm that Judeo-Christian civilization was
entering the final stages of a protracted struggle
with Islam. Turkey would be a battleground in that
inevitable clash, and a model of how a modern
secular society could triumph over Islam's
medieval traditions. As Lewis's arguments took
hold, his stature in the academic community
increased until he was acknowledged as America's
chief interpreter of Islam.
It was Lewis,
and not Samuel Huntington, who coined the term
"clash of civilizations" in an article titled "The
Roots of Muslim Rage". "It should by now be clear
that we are facing a mood and a movement far
transcending the level of issues and policies and
the governments that pursue them," he wrote in the
September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
"This is no less than a clash of civilizations -
that perhaps irrational but surely historic
reactions of an ancient rival against our
Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and
the worldwide expansion of both."
Lewis's
critics have struck back, with claims of "lazy
generalizations, the reckless distortions of
history, the wholesale demotion of civilizations
into categories like irrational and enraged", and
by pointing out that Lewis treats "a billion
people" as if they were one, and that the clash of
civilization is between "us" and them" - between
those who have values, and those who have none.
The late Edward Said was Lewis's (and
Huntington's) most persistent and articulate
critic, taking on the "clash of civilizations"
thesis in "The Clash of Definitions", an essay
that enraged both his antagonists: "Is it wise as
an intellectual and a scholarly expert to produce
a simplified map of the world and then hand it to
generals and civilian lawmakers as a prescription
for first comprehending and then acting in the
world? Doesn't this method in effect prolong,
exacerbate, and deepen conflict? Do we want a
clash of civilizations?"
While Lewis's
1990 Atlantic essay spurred his detractors, it
enhanced his reputation among neo-conservatives,
who saw him as a purveyor of the values that would
be promoted by the United States in the Middle
East - where the US, after September 11, would set
out to "destroy many of the world's monsters".
The attacks on September 11 catapulted
Lewis from the world of scholarly debates into the
home of Vice President Dick Cheney, who convened a
dinner of experts to help shape a policy toward
Islam. Lewis dominated the discussion, telling
Cheney that radical Islamists viewed the US as
incapable of maintaining a strong foreign-policy
course, as evidenced by the US retreat from Beirut
in 1983 and from Somalia in 1993.
Cheney
was entranced by Lewis's views, though not simply
because he agreed with him: here was a man with a
vision of Islam and the credentials that would
give US policy legitimacy. Cheney was particularly
attracted by Lewis's view that Islam's problems
are largely self-inflicted, and that the legacy of
Western colonialism and economic exploitation has
little to do with Muslim attacks on Western
societies.
This fit well with the
neo-conservative view - which was already
maintaining that "when we were attacked on
September 11, we knew the main reason for the
attack was that Islamists hated our way of life,
our virtues, our freedoms". The attacks had
nothing to do with Western policies, with the
legacy of colonialism, or with the support for
Middle Eastern dictators. It wasn't that we in the
West have bad policies, it was that they have no
values.
It is not hard to see how the
young Lewis (a scholar diligently bent over his
researches in the dusty Ottoman archives in the
wake of World War II) was so taken with Kemal
Ataturk. Here was a Muslim, Lewis believed, who
understood that modernization of his culture could
only take place when Islam adopted the narrative
of the West.
Lewis set about his life's
work with a fury, transmitting Ataturk's vision of
a new Middle East for a generation of US and
British policymakers. His influence is undeniable:
Lewis's views on Islam embody the now prevalent
Western vision of Islamists as reactionaries at
war with modernism, as obscuritanists doing battle
with values, as technophobes seeking a return to
the 7th century. Lewis was particularly intrigued
by Ataturk's description of Islam as "a putrefied
corpse which poisons our lives" and as "the enemy
of civilization and science".
When Ataturk
ended the thousand-year Caliphate in 1923, his
political program of modernization paralleled his
project to demonize Islam. Ataturk's followers
rewrote the history of the peoples of Anatolia,
creating a broad tent that could accommodate
Turks, ethnic Kurds and Armenians. Islam had
little place in Ataturk's triumphant national
narrative and it was ruthlessly and purposely
suppressed. Islamic clothing, music and education
were replaced by Western models that were
duplicated slavishly. His formula "Mecca or
Mechanization" became the mantra of the young
officers who surrounded him.
But Lewis's
attraction to Ataturk told only half of the story.
In driving Islam from the state bureaucracy, the
Kemalists rooted it more firmly in the street and
mosque. Kemalism thus created the conditions in
which Islamism transmuted and evolved, giving
space to generations of new thinkers who have
challenged Islamic orthodoxy. Islam's response to
Kemalism included the articulation of a politics
of discontent that opposed the liquidation of
Muslim identity and rejected an Ataturk-imposed
Western world order.
The new Islamism
refused to accept that universal values could only
be imported from the Western historical narrative.
Instead, they searched for universal values
derived from Islam, with an emphasis on the Koran
and the seed community of Muslims at Medina - an
alternative historical perspective outside the
Western narrative. Thus was born a decades-long
hostility that has shaped the character of modern
political Islamists.
In one sense, Turkey
is the talisman of this disorder, with a
historical cycle of the failure of Kemalist-forced
secularization, followed by military intervention,
followed by a retreat until forced secularization
is attempted yet again. It is this cycle of
imposed secularism, military intervention and
inevitable retreat that has caused so much anxiety
in the West, for the rise of Islamism challenges
the efficacy of the Kemalist model: the West's
sense that bloody religious wars must be resolved
in favor of the state, our concept of a
nation-state divorced from religion, our view that
modernity can only be successful when Western
models are adopted - or imposed.
More
crucially, the rise of political Islam portends a
reinsertion of God into politics, of faith into
society's governance and signals that the
coherence of the Western project is being
challenged by one-fifth of the world's population.
Western anxieties are exacerbated by the rising
militarization of some Islamist movements, for the
violent reaction to imposed modernization seems a
sign of intellectual bankruptcy.
Put
another way, the West's Westphalian inheritance
(the resolution of Europe's religious wars that
murdered one-third of the continent's population)
sees national struggles as reasonable and normal,
while violence in the name of religious ideals
promises a spiral into anarchy. More simply,
Lewis's vision of a secular Middle East on
Ataturk's model is specious in several respects,
as its permanence has yet to be proved and because
the Kemalist program, when replicated by avowedly
nationalist leaders in Arab societies, exiled the
voices of Islam from the halls of government, but
not from the street or mosque.
So it is
that we are reluctantly forced to acknowledge that
the words of our most important allies, those
secularized pro-Western leaders of the region -
Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, President General Pervez
Musharraf in Pakistan and the young King Abdullah
in Saudi Arabia - mean less to the vast majority
of politically engaged Islamists than the words of
two Islamic leaders, dead now, with disparate
beliefs and followers.
Egyptian Sayyid
Qutb and Pakistani Maulana Maududi explicitly
rejected Ataturk's conception of a national state
as a rejection of Islamic law and culture and, in
the process, freed political Islam from the
constraints of clerics and scholars. Qutb argued
in Milestones that Muslims do not need an
Islamic hierarchy to tell them how to live; all
they need do is treat the Koran as both a
practical personal guide as well as a political
manifesto, while Maududi (Qutb's progenitor) urged
Muslims - who saw their community divided by
successive generations of Western diplomats - to
rediscover their common political and cultural
roots in Islam.
Qutb wrote that the Koran
was accessible and understandable by all, a
statement that is as influential in Islam today as
Martin Luther's theses were to Christianity 500
years ago. Qutb and Maududi speak to Muslims
across the ages, their words repeated in sermons
and books throughout the Arab world. It is their
vision for the future, and not Ataturk's, that
remains vibrantly alive in the Muslim world today.
Wednesday:
Part 5: The politics of indignation
Alastair Crooke and Mark
Perry are the co-directors of Conflicts Forum,
a London-based group dedicated to providing an
opening to political Islam. Crooke is the former
Middle East adviser to European Union High
Representative Javier Solana and served as a staff
member of the Mitchell Commission investigating
the causes of the second intifada. Perry is a
Washington, DC-based political consultant, author
of six books on US history, and a former personal
adviser to Yasser Arafat.
(Copyright
2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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