Now that we have been able to examine how the Arab world has been thinking lately and we’ve considered some of the themes of ‘modernising’ Islam, too, let’s try to come back to a further examination of the relationship of the Arab and Islamic world to “us” in the West. Are they out to get us? There appear to be two main opposing views expressed in the works, respectively, of Samuel Huntington and Tariq ‘Ali: The Clash of Civilizations and The Clash of Fundamentalisms.
The first view can probably be seen as having its origins as least as far back as the time of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire published in the 18th Century. That view is that civilisations clash.
There has on the other hand been an ironic coincidence of aims between the neo-cons in the US, 'led' by George W. Bush, and al-Qaeda. Both groups actually wanted a fight on 'Muslim soil' as al-Qaeda wants to prove that the US wants to kill Muslims, generally (as well as letting its proxy, Israel, do so), as they have been in Iraq and still are in Afghanistan. The reasons of 'the US' include preferring a fight away from the US 'homeland' for domestic political reasons. The US had been warned by observers like Tariq ‘Ali and ‘Abd al-Bari Atwan that al-Qaeda wanted this exact thing but neo cons wanted it so desperately themselves that 'the US' went ahead and did it anyway.
Edward Said in his work, Covering Islam, discusses how this view of Islam as out to get the West has come about in the West. He first suggests that the West and especially the US has been looking for an enemy for internal reasons (i.e. to achieve more unity). Writing immediately after the Iranian Islamic revolution, he gives this as a case in point. He goes on to suggest that Muslims are not out to get the West and that what we in the West have taken to be evidence of this is actually evidence of a struggle within Islam. While he wrote this before 9/11, the post-9/11 struggle is merely a continuation and 'spill-over' of the struggle he identified within Islam.
He notes that what the West ought not to do is seek to control the ‘East’ as much as engage in real dialogue with it.
Clearly, this impulse to control the ‘Other’ accompanied by almost wilful ignorance may produce effects like 9/11. In his masterpiece Orientalism, based in part on Foucault’s discourse theory and also on the work of Noam Chomsky, and in other works, Said explores this in more detail while also clearly opposing the ideology of nationalism. The idea of the Orient as a Foucaultian “subterranean self” of the Occident as opposed to a real place is explored and has inspired entire fields of post modern and “post-colonial” study as well as some criticism. The cover artwork of one of the paperback versions aptly consists of a depiction of Snake Charmer by the 19th Century French painter of the so-called “Academic School”, Jean Leon Gerome, a mere (but inventive yet still defamatory) pastiche of a purported Middle Eastern scene that poses as a photo-realistic depiction.
One of the complicating features of the question of Islam and the West is the situation in Israel-Palestine. Dr Ghada Karmi has written about how Israel must recognise the rights of Palestinians and has proposed a one-state solution in Israel/Palestine. Said’s The Question of Palestine and his autobiography, Out of Place, are both significant works for their rich discussion of important issues to the Arab psyche for the benefit of a US audience, cogent argument and fine English prose. He again employs discourse theory and claims objectivity is not possible in the circumstances of conflict in which Israel/Palestine is mired. He further claims Zionism to be a corrosive element in US discourse concerning the conflict and beyond. His main goal, he suggests, is to address the imbalance in the US discourse and encourage other Arabs to find ways to do so also.
The main view that he proposes is that Zionism is racist and colonialist ideology that uses religion disingenuously and that Zionists have disingenuously peddled an absurd view that there is not a Palestinian people that needs to be considered in the Zionist project in Palestine. This turns on its head the idea that anti-Zionism is racist; rather he asserts that it is both anti-racist and anti-imperialist (contrary to the Zionist argument that the Jews are the only natives in Palestine). He shows that there is a Palestinian history and a Palestinian culture, what Zionism is (and how it argues there is no other viable polity in Palestine) and also proposes a secular one-state solution to this “question of Palestine”.
Amin Rihani in the 1920s (and Tanya Reinhart for the Jewish “side” more recently) among others have seriously proposed similar solutions but they have never received serious popular support on either “side”). Rihani also expressed a desire to improve the US discourse concerning this “question” as early as in the 1920s and was also quite active in promotion of an improved and fairer understanding of the Arab world in the US. He was also uncannily prophetic concerning the wider geopolitical effects of the “question” that are evident today.
In a collection of Said’s interviews, Power, Politics and Culture, he typically advocates the secular one-state solution even more strongly in his later years as he also does in his later writings.
The 'scholarly' argument that goes to support this position of recommending controlling the East has been called ‘fundamentalism with footnotes’. It often seeks to portray Islam as having an essence rather than being the indefinite thing that it is, defined only in its historical contexts, in much the same way Islamic fundamentalists also do. The Jewish historian, Bernard Lewis is a classic example of this kind of ‘essentialising’ scholar against whom Said rightly railed.
Islam is thus often referred to in this debate as ‘inherently backward’. This form of scholarship sometimes uses the tactic of comparing apples and oranges such as the best of the West with the worst of the East, in order to deliberately draw specious conclusions about the two hemispheres to the detriment especially of ‘inherently backward’ Islamic populations.
The less ‘scientific’ approach to this side of the debate with definite political axes to grind is exemplified by the neo-conservative New American Century group. Their approach is to assert a God-ordained position in the world for the United States as al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups assert a similar role for themselves.
Fundamentalism on both sides stems from emotions of fear, insecurity, anger, despair and inflexibility and a Weltanshauung characterised by irrational ahistoricity and hatred of the ‘Other’. In the end, the debate often serves to define ‘our’ values as ‘human’ values to the exclusion of the views of the ‘inherently backward Other’. Consequently, invasion of countries such as Iraq comes to seem to make complete sense for reasons of ‘world’ peace and ‘human’ rights.
Suicide bombers on a large scale are such an obvious example of a recent phenomenon in Islam that the idea that Islam is unchanging is clearly demolished by it. What is, of course, changing is the level of some of the negative emotions in various parts of the Islamic world for clearly historical reasons. For Islamists, apparently Western ideas such as ‘democracy’ thus naturally lose some of their lustre in these kinds of contexts.
Karen Armstrong has become a noted Western apologist for Islam and supporter of theism more generally and has neatly divided the historical Islam into five periods; beginnings, development, culmination, triumph and the current agonist phase. She suggests that the effect of colonialism and the Western ideas of nationalism and modernism on Muslims rather than the effect of Islam itself (which she holds is also inherently democratic and egalitarian) has been the catalyst of the fundamentalist and violent form of Islam that is most problematic today. She also regards Shi’a Islam as inherently less optimistic in its outlook than Sunnism.
Benedict Anderson has also explored the nature of religiously inspired and other nationalisms in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Hans Küng has also attempted (perhaps with more insight than Armstrong, it’s hard to say I have to admit) to tease out the paradigmatic dimensions represented in the history that would allow a Westerner, and more specifically a Christian (as a Catholic theologian himself), to have a serious dialogue with Muslims and through them with Islam. I note with some disappointment the unwillingness of Richard Dawkins to move outside the Orientalist perspective when discussing Islam.
Yitzhak Nakash, a Jewish Brandeis academic, has written of the particular place of the Shi’a in a new Arab Islamic era first catalysed by both Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi’a Iran in Reaching for Power: the Shi’a in the Modern Arab World. The book examines the games that are ongoing between the Sunni and Shi’a in Arab Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Lebanon and Iraq. It begins with a discussion of the hatred for the Shi’a engendered by 18th Century Wahhabism in the region that became Saudi Arabia and extended also to Iraq, Lebanon and Bahrain. It also examines the effects of the current Western policy of containment of Iran in the region and the situation today in Iraq. The author notices that the Shi’a political classes in Iraq have reached a unique accommodation with the West that I must add possibly isn’t well supported by Shi’a political ideology or the Shi’a masses. The author also discusses comparative Sunni and Shi’a views concerning democracy, Shi’a nationalisms in general, problems in Iraq for mostly Shi’a non-Ottoman citizens in the succession from Ottoman rule and the nature of the significant Shi’a resurgence in Lebanon in recent years.
The Arab World Today, edited in 1994 by Dan Tschirgi seems to suggest an Arab crisis in the immediate aftermath of the US Gulf War of 1991. It generally focuses upon implications for the West and various USSR successor states but a wide range of views are included. The general conclusion is that the crisis produced a deepening of fissures between pro- and anti-US camps in the Arab world. Looking back, its predictions generally weren’t especially prescient (especially Alan Richards’s concerning oil prices) but the authors’ analysis is generally interesting.
It begins by contextualising the crisis including within the loosening framework of the end period of the Cold War analysed by Carl Brown of Princeton. He suggests that the Arab states were thus left increasingly dependent on the US militarily for what are now their highly militarised regimes in the new instability of the region. That may now be a dated view but the sophistication of the military power now available in the region is undoubted despite the relative ease with which Hussein’s regime was later ousted. Nicholas Hopkins assesses the region using the kind of class analysis employed by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party and finds the analysis wanting. Cynthia Nelson engagingly suggests a feminist critique of the crisis and her prognostications for the region are unfortunately pessimistic. One author sees Russia continuing to be a powerful influence in the region. Saad Eddin Ibrahim considers most efforts in the direction of democratisation in the region to have been abortive. It remains to be seen, of course, what will become of the most recent regime in Iraq. Ferghany considers the intra- and inter-region effects of globalisation as they relate to the region. Features of the instability included regional unemployment (which is an ongoing problem) and an interruption in remittances from the Gulf (also an ongoing potential threat as fewer (especially but not exclusively) non-Gulf Arabs tend to be able to take advantage of employment opportunities there). Al-Khoury rightly notes that the alleged liberality of Jordan is, in fact, quite limited. He doesn’t see the 1991 war as an historically major event. Bassam Tibi considers the deleterious effects of this intra-Arab world war on any prospects for the elusive and perhaps illusory pan-Arab unity in the near term. He nevertheless considers the EU model as worth considering in the Arab context. Al-Djami, a member of the Palestinian National Council, suggests that Saddam’s prosecution of the war effectively stiffened the backbones of the Israeli hawks and that Israel was made relatively strong as it faced a further divided Arab world but still amazingly but laudably expresses optimism for the “peace process”.
In 2005, Kuwaiti American Khalid Abou el-Fadl wrote The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists. He has legal training from both Kuwait and Al-Azhar and prestigious US law schools and a PhD from Princeton and teaches at UCLA. The essence of the work is a comparative jurisprudence of two Islamic ‘sides’ and seeks to arrive at a relatively ‘moderate’ true position of Islam thus undermining extremist Islamist interpretations on what he calls the Puritan side. He acknowledges both the more ‘Puritan’ and ‘moderate’ legal traditions within Islam. He understands the rise of the Puritan views to prominence in historical periods as having political causes.
He suggests that Afghani represented the moderate view whereas al-Banna, Qutb and Rida all came from the Puritan tradition. The distinction may not be as clear-cut as he proposes but he himself, as an Usuli-trained scholar in Sunni terms, may fall quite near the meeting point between the two styles. He appears to give some limited support to the ideas of secularism. The work explains well the debate within Islamic jurisprudence of the two invested sides.
El-Fadl explores the history of the Wahhabi ideology and its linkages with modernist thinkers such as ‘Abduh. He also has a provocatively titled section, What all Muslims Agree on, in which he explores the attitude of Muslims to the sources of Islamic law, just government and law, rights of resistance against unjust government, democracy and women. The cleavages, he suggests, are not predominantly over the sources per se but over the uses to which they are put. The Puritans are, in essence, not willing to allow law to be derived from the sources by any kind of analogy, he says, or even any consensus of the scholars or legal authorities that were not actually alive in the time of the Prophet.
So whether 'they' hate the West or not there is certainly significant internal division that may easily be confused with a state of being out to get the West but should not be. The state of Afghanistan today, though, is relevant to how the West is being viewed. In 2007, Dr Sima Samar, the human rights ‘watchdog’ (the Independent Human Rights Commissioner/Chairperson) in Afghanistan, former deputy president and a medical doctor gave a lecture to a Politics Society meeting at the University of Sydney on the conditions of women and human rights in her country. She went into exile under the Marxist government in 1978 and returned to her country post-Taliban (i.e. post-2001). She is also the human rights ‘watchdog’ in Sudan so she clearly has some monumental challenges on her plate.
She explains the context of the current situation beginning with the 1978 Marxist government by coup d’état and its call to the Soviets that led to their 1979 invasion and anti-religion and anti-landowner government. This, of course, met with violent reaction region-wide in the further context of a recently Islamising Middle East and Talibanising (‘brain washing’) Pakistani madrasa system. The movement for the Islamic polity that was thus set into motion, she says, was anti-woman. She notes that most of the humanitarian NGOs had been forced out by 1992. When the Soviets were defeated, the mostly Arab mujahidin that had until then been supported by the West then essentially left the young local Taliban fighters to continue the jihad alone. The idea Dr Samar stressed was that the West helped break her country so they essentially bought it but nevertheless piked out and left it in the parlous state that ended in the anti-woman Taliban regime beginning in Kandahar in 1994 (incidentally the name Kandahar is a local form of Alexandria - the city was established in Hellenistic times and thus named for Alexander. Iskander is a Persian form of Alexander, too). I understand Dr Samar's current view is that the West has now done enough damage and should just leave. The West, of course, became most concerned for the women again after 9/11/2001.
The Taliban promised peace but soon disappointed. Women, of course, were not allowed to be educated or hardly even to speak and the imposition of the Burka and the severest of punishments is well known. The Arab hijackers of 9/11 were trained in Talibani Afghanistan and the US and others invaded the very type of regime whose beginnings it supported against the USSR. Would it make the same mistakes again? Surely it had a responsibility now not to repeat that mistake.
The US invasion, of course, is unfinished business but the first interim government and the US put Dr Samar in her current role. She claims to have been since working with some success to make herself unpopular by continuing to expose the “wound” of ongoing human rights abuses in Afghanistan. She said she believed she still had the support of President Karzai.
The primary issue she has faced has been the Western stink of the concept of human rights. She asserts that Islam nevertheless ought to be concerned with them. Thus her theme has been the creation of a human rights commission that suits Afghanistan and Islam despite its Western stink. With advertising and school curriculum reform attempts, she has attempted to educate the general population and children about the idea of basic rights. While this is ongoing, she emphasised, there is a role for the international community in bringing about an actual rule of law, law enforcement, good governance, a fair judiciary, support for her commission and security.
The major current ideological deficits have produced persistent inequalities based on race and sex in overall impecunious circumstances at the best of times. The absence of a social security safety-net has led to children still forced either to work, starve or attend madrasas so that they might be fed – only one option is viable for any given child. For the moment, Dr Samar sees work as the least of these three evils. Strangely, this form of equality - of children with their parents - is currently acceptable in today’s Afghanistan. This should serve as a reminder that much in the way of resources is still needed from the West; health services are among the things in most distress. Women only receive any protection in the large cities due to the security situation as at 2007 [this has probably since worsened]. There, but only there, they could usually receive an education, exercise some freedoms and unveil somewhat.
Besides advocating the reforms above, the role of the commission has been to independently witness compliance or otherwise in the country generally with international human rights-related treaties including those concerning the rights of women, children and the disabled and concerning the institution of a just penal system. Some of the women’s rights are also provided for directly in the constitution. One strategy in advertising that aims to promote more respect for women is, remarkably, to remind Afghani men that their mothers are women. To an extent, the commission also has a role in highlighting successes in the penal system but must report on abuses. Prison visiting is one of the means of establishing the success or otherwise of reforms. Practices are improving somewhat and are somewhat more regularised with less open use of torture evident than previously. Advertising of particularly egregious abuses in local media has apparently proved effective. The commission also reports on governance, miscarriages of justice and security concerns. It has sought to emulate the South African truth and reconciliation model to some extent but punishments and justice have been demanded. The commission was (in 2007) establishing the facts of atrocities related to around 84 mass grave sites.
That's a little of the flavour of the inputs into answering the question I've posed in the title of today's post. The answer requires more posts (as I mentioned in the last post) so they will be forthcoming soon.
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