COMMENT Spreading the word in
the US By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Former Iranian president Mohammad
Khatami's speaking tour in the United States,
which granted him a visa as a gesture of goodwill
toward Iran, has, as expected, occasioned renewed
interest in Khatami's theme of dialogue among
civilizations.
Initiated in 2000 as a
discursive response to the siren voices of
clashing civilizations, Khatami's
"counter-paradigm" attracted
global attention after the
United Nations' embrace of his suggestion to make
2001 the Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations. The
UN and its Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) organized a plethora of
events around this, sponsored under the leadership
of veteran UN diplomat Giandomenico Picco, Kofi
Annan's personal representative on "Dialogue Among
Civilizations".
For more than two years,
this author worked closely with Picco and others
to promote the message of tolerance, understanding
and reciprocity behind this UN-focused program.
[1] In addition to countless conferences, seminars
and inter-faith meetings, this involved organizing
a world youth festival on "Dialogue Among
Civilizations", which took place in Vilnius,
Lithuania, in the summer of 2000, bringing
hundreds of young people from some 60 countries
for a week of learning and inter-cultural
activities.
In an article I inked in 2001
titled "Khatami and the emancipatory project of
dialogue among civilizations", I highlighted the
more than one dozen motivational factors that
operated behind Khatami's initiative, including a
quest for identity, autonomy, interdependence,
peace and non-violence. [2]
In retrospect,
I would put non-violence on top, particularly
since there is so much rather pathetic
misunderstanding of Islam in general and Shi'ism
in specific in the West, irrespective of all the
media commentaries. Case in point, respected
Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis opined an
article titled "August 22" in the Wall Street
Journal last month in which he lambasted Iranian
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic Mahdism
as a violent discourse premised on the end of the
world.
Lewis's diatribe, easily debunkable
by showing the remarkable non-violent ethos of
Mahdism, in essence as a doctrine of hope in close
affinity with the Christian belief in
resurrection, clearly shows that the malady of
pseudo-understanding of Islam is not a monopoly of
so-called yellow journalism and unfortunately runs
deeper, infecting a significant aspect of the
academic community in the United States. [3]
Thus the timely antidote of Khatami's trip
and his message of Islamic humanism beamed at the
US and global audience sets straight a sad
spectacle of academic and scholarly miscognition
on Islam.
In a speech in Chicago, Khatami
responded to his Jewish and other critics by
pointing out that he was the first Muslim leader
to condemn the "barbaric" atrocities of September
11, 2001, and that he condemned the terrorists
committing mass slaughter in New York in the
strongest language possible in his speech before
the UN General Assembly that year.
Khatami
may be out of office and even out of favor in
Tehran, yet his message of peace and dialogue is
as important as ever, seeing how the nuclear row
between Iran and the US has the potential of going
down the slippery road to military confrontation.
A relatively neglected facet of Khatami's
discourse deals with security. Until now, Khatami
has not fully incorporated the security dialogue
as an organic facet of his vision of dialogue
among civilizations. Yet in light of the
post-September 11 US intervention in the Middle
East and the heightened insecurity of the Muslim
Middle East regarding a "new crusade" led by an
evangelical US president, it is essential that the
discourse move on from mostly philosophical and
theological levels or dimensions to the more
concrete level of security dialogue.
Dialogue is, after all, a quest for
understanding the "hostile other", and short of
understanding the root causes of insecurity
breeding paranoia in the West and Muslim East
about each other, it is impossible to see a
genuine way forward beyond the seemingly
impregnable walls of clashing civilizations.
Of course, even then there is no guarantee
that we could witness a qualitative breakthrough
in the hot furnace of Islam versus West in the
current milieu. As Samuel Huntington has aptly
pointed out in his book on clashing civilizations,
a great deal of this animosity is power-generated,
by the vast accumulation of economic and political
capital in the West headed by the United States,
which, according to Huntington, manipulates the UN
almost at will.
Huntington has been
rightly criticized, including by this author, for
his not-so-apt analysis of the countervailing
forces at the UN, etc, and his theoretically
simplistic advocacy of "distinct" civilizations
leaves a lot to be desired. Yet for one reason or
another, which goes to the heart of the decline of
intellectual power in the West, this thoroughly
suspect "paradigm" has come to grand prominence,
lighting the fire of the raw sentiments of many a
religious zealot in the West and the East.
To his credit, Khatami has taken a lead in
criticizing this "dangerous idea" and has made the
singular contribution of seeking to turn its
poison around by putting its premise on the head
by the counter-discourse of dialogue among
civilizations, the theoretical status of which
still remains somewhat murky six years later.
In an essay published in the UN Chronicle
in 2000, this author made the following
observation: "Much as some of us, particularly in
the West, may prefer an economically neutral
'dialogue among civilizations' tailored to
cross-cultural exchange on a world scale, for this
dialogue to have an impact, its terrain must
extend to political economy, taking into
consideration the lessons of the North-South
dialogue, such as that globalization has marred
the lines of demarcation between the poles even
though the present world hierarchization and
inequities warrant churning the engines of this
dialogue - on perennial issues of just trade,
foreign aid, reform of global finance, AIDS and so
on - notwithstanding Nelson Mandela's call for
'globalization without marginalization'."
Six years later, in view of the UN's
inability to make meaningful progress on its
much-publicized Millennium Development Goals, the
global fight against poverty is more and more
appearing as a losing battle. Poverty breeds
hatred and conflict, and with so much of the
Muslim world living in poverty, there has to be a
dialogue on economic security that addresses the
economic root causes of terrorism, the fact that
the Muslim underclass is easy prey to terrorist
networks, partly for economic reasons in addition
to purely religious grounds.
A genuine
ethic of tolerance blinded to the economic causes
of intolerance is like a one-eyed horse that limps
only in one direction, ie, cultural reciprocity.
Yet while this is highly important, the economic
determinations, leading us back to some of the
basic insights of Karl Marx, are equally
important.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and
co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear
Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential
latent", Harvard International Review, and is
author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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