Salams
some interesting blogs;
www.maajidnawaz.blogspot.com
www.abu-ibrahim.blogspot.com
www.traditionalislamist.blogspot.com
Saturday 13 October 2007
Monday 11 June 2007
Rand Report
Hello
The below RAND report outlines the approach the US governments needs to take to tackle Political Islam. It was written in 2003, but still relevant to US policy and strategy today in the Middle East.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/2005/MR1716.pdf
The below RAND report outlines the approach the US governments needs to take to tackle Political Islam. It was written in 2003, but still relevant to US policy and strategy today in the Middle East.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/2005/MR1716.pdf
The Caliphate- Islam's Challenge to the Global Order
Hello,
The below article is by Dr Numan Hanif, an expert in international terrorism and security. His blog can be accessed from the below link.
http://islamicaffairsanalyst.blogspot.com
A divine belief by the radical Islamic movement in the institution of the Caliphate as a fortress to restore Islam’s power and a vehicle to challenge the primacy of Western civilisation is gathering storm in the Islamic world and beyond. Sourced from the Koran and Islamic history, the Islamic movement may differ as to whether the methodology of revival should be jihad, reformist or political, but the goal of restoring the Caliphate is now uniformly agreed upon.
The Western response to the Islamic movement has been to link the Caliphate with global jihad and by extension the war on terrorism. The evolution of language in Western capitals from generic terrorism to Islamist terrorism to evil ideology and finally to the Caliphate has endorsed what the Islamic movement has long been advocating for some time, that the war on terror is essentially a war against Islam.
As further evidence, the Islamic movement has capitalised upon a remarkable series of statements on the Caliphate by political leaders in Washington and Europe. In a speech to the Heritage Foundation on October 6, 2005, British Home Secretary Charles Clarke said, “…there can be no negotiation about the re-creation of the Caliphate; there can be no negotiation about the imposition of Sharia (Islamic) law...” President George Bush in a speech to the nation on the 8th of October 2005 stated, “The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.'' On December 5th 2005, US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld in remarks pertaining to the future of Iraq at John Hopkins University said, “Iraq would serve as the base of a new Islamic Caliphate to extend throughout the Middle East and which would threaten the legitimate governments in Europe, Africa, and Asia. This is their plan. They (radical Islamic movement) have said so. We make a terrible mistake if we fail to listen and learn”.
The Caliphate as defined by the Sunni Islamic Movement is the total leadership for all the Muslims aimed at implementing Islamic law and carrying the Islamic message to the entire world. It is the successor to the Islamic Caliphate which spanned at one time from Indonesia to Spain through a period of fourteen hundred years. It has not been defined as a monarchy, democracy, dictatorship or a theocracy. Rather a contract of leadership between an elected Caliph and the citizens to apply complete Islamic law within internal and external policy.
The Sunni school differs from the Shia in that it endorses the immediate restoration of Islamic rule by any Muslim meeting certain criteria. The Shia school on the other hand dictates that only a person from the lineage of the Prophet Mohammed has the authority to implement Islamic rule. This lineage having been broken by the disappearance or concealment of the twelfth Imam in 941A.D means that only through his reappearance can the Islamic rule continue. Thereby, the Iranian revolution was never declared or accepted by the majority Sunni or even the Shia in the Islamic world as a Caliphate.
In this article I will argue that the Western position of avoiding an open confrontation with Islam and resisting the popular move towards the resumption of the Caliphate is becoming unsustainable. Armed with the Koran, the Islamic movement continues to win every battle in the war of ideas. The patronage of moderate Islam as a mirror of Western Liberalism in the Islamic world is rapidly collapsing in light of superior scholarly authority from the Islamic movement.
The Islamic movement has been successful in presenting to the Muslim masses an alternative ideological model to Western secular Liberalism consistent with the Koran. The reproduction of the Caliphate forms the apex of this model as a means of challenging the Western dominated global structure.
If the West is going to challenge this model it has no alternative but to openly battle Islam along with the Koran. This is not a deliberate precipitation of the clash of civilisations, rather a clear identification of the doctrinal incompatibility between Islam and secular Western Liberalism.
It would be folly to argue that the West is going to change its policy towards the Islamic world. The perpetual conflict between energy security, global Capitalism, promoting secular democracy and accommodating political Islam will continue to bedevil its behaviour. Hence, a Western mood swing in the Islamic world towards controlled democracy by force and occupation only strengthens the Islamic movement. Continued support for dictatorships and monarchies intent on wiping out the Islamic movement and opposing the Caliphate only confirms in the minds of the masses that the West is intent on continuing a crusade against Islam. These conditions have secured an environment for the inevitable collapse of local regimes, the entrance of the Caliphate and a consequential upheaval in global order.
Roots of Islamic Revival
The ideological vacuum left by the collapse of the Communist experiment in Russia quickly focussed international debate on whether Islam would fill the void and present the next challenge to a triumphant secular liberal global doctrine lead by the United States and Europe. Basking in the unexpected ideological defeat of Communism, academics cultured in the Western secular liberal tradition were quick to pronounce the Islamic revival as a reaction to Western ideological supremacy, a strategic conundrum, but not one which was capable of challenging Western universalism. This thinking has tended to dominate the literature in the West, leading to a fundamental error in the understanding and explanation pertaining to the basis of Islamic revival and its challenge to revolutionise global order.
Western academics and policymakers have made the critical mistake of analysing the source of Islamic revival and the conditions which stimulate it as one and the same. The spring of ideas have not been separated from the political, economic and social environments which foster its growth. The foundation of the Islamic movement which aims to revive the totality of Islam through the Caliphate is securely rooted in the inspiration of its source, the Koran.
In the Islamic world it is the Koran which is considered the utopia of thought and considered to have ended history twelve hundred years prior to Francis Fukyama’s dialectic benchmark of the French revolution. The belief in the perfection of the Koran and by default God’s laws ensuing from it shape the roots of Muslim rage and render the clash of civilisations between Islam and secular liberalism inevitable.
Western academic discourse on the stated failure of political Islam is so overtaken by Western globalism that it constructs a hypothesis of Islam in its own image far removed from the Koran, the vast heritage of Islamic jurisprudence and by default the power of the Islamic movement. The belief in the Koran’s universalism and the compatibility between material and spirit render paradigms of an Islamic reformation impotent.
The Western secular dictum ‘render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s and unto God’s what is God’s’, is powerfully disputed by the Islamic movement through verses of the Koran and their jurisprudential understandings as having no parallel in classical or contemporary Islamic discourse.
The argument that political Islam has failed because it has been unable to adapt to Western modernity and hence to Western political structure is not a prosecution for political Islam’s failure. Rather it is further evidence that Islam and Western political architecture are doctrinally and systemically incompatible. Moreover, the Islamic Movements construction of the Caliphate as the political and systemic alternative to the Western secular model actually represents the success of political Islam.
The social, political and economic condition in the Islamic world no doubt feeds the cause of the Islamic movement, but contrary to Western assumptions, the solution to the malaise is identified not in secular liberalism or its Capitalist derivative but in the Islamic deficit. This conclusion is inevitable considering what the Islamic world has had to endure in terms of decades of Western interference ensuing from colonialism, super power conflict and brutal friendships with non-Islamic dictatorships in the name of stability and the interests of oil security. Continued Western occupation, humiliation and intervention only confirm in the minds of the Muslim masses that the West and not Islam is the cause of their suffering. The consequent helplessness has motivated them to seek an alternative in Islam in the hope of providing dignity, power, protection and stability through a system for the individual, state and society. The linkage with the Koran, the Islamic heritage and by extension the Caliphate is thus natural and inevitable. Western attempts to pre-empt the revival and the Caliphate through forced military, political, cultural and economic intervention only fuel Muslim rage.
The Resurrection
The call for the Caliphate by the Islamic movement transcends the artificial and colonial Westphalian constructs carved out of the ashes of the Ottoman Caliphate. Today, every regime in the Islamic world faces a threat to its existence from a trans-national Islamic movement. The rejection of nationalism as a destructive and disuniting force is supported by references to the Koran, jurisprudence and history, forming a powerful weapon in its quest to overturn the existing nation state order in the Islamic world and establish a unified Caliphate. The collapse of the Soviet order has further resulted in the rapid expansion of the movement, filling the vacuum in the Caucuses and Central Asia, in turn completing the arc of Islamic revival.
The conviction in Islam as a comprehensive source for the regulation of the individual, state and society, along with the global movement in immigration, ideas and information has enabled the Islamic world to overcome its sense of intellectual, technological and political inferiority to Western civilisation. The wealth of mineral, strategic, intellectual and human resources existent in the vast geography of the Islamic world provides intellectual confidence in the ability of a Caliphate to challenge and overcome Western military and technological primacy. It is thus of no great surprise that highly educated members of the Islamic movement operating from the crucible of Western civilisation in Washington, London, Paris and Rome successfully spearhead the global marketing of the Caliphate.
A series of political events from the creation of Israel to the invasion of Iraq has radically altered the political landscape and atmosphere in the Islamic world. Due in large part to mass culturing by the Islamic movement and aided in no short measure by Western policy, the political maturity of the Islamic world is far removed from the impotence exhibited during the last phase of the Ottoman Caliphate. Projects developed by the Western powers in partnership with the local regimes to divert and crush the Islamic revival in the last eighty years have been increasingly threatened by a heightened political awareness. The war on terror and the invasion of Iraq are overwhelmingly analysed in the Islamic world as a war against Islam and a policy to pre-empt the Caliphate. As a result the Islamic movement has removed the distinction between Western policy and local governments. With effective political culturing, the move towards regime change has more of a reality from the Islamic movement than from the Western powers.
Challenging Global Order
Fourteen hundred years of Caliphate history in the realms of scientific, military, economic and political thought bear witness to a coming upheaval in the US and European dominated international structure. Just as Western civilisation reverted to and continues to revert to the classical sources of ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration, the Islamic movement has also gone back to the future.
The distinctive accomplishment of the Islamic movement in resurrecting the classical sources of Islam into a modern paradigm to challenge Western ideologies formed the nucleus of its resistance towards Communism as a political doctrine and a system. The same paradigm now thrusts against the global secular/Capitalist order.
In applying the paradigm, the Islamic movement has gone to some length in detailing distinct and alternative economic, social and political models. Comprehensive rules derived from the Koran and classical sources pertaining to economic transactions, social relationships, penal code, judiciary, ruling and foreign policy have provided confidence by the Islamic movement to the Muslim masses that Islam and the Caliphate can provide solutions to modern problems.
Western powers will have little problem with the ruling or social structure of a Caliphate as evidenced by their foreign policy towards successive dictatorships. It is in the principles and policies towards economics, military and foreign relations that Western interests and global Capitalism will be directly challenged.
The Islamic movement’s fundamental definition of the economic problem being that of distribution as opposed to the Western model of production will form the basis of the Caliphate’s economic policy. The division between state, public and private ownership will be an alternative to the privatised economic model. The rejection of the market as the sole distributor of wealth and basic commodities will strike a powerful note in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America, where liberal economics and international Capitalism despite the promises of globalisation and multilateral trade have failed to overturn the economic poverty and slide into chaos.
The mineral wealth including oil and gas will be regulated according to the Islamic economic principle of the commodity being a share of the citizens held on trust by the State. This rule outlines the foundation of eliminating Western oil interests in the Islamic world. Cheap Western access and squandering by supported regimes of the oil wealth in the Islamic world already projects a powerful magnet for the resumption of the Caliphate.
Backed by oil power and political confidence, the Caliphate will turn (as it did in history) to the gold standard to instil financial discipline and stability in the domestic and international economic environment. The oil weapon is likely to be key for the procurement of sufficient gold to support the currency. The projected stability is expected to act as catalyst to re-internationalise the gold standard with the rapid dumping of the dollar in light of plummeting confidence from heightened political upheaval.
The Islamic movement’s rejection of the idea of international law on doctrinal and Hobbesian philosophical edifice will precipitate an enormous threat to the United Nations. Unlike the pragmatic stance of the Soviet Union, the Caliphate will resist the idea of international law and the United Nations as a vehicle for Western secular hegemony, a charge already popular in the Islamic and developing world. As an alternative, the Caliphate according to historical precedent and Islamic sources will revert to conducting international relations through treatise, custom and the force of international public opinion.
The military ascendancy of the Caliphate is likely to be rapid. The immediate removal of Western military bases will deny the accessibility to strategic waterways, airspace, land routes and logistics for any short or medium term military response from the West. Furthermore, the availability of the nuclear option will make this impossible.
The Caliphate will have no shortage in the availability of brilliant minds as well as access to the same international market for scientists open to Washington and Europe. Furthermore, the enormous pool of sympathetic Muslim minds working deep in the Western and former Soviet military-industrial complexes will naturally be capitalised upon leading to a critical but predictable brain drain in the West.
As in history, the quest for military supremacy is likely to dominate in order to strengthen the Caliphate’s march towards global ideological leadership. However, military supremacy did not prevent the ideological rot of the Ottoman Caliphate. The cause was political, as was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Islamic movement seems to have learnt its lesson from history by demonstrating sharp political skills in its ability to survive and maintain momentum in the Islamic world. No doubt the same political acumen will be a formidable force applied to the Caliphate’s quest for a revolution in global order.
Accepting the Caliphate
It was former British Prime Minister William Gladstone, whilst in the final phases of dismantling the Ottoman Caliphate, who held up the Koran in Parliament and predicted that as long as the Islamic world remained attached to the book, the West could not prevent its revival. Gladstone’s prediction has come true with the resumption of classical ijitihad (orthodox methodology of extracting Islamic law) which has radically energised the Islamic movement into sourcing the Koran for modern problems as an alternative to Western secular liberalism.
In facing this challenge, Western policy can no longer sustain a battle with Islam through the back door including the War on Terror. Islam means ‘peace’, but a peace only on its terms, through full submission to God’s law. Hence, despite politically correct adulations of Islam by Washington and Europe, there can be no co-existence between Islam and Western Civilisation.
A Reaganite inspired and neo-conservative influenced American policy seems to be moving more openly by attaching the vague label of “evil ideology” to the Caliphate. However, as with Communism, Western policy needs to be bolder in correctly defining Islam as the main threat. A continuing state of public denial as regards a conflict with Islam in Washington and Europe only breeds more confusion, frustration and contradiction amongst its academic and policy circles cognizant of the incompatibility between the two doctrines.
The Islamic world’s position on the other hand does not suffer such confusion. Western policy is clearly considered to be directed at Islam and pre-empting the Caliphate in the heart of the Middle East, as viewed by the American invasion of Iraq and the refusal to accept Islam as its sole source of legislation and the Caliphate it’s the political structure.
The essence of violent global jihad and its response by the West as a War on Terror sidesteps the underlying causes and dynamics of anti-Western sentiment in the Islamic world. Global jihad is a frustrated and mutated response to the Western policy of backing regimes which torture its citizens and obstructs the Islamic movement in its goal of establishing the Caliphate.
Washington and Europe are deceiving themselves if they think they can reassure their societies that the Islamic movement will simply fade away because of the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq. Or that the Islamic world will follow their lead with a revised neo-colonial outlook. The political constituent of the Islamic movement goes from strength to strength, while the jihadi element raises the stakes by prolonging and expanding the violent attacks on Western society.
America and especially Europe foster sizeable Muslim populations which have strong connections to the global Islamic movement and support the re-establishment of the Caliphate as a serious objective. This phenomenon marks a failure of the West to gain doctrinal leadership over the Muslims within its own realm. This situation will only intensify as the Islamic movement perpetuates its global call.
The clash of doctrines between Islam and Western civilisation predates the asymmetrical declaration of war between the West and the Islamic movement and will continue for generations to come. The war on terror on the other hand does have an end. Global jihad’s alteration of expanding the struggle from the regimes in the Islamic world to attacking targets in the West will cease upon the birth of the Caliphate. The conflict will then transform to the more conventional.
A policy of attacking the idea of the Caliphate by linking it with the political violence of the jihadi movement cannot eliminate its Koranic authority. The Islamic world may not totally agree with the armed method of the jihadi movement, but the Caliphate’s linkage with the Koran is not in dispute. The political and non-violent aspect of the Islamic movement, considered the godfather of reviving the Caliphate idea, has deeper and wider appeal. An attack on the Caliphate is in effect considered an attack against Islam.
A fundamental transformation needs to occur in Western academic and policy circles as regards Islam. Western discourse needs to move beyond the dogmatic position of attempting to remould Islam according to the tenets of Western civilisation without Koranic authority. This attempt has failed in the Islamic world. The opium of linking the Caliphate and viewing radical Islam through the prism of the war on terror fogs the reality of understanding the dynamics of Islamic revival. There needs to be a clear appreciation that the Koran is the nuclear reactor of the Islamic world providing energy for the restoration of the Caliphate and its consequent challenge to global order. The West has no option but to accept the inevitability of the Caliphate and formulate a clear, distinct and explicit position towards Islam which identifies its doctrinal incompatibility. With the increasing success of Islamist groups in increasing the vote bank from the masses, the Islamic world seems already to have adopted its posture towards the West.
The below article is by Dr Numan Hanif, an expert in international terrorism and security. His blog can be accessed from the below link.
http://islamicaffairsanalyst.blogspot.com
A divine belief by the radical Islamic movement in the institution of the Caliphate as a fortress to restore Islam’s power and a vehicle to challenge the primacy of Western civilisation is gathering storm in the Islamic world and beyond. Sourced from the Koran and Islamic history, the Islamic movement may differ as to whether the methodology of revival should be jihad, reformist or political, but the goal of restoring the Caliphate is now uniformly agreed upon.
The Western response to the Islamic movement has been to link the Caliphate with global jihad and by extension the war on terrorism. The evolution of language in Western capitals from generic terrorism to Islamist terrorism to evil ideology and finally to the Caliphate has endorsed what the Islamic movement has long been advocating for some time, that the war on terror is essentially a war against Islam.
As further evidence, the Islamic movement has capitalised upon a remarkable series of statements on the Caliphate by political leaders in Washington and Europe. In a speech to the Heritage Foundation on October 6, 2005, British Home Secretary Charles Clarke said, “…there can be no negotiation about the re-creation of the Caliphate; there can be no negotiation about the imposition of Sharia (Islamic) law...” President George Bush in a speech to the nation on the 8th of October 2005 stated, “The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.'' On December 5th 2005, US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld in remarks pertaining to the future of Iraq at John Hopkins University said, “Iraq would serve as the base of a new Islamic Caliphate to extend throughout the Middle East and which would threaten the legitimate governments in Europe, Africa, and Asia. This is their plan. They (radical Islamic movement) have said so. We make a terrible mistake if we fail to listen and learn”.
The Caliphate as defined by the Sunni Islamic Movement is the total leadership for all the Muslims aimed at implementing Islamic law and carrying the Islamic message to the entire world. It is the successor to the Islamic Caliphate which spanned at one time from Indonesia to Spain through a period of fourteen hundred years. It has not been defined as a monarchy, democracy, dictatorship or a theocracy. Rather a contract of leadership between an elected Caliph and the citizens to apply complete Islamic law within internal and external policy.
The Sunni school differs from the Shia in that it endorses the immediate restoration of Islamic rule by any Muslim meeting certain criteria. The Shia school on the other hand dictates that only a person from the lineage of the Prophet Mohammed has the authority to implement Islamic rule. This lineage having been broken by the disappearance or concealment of the twelfth Imam in 941A.D means that only through his reappearance can the Islamic rule continue. Thereby, the Iranian revolution was never declared or accepted by the majority Sunni or even the Shia in the Islamic world as a Caliphate.
In this article I will argue that the Western position of avoiding an open confrontation with Islam and resisting the popular move towards the resumption of the Caliphate is becoming unsustainable. Armed with the Koran, the Islamic movement continues to win every battle in the war of ideas. The patronage of moderate Islam as a mirror of Western Liberalism in the Islamic world is rapidly collapsing in light of superior scholarly authority from the Islamic movement.
The Islamic movement has been successful in presenting to the Muslim masses an alternative ideological model to Western secular Liberalism consistent with the Koran. The reproduction of the Caliphate forms the apex of this model as a means of challenging the Western dominated global structure.
If the West is going to challenge this model it has no alternative but to openly battle Islam along with the Koran. This is not a deliberate precipitation of the clash of civilisations, rather a clear identification of the doctrinal incompatibility between Islam and secular Western Liberalism.
It would be folly to argue that the West is going to change its policy towards the Islamic world. The perpetual conflict between energy security, global Capitalism, promoting secular democracy and accommodating political Islam will continue to bedevil its behaviour. Hence, a Western mood swing in the Islamic world towards controlled democracy by force and occupation only strengthens the Islamic movement. Continued support for dictatorships and monarchies intent on wiping out the Islamic movement and opposing the Caliphate only confirms in the minds of the masses that the West is intent on continuing a crusade against Islam. These conditions have secured an environment for the inevitable collapse of local regimes, the entrance of the Caliphate and a consequential upheaval in global order.
Roots of Islamic Revival
The ideological vacuum left by the collapse of the Communist experiment in Russia quickly focussed international debate on whether Islam would fill the void and present the next challenge to a triumphant secular liberal global doctrine lead by the United States and Europe. Basking in the unexpected ideological defeat of Communism, academics cultured in the Western secular liberal tradition were quick to pronounce the Islamic revival as a reaction to Western ideological supremacy, a strategic conundrum, but not one which was capable of challenging Western universalism. This thinking has tended to dominate the literature in the West, leading to a fundamental error in the understanding and explanation pertaining to the basis of Islamic revival and its challenge to revolutionise global order.
Western academics and policymakers have made the critical mistake of analysing the source of Islamic revival and the conditions which stimulate it as one and the same. The spring of ideas have not been separated from the political, economic and social environments which foster its growth. The foundation of the Islamic movement which aims to revive the totality of Islam through the Caliphate is securely rooted in the inspiration of its source, the Koran.
In the Islamic world it is the Koran which is considered the utopia of thought and considered to have ended history twelve hundred years prior to Francis Fukyama’s dialectic benchmark of the French revolution. The belief in the perfection of the Koran and by default God’s laws ensuing from it shape the roots of Muslim rage and render the clash of civilisations between Islam and secular liberalism inevitable.
Western academic discourse on the stated failure of political Islam is so overtaken by Western globalism that it constructs a hypothesis of Islam in its own image far removed from the Koran, the vast heritage of Islamic jurisprudence and by default the power of the Islamic movement. The belief in the Koran’s universalism and the compatibility between material and spirit render paradigms of an Islamic reformation impotent.
The Western secular dictum ‘render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s and unto God’s what is God’s’, is powerfully disputed by the Islamic movement through verses of the Koran and their jurisprudential understandings as having no parallel in classical or contemporary Islamic discourse.
The argument that political Islam has failed because it has been unable to adapt to Western modernity and hence to Western political structure is not a prosecution for political Islam’s failure. Rather it is further evidence that Islam and Western political architecture are doctrinally and systemically incompatible. Moreover, the Islamic Movements construction of the Caliphate as the political and systemic alternative to the Western secular model actually represents the success of political Islam.
The social, political and economic condition in the Islamic world no doubt feeds the cause of the Islamic movement, but contrary to Western assumptions, the solution to the malaise is identified not in secular liberalism or its Capitalist derivative but in the Islamic deficit. This conclusion is inevitable considering what the Islamic world has had to endure in terms of decades of Western interference ensuing from colonialism, super power conflict and brutal friendships with non-Islamic dictatorships in the name of stability and the interests of oil security. Continued Western occupation, humiliation and intervention only confirm in the minds of the Muslim masses that the West and not Islam is the cause of their suffering. The consequent helplessness has motivated them to seek an alternative in Islam in the hope of providing dignity, power, protection and stability through a system for the individual, state and society. The linkage with the Koran, the Islamic heritage and by extension the Caliphate is thus natural and inevitable. Western attempts to pre-empt the revival and the Caliphate through forced military, political, cultural and economic intervention only fuel Muslim rage.
The Resurrection
The call for the Caliphate by the Islamic movement transcends the artificial and colonial Westphalian constructs carved out of the ashes of the Ottoman Caliphate. Today, every regime in the Islamic world faces a threat to its existence from a trans-national Islamic movement. The rejection of nationalism as a destructive and disuniting force is supported by references to the Koran, jurisprudence and history, forming a powerful weapon in its quest to overturn the existing nation state order in the Islamic world and establish a unified Caliphate. The collapse of the Soviet order has further resulted in the rapid expansion of the movement, filling the vacuum in the Caucuses and Central Asia, in turn completing the arc of Islamic revival.
The conviction in Islam as a comprehensive source for the regulation of the individual, state and society, along with the global movement in immigration, ideas and information has enabled the Islamic world to overcome its sense of intellectual, technological and political inferiority to Western civilisation. The wealth of mineral, strategic, intellectual and human resources existent in the vast geography of the Islamic world provides intellectual confidence in the ability of a Caliphate to challenge and overcome Western military and technological primacy. It is thus of no great surprise that highly educated members of the Islamic movement operating from the crucible of Western civilisation in Washington, London, Paris and Rome successfully spearhead the global marketing of the Caliphate.
A series of political events from the creation of Israel to the invasion of Iraq has radically altered the political landscape and atmosphere in the Islamic world. Due in large part to mass culturing by the Islamic movement and aided in no short measure by Western policy, the political maturity of the Islamic world is far removed from the impotence exhibited during the last phase of the Ottoman Caliphate. Projects developed by the Western powers in partnership with the local regimes to divert and crush the Islamic revival in the last eighty years have been increasingly threatened by a heightened political awareness. The war on terror and the invasion of Iraq are overwhelmingly analysed in the Islamic world as a war against Islam and a policy to pre-empt the Caliphate. As a result the Islamic movement has removed the distinction between Western policy and local governments. With effective political culturing, the move towards regime change has more of a reality from the Islamic movement than from the Western powers.
Challenging Global Order
Fourteen hundred years of Caliphate history in the realms of scientific, military, economic and political thought bear witness to a coming upheaval in the US and European dominated international structure. Just as Western civilisation reverted to and continues to revert to the classical sources of ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration, the Islamic movement has also gone back to the future.
The distinctive accomplishment of the Islamic movement in resurrecting the classical sources of Islam into a modern paradigm to challenge Western ideologies formed the nucleus of its resistance towards Communism as a political doctrine and a system. The same paradigm now thrusts against the global secular/Capitalist order.
In applying the paradigm, the Islamic movement has gone to some length in detailing distinct and alternative economic, social and political models. Comprehensive rules derived from the Koran and classical sources pertaining to economic transactions, social relationships, penal code, judiciary, ruling and foreign policy have provided confidence by the Islamic movement to the Muslim masses that Islam and the Caliphate can provide solutions to modern problems.
Western powers will have little problem with the ruling or social structure of a Caliphate as evidenced by their foreign policy towards successive dictatorships. It is in the principles and policies towards economics, military and foreign relations that Western interests and global Capitalism will be directly challenged.
The Islamic movement’s fundamental definition of the economic problem being that of distribution as opposed to the Western model of production will form the basis of the Caliphate’s economic policy. The division between state, public and private ownership will be an alternative to the privatised economic model. The rejection of the market as the sole distributor of wealth and basic commodities will strike a powerful note in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America, where liberal economics and international Capitalism despite the promises of globalisation and multilateral trade have failed to overturn the economic poverty and slide into chaos.
The mineral wealth including oil and gas will be regulated according to the Islamic economic principle of the commodity being a share of the citizens held on trust by the State. This rule outlines the foundation of eliminating Western oil interests in the Islamic world. Cheap Western access and squandering by supported regimes of the oil wealth in the Islamic world already projects a powerful magnet for the resumption of the Caliphate.
Backed by oil power and political confidence, the Caliphate will turn (as it did in history) to the gold standard to instil financial discipline and stability in the domestic and international economic environment. The oil weapon is likely to be key for the procurement of sufficient gold to support the currency. The projected stability is expected to act as catalyst to re-internationalise the gold standard with the rapid dumping of the dollar in light of plummeting confidence from heightened political upheaval.
The Islamic movement’s rejection of the idea of international law on doctrinal and Hobbesian philosophical edifice will precipitate an enormous threat to the United Nations. Unlike the pragmatic stance of the Soviet Union, the Caliphate will resist the idea of international law and the United Nations as a vehicle for Western secular hegemony, a charge already popular in the Islamic and developing world. As an alternative, the Caliphate according to historical precedent and Islamic sources will revert to conducting international relations through treatise, custom and the force of international public opinion.
The military ascendancy of the Caliphate is likely to be rapid. The immediate removal of Western military bases will deny the accessibility to strategic waterways, airspace, land routes and logistics for any short or medium term military response from the West. Furthermore, the availability of the nuclear option will make this impossible.
The Caliphate will have no shortage in the availability of brilliant minds as well as access to the same international market for scientists open to Washington and Europe. Furthermore, the enormous pool of sympathetic Muslim minds working deep in the Western and former Soviet military-industrial complexes will naturally be capitalised upon leading to a critical but predictable brain drain in the West.
As in history, the quest for military supremacy is likely to dominate in order to strengthen the Caliphate’s march towards global ideological leadership. However, military supremacy did not prevent the ideological rot of the Ottoman Caliphate. The cause was political, as was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Islamic movement seems to have learnt its lesson from history by demonstrating sharp political skills in its ability to survive and maintain momentum in the Islamic world. No doubt the same political acumen will be a formidable force applied to the Caliphate’s quest for a revolution in global order.
Accepting the Caliphate
It was former British Prime Minister William Gladstone, whilst in the final phases of dismantling the Ottoman Caliphate, who held up the Koran in Parliament and predicted that as long as the Islamic world remained attached to the book, the West could not prevent its revival. Gladstone’s prediction has come true with the resumption of classical ijitihad (orthodox methodology of extracting Islamic law) which has radically energised the Islamic movement into sourcing the Koran for modern problems as an alternative to Western secular liberalism.
In facing this challenge, Western policy can no longer sustain a battle with Islam through the back door including the War on Terror. Islam means ‘peace’, but a peace only on its terms, through full submission to God’s law. Hence, despite politically correct adulations of Islam by Washington and Europe, there can be no co-existence between Islam and Western Civilisation.
A Reaganite inspired and neo-conservative influenced American policy seems to be moving more openly by attaching the vague label of “evil ideology” to the Caliphate. However, as with Communism, Western policy needs to be bolder in correctly defining Islam as the main threat. A continuing state of public denial as regards a conflict with Islam in Washington and Europe only breeds more confusion, frustration and contradiction amongst its academic and policy circles cognizant of the incompatibility between the two doctrines.
The Islamic world’s position on the other hand does not suffer such confusion. Western policy is clearly considered to be directed at Islam and pre-empting the Caliphate in the heart of the Middle East, as viewed by the American invasion of Iraq and the refusal to accept Islam as its sole source of legislation and the Caliphate it’s the political structure.
The essence of violent global jihad and its response by the West as a War on Terror sidesteps the underlying causes and dynamics of anti-Western sentiment in the Islamic world. Global jihad is a frustrated and mutated response to the Western policy of backing regimes which torture its citizens and obstructs the Islamic movement in its goal of establishing the Caliphate.
Washington and Europe are deceiving themselves if they think they can reassure their societies that the Islamic movement will simply fade away because of the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq. Or that the Islamic world will follow their lead with a revised neo-colonial outlook. The political constituent of the Islamic movement goes from strength to strength, while the jihadi element raises the stakes by prolonging and expanding the violent attacks on Western society.
America and especially Europe foster sizeable Muslim populations which have strong connections to the global Islamic movement and support the re-establishment of the Caliphate as a serious objective. This phenomenon marks a failure of the West to gain doctrinal leadership over the Muslims within its own realm. This situation will only intensify as the Islamic movement perpetuates its global call.
The clash of doctrines between Islam and Western civilisation predates the asymmetrical declaration of war between the West and the Islamic movement and will continue for generations to come. The war on terror on the other hand does have an end. Global jihad’s alteration of expanding the struggle from the regimes in the Islamic world to attacking targets in the West will cease upon the birth of the Caliphate. The conflict will then transform to the more conventional.
A policy of attacking the idea of the Caliphate by linking it with the political violence of the jihadi movement cannot eliminate its Koranic authority. The Islamic world may not totally agree with the armed method of the jihadi movement, but the Caliphate’s linkage with the Koran is not in dispute. The political and non-violent aspect of the Islamic movement, considered the godfather of reviving the Caliphate idea, has deeper and wider appeal. An attack on the Caliphate is in effect considered an attack against Islam.
A fundamental transformation needs to occur in Western academic and policy circles as regards Islam. Western discourse needs to move beyond the dogmatic position of attempting to remould Islam according to the tenets of Western civilisation without Koranic authority. This attempt has failed in the Islamic world. The opium of linking the Caliphate and viewing radical Islam through the prism of the war on terror fogs the reality of understanding the dynamics of Islamic revival. There needs to be a clear appreciation that the Koran is the nuclear reactor of the Islamic world providing energy for the restoration of the Caliphate and its consequent challenge to global order. The West has no option but to accept the inevitability of the Caliphate and formulate a clear, distinct and explicit position towards Islam which identifies its doctrinal incompatibility. With the increasing success of Islamist groups in increasing the vote bank from the masses, the Islamic world seems already to have adopted its posture towards the West.
Sunday 10 June 2007
Britishness and Identity Politics
Hello
The below article is by Dr Abdul Wahid, an Islamic thinker, looking into debates relating to britishness and identity politics in the UK.
Introduction
Gordon Brown, Michael Howard, Boris Johnson, David Blunkett and Trevor Phillips are just a few of the names that have dared to tackle the complex and controversial subject of British citizenship. The subject is complex, because Britain was always a convenient political identity to try to preserve an uncomfortable union between dominant England and its vanquished neighbours. It is controversial because its prominence has been brought about because one section of the British population – the Muslim community – has caused concerns. Most concerns have been dominated by allegations of a security threat by an ‘enemy within’, seemingly realised after the 7/7 bombings, but for those who had studied the issues for longer, concerns really emerged when the Muslim community in Europe had such a strong reactions to the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. The blame was placed firmly on the policy of multiculturalism for institutionalising difference, the lack of a strong and distinct British identity and the failure of Islam to ‘reform’, meaning to secularise.
At best the responses produced to solving the problem of defining what is meant by ‘Britishness’ are, in my view, destined to fail. At worse, where they confuse security and religious reform with citizenship and identity, they could backfire spectacularly. It is measure of the failure of the debate that such a fundamental discussion has been framed as a reaction to specific events, and has placed the burdens of change upon one specific community.
Where should the blame lie?
Those who would blame Islam and Muslims for the failure to be well integrated stakeholders in society should pause for thought. It is easy to cite examples that Muslim US citizens fought against US troops in Afghanistan (John Walker Lindh for example) or that Muslims were amongst those rioting in Paris earlier this year. However, the images of an alienated black underclass in New Orleans, exposed by Hurricane Katrina, should pose an immediate challenge to complacent views that somehow other minorities are thoroughly assimilated. Furthermore the involvement of immigrants of more than one religion in the riots in Paris prompts the memory of similar riots in Brixton and Toxteth some years ago. If we are looking for a scapegoat there is more of a case to make for targeting French style secular assimilation, or the so-called American dream, than Muslims and their alleged failure to fully integrate into British society.
Fundamental mistakes: National identities, shared values and uniform ‘Britishness’
The contribution to this debate by Gordon Brown in his speech to the Fabian Society conference of 2006 was arguably the most significant contribution made thus far in the whole debate. Brown argued that Britain has a history in which people manage their multiple identities well. He felt that this was still possible as long as Britishness was built upon a shared history, a shared sense of purpose and shared underlying values.
In my view it is neither possible nor desirable to focus upon identities built on national identity, as articulated through an ‘official’ narrative, nor upon certain adopted values. It is simply not possible to unify people based upon such matters as a common history, heritage or shared cultural values. This is because it is almost impossible for people in a globalised world to share the same narrative of any nation’s history, particularly in countries with large immigrant minorities from ex-colonies. Furthermore, there is the ever increasing prominence of supranational identity – be it either European or Internationalist in outlook.
There is no currently unified or uniform view of Britishness that many such as Brown or Howard allude to. How could there possibly be? A white Anglo-Saxon Protestant has a very different historical heritage, culture or religion to a citizen who is Celtic, Catholic, Hindu or Muslim. Someone who’s ancestry can be traced back to the British Isles will have a very different view of history to someone whose ancestry is from an ex-colony. Even within one ‘ethnic’ subgroup a senior citizen, whose views in life have been shaped by two world wars, will have very different values to someone whose formative years were during the swinging sixties or the yuppy eighties.
To try to unify such a diverse society in this manner would do one of two things. Either one would simply define the lowest common denominator of shared culture, which is hardly likely to fill people with any great national pride, or one could try and impose a dominant ‘nationalistic’ interpretation of a culture on the whole of society. The former approach goes to the heart of the recent criticism of multiculturalism. The latter represents the worst form of citizenship – whether it be manifested in Britain, France or even Muslim countries like Pakistan. It is the ugly rabid form of nationalism which often leads to jingoism and feelings of racial supremacy.
So, what about shared values? Do they exist? It would be supremely arrogant for the political ruling class to define a certain view of Britishness based on certain values they advocate. It would be doubly arrogant to then dictate to large numbers of minorities a narrow view of what the best values were, or worse what were acceptable political views. The Brown / Fabian approach was just an attempt to do this, to the extent that the view of British values excluded even much of the political ‘right’.
To a large extent this has become institutionalised by the present government through its educational citizenship programme, both in schools and for immigrants. The values based approach is coercive, often aggressively promoted in the media, encouraging people to adopt certain values, and abandon some of their own. This is the reason that the pressure on Muslims to ‘reform’ Islam has become entwined with the politics of identity. Such an imposition of values completely circumvents any opportunity for reasoned debate, or ideological discussion of the relative merits of different ideas and beliefs.
There is a real danger that putting such a strong emphasis on controversial values, history or institutions as a litmus test for citizenship in the absence of conviction or genuine agreement will create different levels of citizenship. Muslim citizens for example are often made to feel that they must display more loyalty to symbols of the State such as the Crown than others in society, many of whom have little or no respect for the Crown (indeed a sizeable minority of British citizens and a majority of the Fabian conference delegates would quite happily confine the monarchy to the dustbin of history). Some expect the Muslim community for instance to show respect and trust in Parliament despite the fact that 40% of the mainstream population showed their own respect and confidence in the system by not voting at the last general election.
Even ignoring these contrasts, there are immense pressures from the media on Muslims and others who hold a very strong religious faith, to adopt liberal secular values. Not conforming to the dominant view leaves those citizens open to vilification or ridicule. This pressure creates a socially imposed censorship on the views of a significant minority every bit as sinister as the legalised censorship that is enforced in the anti-terror laws. Both forms of censorship effectively censor views the former on a number of matters relating to social domestic policy, the latter relating to foreign policy under the guise of ‘glorifying’ terrorism.
Helpful advice from the Muslim experience?
A system much admired in European history for its achievements in Andalusia was the Islamic Caliphate. From its outset in the Middle East the Caliphate achieved a largely cohesive citizenship between people of different races and religions. In the context of that diverse society Sir Thomas Arnold once wrote:
"We have never heard about any attempt to compel Non-Muslim parties to adopt Islam or about any organized persecution aiming at exterminating Christianity. If the Caliphs had chosen one of these plans, they would have wiped out Christianity as easily as what happened to Islam during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain; by the same method which Louis XIV followed to make Protestantism a creed whose followers were to be sentenced to death; or with the same ease of keeping the Jews away from Britain for a period of three hundred fifty years. The Eastern Churches in Asia were entirely cut off from communion with the rest of Christiandom, throughout which no one would have been found to lift a finger on their behalf, as heretical communions. So that the very survival of these Churches to the present day is a strong proof of the generally tolerant attitude of Mohammedan [sic] governments towards them”. Arnold, Sir Thomas W. THE PREACHING OF ISLAM, A HISTORY OF THE PROPAGATION OF THE MUSLIM FAITH, Westminster A. Constable & Co., London, 1896, p. 80.
There are two essential points to consider based upon the model that Arnold describes. Firstly, the level of commitment to the state that needed to be shown by any citizen was obedience to the law. That was all. Not that they be forced to believe in the source of that law. Had non-Muslims been asked to proclaim that the source of law was divine it would have violated the Islamic principle: ‘there is no compulsion in the deen (religion).’ People who did not share the fundamental beliefs and values of lslam were not expected to change their religion to Islam, nor to omit verses from the Torah and Bible to conform with Islam. To ask for that would have been tantamount to a forced conversion, and could only have been described as totalitarian. Of course many will argue that Muslims are also not being asked to leave their faith, yet what is effectively being asked of Muslims is to secularise their faith to conform with the dominant value system found in western societies. As Islam does not recognise a separation between religion and state, asking Muslims to adopt divergent values and concepts is tantamount to asking them to leave important parts of their holistic faith.
The second point to reflect upon is that people in the society Arnold described trusted the system, felt secure and as a consequence felt like stakeholders. People feel secure, and consequently feel ‘at home’ when they have equal access to justice, have opportunities for redress and have space to hold on to their beliefs. The Caliphate gave citizens of different faith the space to practice their faith and even exempted them from the obligations of citizenship that were specifically linked to the Islamic belief.
This view that the predominant expectation of any citizen should be no more that to abide by the law and display civility in interaction with others is not unique to the Caliphate. It is one that some brave voices do air, and it is a demonstration of confidence in ones values and state.
The ties that bind
The push for a nationalistic, values based citizenship is therefore a divisive and coercive approach, which sadly dominates much of the identity debate today. It betrays a lack of confidence, and perhaps substance in the dominant values and symbols of national pride that are being forced on society today. Sadly, this will not create the harmony that many may intend, only harm.
In the end people, and especially minorities, feel they have a stake in society when they feel welcome, are given space to find their feet and practice their own faith in a protected sphere, without vilification and pressure to reform their religion from its basis. They feel they have a stake when they feel that justice and opportunities are truly for all. In such a way there is a natural process of attachment to ones home, an appreciation of the natural environment in which one lives, and an adoption of those aspects of culture that do not contradict ones principles. This is the natural process that existed for centuries in the Muslim world that allowed minorities – religious and ethnic – to feel attached to their state, preserving many rich cultural variations in a way that did not cause division and resentment.
For Muslims in modern Europe – including Britain - this has not only been denied through the attempts at social censorship on the personal views of Muslims, laws banning the hijab (and now the jilbab), a discriminatory foreign policy and oppressive legislation, none of which will help the process of harmonizing society.
This was the lesson of Northern Ireland. This was the lesson of Lord Scarman after the race riots of the eighties. Yet this is the path that politicians tread once again. Sadly, this is a shared history that does not appear to have been bought into.
The below article is by Dr Abdul Wahid, an Islamic thinker, looking into debates relating to britishness and identity politics in the UK.
Introduction
Gordon Brown, Michael Howard, Boris Johnson, David Blunkett and Trevor Phillips are just a few of the names that have dared to tackle the complex and controversial subject of British citizenship. The subject is complex, because Britain was always a convenient political identity to try to preserve an uncomfortable union between dominant England and its vanquished neighbours. It is controversial because its prominence has been brought about because one section of the British population – the Muslim community – has caused concerns. Most concerns have been dominated by allegations of a security threat by an ‘enemy within’, seemingly realised after the 7/7 bombings, but for those who had studied the issues for longer, concerns really emerged when the Muslim community in Europe had such a strong reactions to the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. The blame was placed firmly on the policy of multiculturalism for institutionalising difference, the lack of a strong and distinct British identity and the failure of Islam to ‘reform’, meaning to secularise.
At best the responses produced to solving the problem of defining what is meant by ‘Britishness’ are, in my view, destined to fail. At worse, where they confuse security and religious reform with citizenship and identity, they could backfire spectacularly. It is measure of the failure of the debate that such a fundamental discussion has been framed as a reaction to specific events, and has placed the burdens of change upon one specific community.
Where should the blame lie?
Those who would blame Islam and Muslims for the failure to be well integrated stakeholders in society should pause for thought. It is easy to cite examples that Muslim US citizens fought against US troops in Afghanistan (John Walker Lindh for example) or that Muslims were amongst those rioting in Paris earlier this year. However, the images of an alienated black underclass in New Orleans, exposed by Hurricane Katrina, should pose an immediate challenge to complacent views that somehow other minorities are thoroughly assimilated. Furthermore the involvement of immigrants of more than one religion in the riots in Paris prompts the memory of similar riots in Brixton and Toxteth some years ago. If we are looking for a scapegoat there is more of a case to make for targeting French style secular assimilation, or the so-called American dream, than Muslims and their alleged failure to fully integrate into British society.
Fundamental mistakes: National identities, shared values and uniform ‘Britishness’
The contribution to this debate by Gordon Brown in his speech to the Fabian Society conference of 2006 was arguably the most significant contribution made thus far in the whole debate. Brown argued that Britain has a history in which people manage their multiple identities well. He felt that this was still possible as long as Britishness was built upon a shared history, a shared sense of purpose and shared underlying values.
In my view it is neither possible nor desirable to focus upon identities built on national identity, as articulated through an ‘official’ narrative, nor upon certain adopted values. It is simply not possible to unify people based upon such matters as a common history, heritage or shared cultural values. This is because it is almost impossible for people in a globalised world to share the same narrative of any nation’s history, particularly in countries with large immigrant minorities from ex-colonies. Furthermore, there is the ever increasing prominence of supranational identity – be it either European or Internationalist in outlook.
There is no currently unified or uniform view of Britishness that many such as Brown or Howard allude to. How could there possibly be? A white Anglo-Saxon Protestant has a very different historical heritage, culture or religion to a citizen who is Celtic, Catholic, Hindu or Muslim. Someone who’s ancestry can be traced back to the British Isles will have a very different view of history to someone whose ancestry is from an ex-colony. Even within one ‘ethnic’ subgroup a senior citizen, whose views in life have been shaped by two world wars, will have very different values to someone whose formative years were during the swinging sixties or the yuppy eighties.
To try to unify such a diverse society in this manner would do one of two things. Either one would simply define the lowest common denominator of shared culture, which is hardly likely to fill people with any great national pride, or one could try and impose a dominant ‘nationalistic’ interpretation of a culture on the whole of society. The former approach goes to the heart of the recent criticism of multiculturalism. The latter represents the worst form of citizenship – whether it be manifested in Britain, France or even Muslim countries like Pakistan. It is the ugly rabid form of nationalism which often leads to jingoism and feelings of racial supremacy.
So, what about shared values? Do they exist? It would be supremely arrogant for the political ruling class to define a certain view of Britishness based on certain values they advocate. It would be doubly arrogant to then dictate to large numbers of minorities a narrow view of what the best values were, or worse what were acceptable political views. The Brown / Fabian approach was just an attempt to do this, to the extent that the view of British values excluded even much of the political ‘right’.
To a large extent this has become institutionalised by the present government through its educational citizenship programme, both in schools and for immigrants. The values based approach is coercive, often aggressively promoted in the media, encouraging people to adopt certain values, and abandon some of their own. This is the reason that the pressure on Muslims to ‘reform’ Islam has become entwined with the politics of identity. Such an imposition of values completely circumvents any opportunity for reasoned debate, or ideological discussion of the relative merits of different ideas and beliefs.
There is a real danger that putting such a strong emphasis on controversial values, history or institutions as a litmus test for citizenship in the absence of conviction or genuine agreement will create different levels of citizenship. Muslim citizens for example are often made to feel that they must display more loyalty to symbols of the State such as the Crown than others in society, many of whom have little or no respect for the Crown (indeed a sizeable minority of British citizens and a majority of the Fabian conference delegates would quite happily confine the monarchy to the dustbin of history). Some expect the Muslim community for instance to show respect and trust in Parliament despite the fact that 40% of the mainstream population showed their own respect and confidence in the system by not voting at the last general election.
Even ignoring these contrasts, there are immense pressures from the media on Muslims and others who hold a very strong religious faith, to adopt liberal secular values. Not conforming to the dominant view leaves those citizens open to vilification or ridicule. This pressure creates a socially imposed censorship on the views of a significant minority every bit as sinister as the legalised censorship that is enforced in the anti-terror laws. Both forms of censorship effectively censor views the former on a number of matters relating to social domestic policy, the latter relating to foreign policy under the guise of ‘glorifying’ terrorism.
Helpful advice from the Muslim experience?
A system much admired in European history for its achievements in Andalusia was the Islamic Caliphate. From its outset in the Middle East the Caliphate achieved a largely cohesive citizenship between people of different races and religions. In the context of that diverse society Sir Thomas Arnold once wrote:
"We have never heard about any attempt to compel Non-Muslim parties to adopt Islam or about any organized persecution aiming at exterminating Christianity. If the Caliphs had chosen one of these plans, they would have wiped out Christianity as easily as what happened to Islam during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain; by the same method which Louis XIV followed to make Protestantism a creed whose followers were to be sentenced to death; or with the same ease of keeping the Jews away from Britain for a period of three hundred fifty years. The Eastern Churches in Asia were entirely cut off from communion with the rest of Christiandom, throughout which no one would have been found to lift a finger on their behalf, as heretical communions. So that the very survival of these Churches to the present day is a strong proof of the generally tolerant attitude of Mohammedan [sic] governments towards them”. Arnold, Sir Thomas W. THE PREACHING OF ISLAM, A HISTORY OF THE PROPAGATION OF THE MUSLIM FAITH, Westminster A. Constable & Co., London, 1896, p. 80.
There are two essential points to consider based upon the model that Arnold describes. Firstly, the level of commitment to the state that needed to be shown by any citizen was obedience to the law. That was all. Not that they be forced to believe in the source of that law. Had non-Muslims been asked to proclaim that the source of law was divine it would have violated the Islamic principle: ‘there is no compulsion in the deen (religion).’ People who did not share the fundamental beliefs and values of lslam were not expected to change their religion to Islam, nor to omit verses from the Torah and Bible to conform with Islam. To ask for that would have been tantamount to a forced conversion, and could only have been described as totalitarian. Of course many will argue that Muslims are also not being asked to leave their faith, yet what is effectively being asked of Muslims is to secularise their faith to conform with the dominant value system found in western societies. As Islam does not recognise a separation between religion and state, asking Muslims to adopt divergent values and concepts is tantamount to asking them to leave important parts of their holistic faith.
The second point to reflect upon is that people in the society Arnold described trusted the system, felt secure and as a consequence felt like stakeholders. People feel secure, and consequently feel ‘at home’ when they have equal access to justice, have opportunities for redress and have space to hold on to their beliefs. The Caliphate gave citizens of different faith the space to practice their faith and even exempted them from the obligations of citizenship that were specifically linked to the Islamic belief.
This view that the predominant expectation of any citizen should be no more that to abide by the law and display civility in interaction with others is not unique to the Caliphate. It is one that some brave voices do air, and it is a demonstration of confidence in ones values and state.
The ties that bind
The push for a nationalistic, values based citizenship is therefore a divisive and coercive approach, which sadly dominates much of the identity debate today. It betrays a lack of confidence, and perhaps substance in the dominant values and symbols of national pride that are being forced on society today. Sadly, this will not create the harmony that many may intend, only harm.
In the end people, and especially minorities, feel they have a stake in society when they feel welcome, are given space to find their feet and practice their own faith in a protected sphere, without vilification and pressure to reform their religion from its basis. They feel they have a stake when they feel that justice and opportunities are truly for all. In such a way there is a natural process of attachment to ones home, an appreciation of the natural environment in which one lives, and an adoption of those aspects of culture that do not contradict ones principles. This is the natural process that existed for centuries in the Muslim world that allowed minorities – religious and ethnic – to feel attached to their state, preserving many rich cultural variations in a way that did not cause division and resentment.
For Muslims in modern Europe – including Britain - this has not only been denied through the attempts at social censorship on the personal views of Muslims, laws banning the hijab (and now the jilbab), a discriminatory foreign policy and oppressive legislation, none of which will help the process of harmonizing society.
This was the lesson of Northern Ireland. This was the lesson of Lord Scarman after the race riots of the eighties. Yet this is the path that politicians tread once again. Sadly, this is a shared history that does not appear to have been bought into.
Middle East Proliferation- Myth or Reality?
The spectre of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons has been causing apprehension in the West lately. There has been much concern about the potential consequences of Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons. There has been concern about the security of Israel, especially after the rise to power of conservative politicians in Iran, who have made clear their disdain for Israel. In addition, the fear of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East has been much touted. The Middle East is unstable at this moment in time as a result of a range of socio-economic and political factors; this has raised the dilemma of a nuclear Iran acting as a catalyst of further regional instability by stimulating the nuclearisation of neighbouring states. This article aims to explore the plausibility of the notion that Iran “going nuclear” would set in motion a process of frantic acquisition of nuclear weapons by the surrounding states. The key Muslim states in the region at this moment in time are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey. These countries will be analysed in order to explore whether a nuclear Iran would lead to attempts by these countries to acquire nuclear weapons. Iraq will not be included as it is in no state to attempt anything at the moment in time due to internal security problems and Libya will not be analysed due to its abandonment of its nuclear programme in 2003 and subsequent rapprochement with the West.
Egypt
There has been general anxiety in Egypt about Israel’s nuclear programme and its impact upon stability in the Middle East since the sixties. In the era of Gamal Abdul Nasser Egypt took some tentative steps to acquire nuclear weapons, but his moves were obstructed by Russia and China. The sixties were a period of heightened Israeli-Arab tensions, resulting in the Arab military defeat in 1967. Rather than spurring the desire to acquire nuclear weapons, this defeat in fact led to the conviction that a nuclear Middle East would cause further instability and impact adversely on Egypt’s quest for regional leadership. Since the 1970s, Egypt has consistently advocated that the region become a Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone and has even sought to enhance its leadership role by promoting this agenda.
It is true that a nuclear Iran could change Egyptian attitudes towards acquiring nuclear weapons, but there would still be major constraints that Egypt would have to overcome. In relation to developing its own military nuclear capability, there are clear technological and economic hurdles that Egypt would have to overcome in order to achieve this. The intent of this article is not to examine the economic and technological capacity of Egypt in depth but it is reasonable to assume that if Egypt were to make the political decision to go nuclear, that these issues would need to be assessed and at this moment in time Egypt lacks the industrial capacity to produce nuclear weapons, a major hurdle to any such aspirations. In addition to this hurdle Egypt would face external constraints. There is no doubt that Egypt would have to take into account its relationship with the U.S., which Hosni Mubarak has most recently described as "strategic and strong." Egypt becoming a suspected nuclear actor would seriously jeopardize the country's relations with the U.S., and this would be a very high price to pay, especially as Egypt is one of the largest recipients of economic and military aid from the US .
In addition, the US has been a strong supporter of the Mubarak regime and any inclination towards nuclear acquirement could lead to suspension of this support and the encouragement of political change in Egypt – clearly detrimental to the monopoly of power Mubarak and his acolytes enjoy in Egypt. It is also important to bear in mind that Egypt going nuclear would upset relations with Israel which have been relatively stable since the Camp David Accords of 1978. Therefore it seems that Egypt does not have the capacity or inclination to produce nuclear weapons at this moment in time. Even if the government contemplated the acquisition of nuclear materials, the inevitable damage to relations with the US would act as a major disincentive.
Turkey
Contemporary relations between Turkey and Iran are still marked by a history of conflict and hostility – stretching back to the time of the Safavid dynasty. Despite improvements in relations during the 20th century, there have still been periods of strong hostility – stemming in part from Turkish accusations of Iran supporting Kurdish separatism. It could be surmised that Turkish distrust and the bad history between the two countries would be sufficient for Turkey to develop its own nuclear programme. No doubt there are voices in Turkey that are calling for an indigenous nuclear programme, but there are various other factors which need to be taken into consideration which would act as major constraints on such a decision.
Turkey's foreign policy options in the post-Cold War era remain highly dependant on European and American acceptance. Given the nature of this relationship, were Iran to go nuclear, Turkey is unlikely to begin its own nuclear programme, due to the potential damage to its relations with the West. Secondly, Turkey does not consider that she is the cause of Iran seeking to “nuclearise” in the first place. The closer that Turkey sticks to EU policy, the better position it will find itself in relation to accession talks. Entertaining the nuclear option would no doubt further stall Turkey’s European aspirations, if not end them all together. Turkey’s hopes of entering the EU will not just depend on a wholesale transformation in the economic and human rights fields, but also its foreign policy moves, especially how it would react to a nuclear Iran.
Therefore Turkey's long-lasting odyssey in search of EU accession – while at the same time balancing the security and military concerns of the US, Israel, and the EU – will act as a major check on Turkey. Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952, which has acted as a linchpin of Turkish security since that time. Even after the Iranian revolution, this has remained the case, thus Turkey is unlikely to renege on this security arrangement via the acquisition of nuclear weapons. In addition, the new conservatives in Iran today seem extremely pragmatic rather than ideological, therefore the likelihood of Iran exporting the principles of the Iranian revolution seem a remote possibility. This fact will calm the nerves of Turkey’s secular elite.
Saudi Arabia
It is also unlikely that Saudi Arabia would seek a nuclear option in the face of a nuclear-armed Iran. Like Turkey, there are a number of policy constraints along that path and Saudi is more likely to revert to more stringent internal policies than attempt a tilt toward strategic or medium-range nuclear technology.
Ten to fifteen years ago, a nuclear Iran might have been a significant threat to Saudi Arabia, due to the ill treatment the Shi'a population in its Eastern province suffer. Although discrimination continues against the Shi’a in Saudi, the authorities have now opened dialogue with Shi’a leaders, and the election of 11 Shi’a candidates into municipal councils during 2004 has no doubt acted as a source of improving Iran-Saudi relations. In addition, the Shi’a in Saudi usually refer to Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani in Iraq, who has a quietist attitude towards politics in comparison to Ayatollah Khameini in Iran. Therefore Iran is unlikely to have major influence among the Shi’a of Saudi; this will ease Saudi worries of Iranian encouragement of internal Shi’a uprisings. The signing of the 2001 Iran-Saudi security agreement is another indication of improving relations and as a result Iran cannot be considered an imminent threat to Saudi security. If there was a military threat from Iran, there is no doubt that a quick response would come from the West, especially the US which has depended on Saudi oil for decades. Saudi is an important state for the US and any attack on Saudi would destabilise the whole Persian Gulf, sharply affecting the world’s supply of oil. This would be disastrous for Western economies, making US intervention to counteract an Iranian military threat inevitable.
In addition, the US has been apprehensive due to the possibility of the Saudi regime being removed by Islamists, leading to the establishment of a Caliphate. The possibility of a Caliphate emerging as a challenge to its hegemony is sufficient to worry the US; add nuclear capabilities and these fears increase. Therefore it is definitely in US national interests to thwart any Saudi attempts to develop nuclear weapons. US interests are a major constraint on Saudi ambitions, but nevertheless the US continues to be the guarantor of the Saudi regime’s security.
Syria
Relations between Iran and Syria have been on good terms since the 1970s. Mutual interests have characterised the relations between the two countries. Chief among these are the threats both countries have faced from Iraq, Turkey and Israel. In addition, today both countries are subject to criticism from the US and potential military attack in the future. In response to US threats, the two countries have strengthened their relations. In February 2005, the two countries announced that they had formed a military pact, a direct result of growing US dominance in the region and aggression towards both countries.
Given the good relations between Syria and Iran, it is unlikely that Syria would attempt to develop nuclear weapons due to Iran doing so; in fact a nuclear Iran would be in the interest of Syria. The prospect of friendly relations with a nuclear actor could strengthen the Syrian hand in relations with the US, Turkey and Israel. In addition, if one looks to the international pressure and scrutiny of the Assad regime following the Hariri assassination, it seems unlikely that Syria would consider developing nuclear weapons. The Assad regime at this moment in time is concerned with political survival. Pressure is growing from all sides, the continuing inquiry into Hariri’s assassination and a new Khaddam-Muslim Brotherhood alliance are adding to the difficulties facing the regime. External pressure could tempt the government to consider acquiring nuclear weapons, rather than the ‘threat’ of a nuclear Iran, but given the difficulties Syria faces at this moment in time, it is unlikely to make its situation more complicated and add further pressure on itself by seeking nuclear weapons.
Conclusion
The cases analysed above indicate that the fear of regional powers acquiring nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear Iran seems more myth rather than reality. A number of hurdles and obstacles face the countries discussed before they could even begin to contemplate acquiring nuclear weapons. US interests are the key factor behind the Middle Eastern proliferation story that is currently being touted. In order to build a case to argue against Iran developing nuclear weapons, justifications are required. The regional proliferation story works, but in reality this line does not stand scrutiny, it only hides true US interests. The US has been concerned by the prospect of a regional actor emerging in the Middle East that could potentially threaten its military dominance in the region. A nuclear Iran would undermine US dominance in the Middle East as it could no longer dictate but would have to consult and listen. In addition, the possibility of being driven out of the vitally important Persian Gulf by a nuclear Iran haunts the US, as it would be catastrophic to US interests. It is these interests that are driving US policy towards Iran rather than fear of instability in the region. If the US was concerned with instability in the Middle East it would have changed its decades-old policy of supporting Israeli aggression against Palestinians, and backing Arab dictators; the US would not have attacked Iraq nor instigated the War on Terror. This US policy has acted as a key source of de-stabilisation rather than stability in the Middle East. The key driving force behind US foreign policy continues to be national interests and it is these interests that are pushing the propaganda campaign to prevent the emergence of a nuclear Iran.
Egypt
There has been general anxiety in Egypt about Israel’s nuclear programme and its impact upon stability in the Middle East since the sixties. In the era of Gamal Abdul Nasser Egypt took some tentative steps to acquire nuclear weapons, but his moves were obstructed by Russia and China. The sixties were a period of heightened Israeli-Arab tensions, resulting in the Arab military defeat in 1967. Rather than spurring the desire to acquire nuclear weapons, this defeat in fact led to the conviction that a nuclear Middle East would cause further instability and impact adversely on Egypt’s quest for regional leadership. Since the 1970s, Egypt has consistently advocated that the region become a Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone and has even sought to enhance its leadership role by promoting this agenda.
It is true that a nuclear Iran could change Egyptian attitudes towards acquiring nuclear weapons, but there would still be major constraints that Egypt would have to overcome. In relation to developing its own military nuclear capability, there are clear technological and economic hurdles that Egypt would have to overcome in order to achieve this. The intent of this article is not to examine the economic and technological capacity of Egypt in depth but it is reasonable to assume that if Egypt were to make the political decision to go nuclear, that these issues would need to be assessed and at this moment in time Egypt lacks the industrial capacity to produce nuclear weapons, a major hurdle to any such aspirations. In addition to this hurdle Egypt would face external constraints. There is no doubt that Egypt would have to take into account its relationship with the U.S., which Hosni Mubarak has most recently described as "strategic and strong." Egypt becoming a suspected nuclear actor would seriously jeopardize the country's relations with the U.S., and this would be a very high price to pay, especially as Egypt is one of the largest recipients of economic and military aid from the US .
In addition, the US has been a strong supporter of the Mubarak regime and any inclination towards nuclear acquirement could lead to suspension of this support and the encouragement of political change in Egypt – clearly detrimental to the monopoly of power Mubarak and his acolytes enjoy in Egypt. It is also important to bear in mind that Egypt going nuclear would upset relations with Israel which have been relatively stable since the Camp David Accords of 1978. Therefore it seems that Egypt does not have the capacity or inclination to produce nuclear weapons at this moment in time. Even if the government contemplated the acquisition of nuclear materials, the inevitable damage to relations with the US would act as a major disincentive.
Turkey
Contemporary relations between Turkey and Iran are still marked by a history of conflict and hostility – stretching back to the time of the Safavid dynasty. Despite improvements in relations during the 20th century, there have still been periods of strong hostility – stemming in part from Turkish accusations of Iran supporting Kurdish separatism. It could be surmised that Turkish distrust and the bad history between the two countries would be sufficient for Turkey to develop its own nuclear programme. No doubt there are voices in Turkey that are calling for an indigenous nuclear programme, but there are various other factors which need to be taken into consideration which would act as major constraints on such a decision.
Turkey's foreign policy options in the post-Cold War era remain highly dependant on European and American acceptance. Given the nature of this relationship, were Iran to go nuclear, Turkey is unlikely to begin its own nuclear programme, due to the potential damage to its relations with the West. Secondly, Turkey does not consider that she is the cause of Iran seeking to “nuclearise” in the first place. The closer that Turkey sticks to EU policy, the better position it will find itself in relation to accession talks. Entertaining the nuclear option would no doubt further stall Turkey’s European aspirations, if not end them all together. Turkey’s hopes of entering the EU will not just depend on a wholesale transformation in the economic and human rights fields, but also its foreign policy moves, especially how it would react to a nuclear Iran.
Therefore Turkey's long-lasting odyssey in search of EU accession – while at the same time balancing the security and military concerns of the US, Israel, and the EU – will act as a major check on Turkey. Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952, which has acted as a linchpin of Turkish security since that time. Even after the Iranian revolution, this has remained the case, thus Turkey is unlikely to renege on this security arrangement via the acquisition of nuclear weapons. In addition, the new conservatives in Iran today seem extremely pragmatic rather than ideological, therefore the likelihood of Iran exporting the principles of the Iranian revolution seem a remote possibility. This fact will calm the nerves of Turkey’s secular elite.
Saudi Arabia
It is also unlikely that Saudi Arabia would seek a nuclear option in the face of a nuclear-armed Iran. Like Turkey, there are a number of policy constraints along that path and Saudi is more likely to revert to more stringent internal policies than attempt a tilt toward strategic or medium-range nuclear technology.
Ten to fifteen years ago, a nuclear Iran might have been a significant threat to Saudi Arabia, due to the ill treatment the Shi'a population in its Eastern province suffer. Although discrimination continues against the Shi’a in Saudi, the authorities have now opened dialogue with Shi’a leaders, and the election of 11 Shi’a candidates into municipal councils during 2004 has no doubt acted as a source of improving Iran-Saudi relations. In addition, the Shi’a in Saudi usually refer to Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani in Iraq, who has a quietist attitude towards politics in comparison to Ayatollah Khameini in Iran. Therefore Iran is unlikely to have major influence among the Shi’a of Saudi; this will ease Saudi worries of Iranian encouragement of internal Shi’a uprisings. The signing of the 2001 Iran-Saudi security agreement is another indication of improving relations and as a result Iran cannot be considered an imminent threat to Saudi security. If there was a military threat from Iran, there is no doubt that a quick response would come from the West, especially the US which has depended on Saudi oil for decades. Saudi is an important state for the US and any attack on Saudi would destabilise the whole Persian Gulf, sharply affecting the world’s supply of oil. This would be disastrous for Western economies, making US intervention to counteract an Iranian military threat inevitable.
In addition, the US has been apprehensive due to the possibility of the Saudi regime being removed by Islamists, leading to the establishment of a Caliphate. The possibility of a Caliphate emerging as a challenge to its hegemony is sufficient to worry the US; add nuclear capabilities and these fears increase. Therefore it is definitely in US national interests to thwart any Saudi attempts to develop nuclear weapons. US interests are a major constraint on Saudi ambitions, but nevertheless the US continues to be the guarantor of the Saudi regime’s security.
Syria
Relations between Iran and Syria have been on good terms since the 1970s. Mutual interests have characterised the relations between the two countries. Chief among these are the threats both countries have faced from Iraq, Turkey and Israel. In addition, today both countries are subject to criticism from the US and potential military attack in the future. In response to US threats, the two countries have strengthened their relations. In February 2005, the two countries announced that they had formed a military pact, a direct result of growing US dominance in the region and aggression towards both countries.
Given the good relations between Syria and Iran, it is unlikely that Syria would attempt to develop nuclear weapons due to Iran doing so; in fact a nuclear Iran would be in the interest of Syria. The prospect of friendly relations with a nuclear actor could strengthen the Syrian hand in relations with the US, Turkey and Israel. In addition, if one looks to the international pressure and scrutiny of the Assad regime following the Hariri assassination, it seems unlikely that Syria would consider developing nuclear weapons. The Assad regime at this moment in time is concerned with political survival. Pressure is growing from all sides, the continuing inquiry into Hariri’s assassination and a new Khaddam-Muslim Brotherhood alliance are adding to the difficulties facing the regime. External pressure could tempt the government to consider acquiring nuclear weapons, rather than the ‘threat’ of a nuclear Iran, but given the difficulties Syria faces at this moment in time, it is unlikely to make its situation more complicated and add further pressure on itself by seeking nuclear weapons.
Conclusion
The cases analysed above indicate that the fear of regional powers acquiring nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear Iran seems more myth rather than reality. A number of hurdles and obstacles face the countries discussed before they could even begin to contemplate acquiring nuclear weapons. US interests are the key factor behind the Middle Eastern proliferation story that is currently being touted. In order to build a case to argue against Iran developing nuclear weapons, justifications are required. The regional proliferation story works, but in reality this line does not stand scrutiny, it only hides true US interests. The US has been concerned by the prospect of a regional actor emerging in the Middle East that could potentially threaten its military dominance in the region. A nuclear Iran would undermine US dominance in the Middle East as it could no longer dictate but would have to consult and listen. In addition, the possibility of being driven out of the vitally important Persian Gulf by a nuclear Iran haunts the US, as it would be catastrophic to US interests. It is these interests that are driving US policy towards Iran rather than fear of instability in the region. If the US was concerned with instability in the Middle East it would have changed its decades-old policy of supporting Israeli aggression against Palestinians, and backing Arab dictators; the US would not have attacked Iraq nor instigated the War on Terror. This US policy has acted as a key source of de-stabilisation rather than stability in the Middle East. The key driving force behind US foreign policy continues to be national interests and it is these interests that are pushing the propaganda campaign to prevent the emergence of a nuclear Iran.
An Idea Whose Time Has Come?
The following is an interesting article that highlights the rise of the political understanding of Islam in the world and the increased call for an Islamic based system in the Muslim world
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=9192
An Idea Whose Time Has Come?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
In 1938, the year of Anschluss and Munich, a perceptive British Catholic looked beyond the continent over which war clouds hung and saw another cloud forming.
"It has always seemed to me … probable," wrote Hilaire Belloc, "that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent."
Belloc was prophetic. Even as Christianity seems to be dying in Europe, Islam is rising to shake the 21st century as it did so many previous centuries.
Indeed, as one watches U.S. armed forces struggle against Sunni insurgents, Shia militias, and jihadists in Iraq, and a resurgent Taliban, all invoking Allah, Victor Hugo's words return to mind: No army is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
The idea for which our many of our adversaries fight is a compelling one. They believe there is but one God, Allah; that Muhammad is his prophet; that Islam, or submission to the Koran, is the only path to paradise; and that a Godly society should be governed according to the Shariah, the law of Islam. Having tried other ways and failed, they are coming home to Islam.
What idea do we have to offer? Americans believe that freedom comports with human dignity, that only a democratic and free-market system can ensure the good life for all, as it has done in the West and is doing in Asia.
From Ataturk on, millions of Islamic peoples have embraced this Western alternative. But today, tens of millions of Muslims appear to be rejecting it, returning to their roots in a more pure Islam.
Indeed, the endurance of the Islamic faith is astonishing.
Islam survived two centuries of defeats and humiliations of the Ottoman Empire and Ataturk's abolition of the caliphate. It endured generations of Western rule. It outlasted the pro-Western monarchs in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Ethiopia and Iran. Islam easily fended off communism, survived the rout of Nasserism in 1967, and has proven more enduring than the nationalism of Arafat or Saddam. Now, it is resisting the world's last superpower.
What occasioned this column was a jolting report in the June 20 Washington Times, by James Brandon, alerting us to a new front.
"Arrests Spark Fear of Armed Islamist Takeover" headlined the story about the arrest, since May, of 500 militants who had allegedly plotted the overthrow of the king of Morocco and establishment of an Islamic state that would sever all ties to the infidel West – to end the poverty and corruption they blame on the West.
The arrests raised fears that al-Adl wa al-Ihsane, or Justice and Charity, was preparing to take up arms to fulfill the predictions of the group's mystics that the monarchy would fall in 2006.
Though illegal, al-Adl wa al-Ihsane is Morocco's largest Islamic movement, which boycotts elections, but has hundreds of thousands of followers and has taken over the universities and is radicalizing the young.
Its founder is Sheik Abdessalam Yassine, who has declared its purpose is to reunite mosque and state: "Politics and spirituality have been kept apart by the Arab elites. And we have been able to reconnect these two aspects of Islam – and that is why people fear us."
And, one might add, why people embrace them.
If Morocco is now in play in the struggle between militant Islam and the West, how looks the correlation of forces in June 2006?
Islamists are taking over in Somalia. They are in power in Sudan. The Muslim Brotherhood won 60 percent of the races it contested in Egypt. Hezbollah swept the board in southern Lebanon. Hamas seized power from Fatah on the West Bank and Gaza. The Shia parties who hearken to Ayatollah Sistani brushed aside our favorites, Chalabi and Iyad Allawi, in the Iraqi elections. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the most admired Iranian leader since Khomeini. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is staging a comeback.
This has all happened in the last year. And where are we winning?
What is the appeal of militant Islam? It is, first, its message: As all else has failed us, why not live the faith and law God gave us?
Second, it is the Muslim rage at the present condition where pro-Western regimes are seen as corruptly enriching themselves, while the poor suffer.
Third, it is a vast U.S. presence that Islamic peoples are taught is designed to steal their God-given resources and assist the Israelis in humiliating them and persecuting the Palestinians.
Lastly, Islamic militants are gaining credibility because they show a willingness to share the poverty of the poor and fight the Americans.
What America needs to understand is something unusual for us: From Morocco to Pakistan, we are no longer seen by the majority as the good guys.
If Islamic rule is an idea taking hold among the Islamic masses, how does even the best army on earth stop it? Do we not need a new policy?
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=9192
An Idea Whose Time Has Come?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
In 1938, the year of Anschluss and Munich, a perceptive British Catholic looked beyond the continent over which war clouds hung and saw another cloud forming.
"It has always seemed to me … probable," wrote Hilaire Belloc, "that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent."
Belloc was prophetic. Even as Christianity seems to be dying in Europe, Islam is rising to shake the 21st century as it did so many previous centuries.
Indeed, as one watches U.S. armed forces struggle against Sunni insurgents, Shia militias, and jihadists in Iraq, and a resurgent Taliban, all invoking Allah, Victor Hugo's words return to mind: No army is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
The idea for which our many of our adversaries fight is a compelling one. They believe there is but one God, Allah; that Muhammad is his prophet; that Islam, or submission to the Koran, is the only path to paradise; and that a Godly society should be governed according to the Shariah, the law of Islam. Having tried other ways and failed, they are coming home to Islam.
What idea do we have to offer? Americans believe that freedom comports with human dignity, that only a democratic and free-market system can ensure the good life for all, as it has done in the West and is doing in Asia.
From Ataturk on, millions of Islamic peoples have embraced this Western alternative. But today, tens of millions of Muslims appear to be rejecting it, returning to their roots in a more pure Islam.
Indeed, the endurance of the Islamic faith is astonishing.
Islam survived two centuries of defeats and humiliations of the Ottoman Empire and Ataturk's abolition of the caliphate. It endured generations of Western rule. It outlasted the pro-Western monarchs in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Ethiopia and Iran. Islam easily fended off communism, survived the rout of Nasserism in 1967, and has proven more enduring than the nationalism of Arafat or Saddam. Now, it is resisting the world's last superpower.
What occasioned this column was a jolting report in the June 20 Washington Times, by James Brandon, alerting us to a new front.
"Arrests Spark Fear of Armed Islamist Takeover" headlined the story about the arrest, since May, of 500 militants who had allegedly plotted the overthrow of the king of Morocco and establishment of an Islamic state that would sever all ties to the infidel West – to end the poverty and corruption they blame on the West.
The arrests raised fears that al-Adl wa al-Ihsane, or Justice and Charity, was preparing to take up arms to fulfill the predictions of the group's mystics that the monarchy would fall in 2006.
Though illegal, al-Adl wa al-Ihsane is Morocco's largest Islamic movement, which boycotts elections, but has hundreds of thousands of followers and has taken over the universities and is radicalizing the young.
Its founder is Sheik Abdessalam Yassine, who has declared its purpose is to reunite mosque and state: "Politics and spirituality have been kept apart by the Arab elites. And we have been able to reconnect these two aspects of Islam – and that is why people fear us."
And, one might add, why people embrace them.
If Morocco is now in play in the struggle between militant Islam and the West, how looks the correlation of forces in June 2006?
Islamists are taking over in Somalia. They are in power in Sudan. The Muslim Brotherhood won 60 percent of the races it contested in Egypt. Hezbollah swept the board in southern Lebanon. Hamas seized power from Fatah on the West Bank and Gaza. The Shia parties who hearken to Ayatollah Sistani brushed aside our favorites, Chalabi and Iyad Allawi, in the Iraqi elections. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the most admired Iranian leader since Khomeini. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is staging a comeback.
This has all happened in the last year. And where are we winning?
What is the appeal of militant Islam? It is, first, its message: As all else has failed us, why not live the faith and law God gave us?
Second, it is the Muslim rage at the present condition where pro-Western regimes are seen as corruptly enriching themselves, while the poor suffer.
Third, it is a vast U.S. presence that Islamic peoples are taught is designed to steal their God-given resources and assist the Israelis in humiliating them and persecuting the Palestinians.
Lastly, Islamic militants are gaining credibility because they show a willingness to share the poverty of the poor and fight the Americans.
What America needs to understand is something unusual for us: From Morocco to Pakistan, we are no longer seen by the majority as the good guys.
If Islamic rule is an idea taking hold among the Islamic masses, how does even the best army on earth stop it? Do we not need a new policy?
The Muslim Conference-
Hello
Further evidence to prove that the recent Muslim Conference held in London was politically driven and motivated- with downing street, the Foreign Office and the Home Office having the key say over who was invited and who was not.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200706110012
Further evidence to prove that the recent Muslim Conference held in London was politically driven and motivated- with downing street, the Foreign Office and the Home Office having the key say over who was invited and who was not.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200706110012
Saturday 9 June 2007
The US and Political Islam
Hello,
The following is an article written by Abid Mustafa, a political commentor who writes for a number of news outlets.
Hamas’s win has once again propelled political Islam to the centre of America’s war on terror. However, Hamas’s victory is not the first for Islamists. Throughout much of the Middle East, Islamists have made unprecedented gains via the ballot box and marginalized their opponents—the modernists whose raison d'etre is to secularise Islam. Amidst this background, fundamental questions are now being asked about the effectiveness of Bush’s foreign policy in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world. While the US media debates the merits of Arab democracy and the success of the Islamists in Palestine, Egypt, Iraq and other countries, a fierce debate goes unreported within America’s foreign policy establishment about America’s relationship with political Islam.The divergent views are not over the nuances of Bush’s democracy agenda but are more about America’s reliance on Islamists as the principal partner for transforming the Muslim world into an oasis of democracy and liberal values.Oddly enough, it is amongst the neoconservative movement that these conflicting views are the sharpest. On October 24 2005, neoconservatives Daniel Pipes director of the Middle East Form and Ruel Marc Gerecht a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute went head to head in a debate entitled “Should the United States Support Islamists?” Gerecht a strong proponent of using political Islam to buttress US interests in the Muslim world argued: “the United States must support the participation of Islamists in democratic elections. Since the authoritarian regimes currently in power will not permit the development of democratic institutions, open elections should be the first step in the reform process. Islamist political parties must be included in these elections due to their significant popular support because a ban on their participation would discredit the electoral process—robbing it of legitimacy.” He also recognized that as the Middle East becomes more democratic, it will be more anti-American and anti-Zionist; however, there is little the United States will be able to do about this trend. Gerecht did not view support for moderates as a viable option, due to their lack of popularity.Pipes on his part argued: “facilitating the immediate political participation of Islamists is tantamount to helping the enemy. He cited four distinct characteristics of Islamist movements that render them anathema to a democratic society: devotion to Sharia, rejection of Western influence, totalitarian ideology, and a drive to power.” Pipes held that both violent and non-violent Islamists share these characteristics as part of the same movement striving towards radical change. Pipes concluded that it is preferable to have in power today’s dictators rather than tomorrow’s Islamists. He preferred a twenty-year goal, which would allow the U.S. to focus its efforts on a long-term democratic transformation. He was dismayed at the scheduling of the Iraqi elections only twenty-two months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, saying that the appropriate interval would have been more like twenty-two years.Such opposing views are not new to American foreign policy makers; rather they are a product of a long standing effort to formulate a coherent policy towards the Islamic world. At present there a two schools of thought that dominate American thinking on this subject. The first, led by Professor Barnard Lewis and his disciples such as Samuel Huntington and the arch neoconservative Richard Perle maintain that political Islam by definition is anti-democratic and anti-Western. Co-existence with Islam is not possible unless there is a major revision of Islamic texts such as the Quran—otherwise the clash of civilisations is inevitable. Lewis asserted his clash of civilisation theory as early as 1964 when he wrote in his book the ‘Middle East and the West’: “We [must] view the present discontents of the Middle East not as a conflict between states and nations, but as a clash of civilisations.” Furthermore, the confrontationalists advocate that America can never trust Islamists and must do more to assist modernists to take power in the Muslim countries.The other school of thought led by Professor John Esposito espouses that the West has nothing to fear from political Islam and those Islamists who eschew violence can be accommodated. These accommodationists insist that through the inclusion of Islamists in government, Muslims will quickly lose confidence in their ability to rule by Islam and will naturally turn to secular values to solve their problems. Thus America will be able to cultivate a healthy relationship with the Islamic world.Despite their apparent differences, both confrontationalists and the accommodationists recognise that America’s continued support for dictatorships in the Muslim world breeds anti-western sentiments and is an incubator of Islamic radicalism. After September 11 2001, both concur that America must promote democracy to counter the rise of political Islam.For decades these two factions have competed for influence amongst policy makers and US government officials. For the most part, successive US governments adopted a pragmatic approach and used political Islam to bolster US client states and support the jihad against the Communists. But the demise of the Soviet Union ushered in a period where US officials began to search for a new enemy to replace communism and many ended up subscribing to the two dominant views on political Islam.It was not until 1992 that a serious effort was undertaken by Edward Djerejian; the then US assistant secretary of state for Near-Eastern affairs to sift through the arguments put forward by both factions and come up with a policy on political Islam. The accommodationists prevailed and some of their views were expressed by Djerejian who delivered a speech entitled "The US, Islam, and the Middle East in a Changing World." In the speech he said, “The US government does not view Islam as the new ‘ism’ confronting the West or threatening world peace. The cold war is not being replaced with a new competition between Islam and the West. The crusades have been over for a long time”Nevertheless the speech failed to provide a coherent framework on how to combat political Islam. The Clinton administration continued to traverse the path followed by previous administrations Exploitation of political Islam to stabilise dictatorships and protect US interests throughout the Muslim world became the mainstay of the Clinton era. This remained the case till September 11 2001. Thereafter, newfound support for the clash of civilisation theory gained popularity in the US and was immediately embraced by the hawks in the Bush administration. But resistance from the State Department, and other government institutions, together with America’s failure to stabilise Iraq and Afghanistan prevented the hawks from launching a full scale crusade against political Islam.Instead, the Bush administration announced its Greater Middle East Initiative and carefully weighed up its policy towards Islamists. In some parts of the Muslim world the US chose to collaborate with Islamists to form governments, while in other parts, America opted to minimise their participation in government. Through these tactics the US is hoping to replace the autocratic regimes of the Muslim world with the Turkish model of democracy.For instance, in 2002, America colluded with Musharraf to facilitate Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) spectacular rise to power in return for shoring up Musharraf’s sagging popularity and preventing the secular parties from forming a viable opposition. When questioned about the success of religious parties that they represented a failure of US policy, US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher replied, “I reject that opinion from the start. We think that the Pakistani people and the government have already demonstrated their strong opposition to terrorism and extremism, their desire to move their society in a more moderate and stable direction. We look forward to working with them on that and we hope that all the parties will be committed to moving in that direction.” Musharraf used the Islamists to cement his pro-American policies by voting through the Legal Framework Order (LFO) in 2004. He then reneged on his promise to step down as COAS, leaving the Islamists bemused and angry. Later, in the local elections of 2005, Musharraf conducted a wide spread purge of the Islamists and favoured secular minded politicians instead.In Iraq, America has collaborated with Ayatollah Sistani and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) to cobble together an Iraqi government that can rule on her behalf. She has also employed the very same Islamists to prevent others in Southern Iraq undermining her occupation. When Muqtada as-Sadr resisted America’s writ, Sistani openly sided with the US to reign in the firebrand cleric and his mahdi army. While America’s tolerance of Shia theologians horrifies many in the West, some US intellectuals fully endorsed it. Gerecht in his book “The Islamic Paradox” wrote:”… secular Shites, not religious oriented ones, are probably the most serious long-term threat to the development of a viable democratic Iraq.”Hamas’s success in the Palestinian election has less to do with the corruption of the PLO and more to do with the policies of Israel and the US. Both Israel and the US hated Yasir Arafat and considered him to close to the British. Hence they systematically destroyed Arafat’s security apparatus and rendered it ineffective against the Palestinian resistance groups. When Abbas (America’s preferred choice) ascended to power he inherited an organisation marred with factional in fighting and unable to curb the activities of Hamas. The weakness of the PLO combined with Israeli military operations against Hamas fuelled Hamas’s popularity. In July 2000 the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted a poll and found that in popularity terms Fatah tallied 42 percent and Hamas 11 percent. The Israelis effectively used Hamas to destroy the PLO. Dreyfuss author of the book “Devil’s Game” quotes Martha Kessler, a senior CIA analyst who said,”We saw Israel cultivate Islam as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalism.” The author also quotes Philip Wilcox, a former US ambassador who headed the US consulate in Jerusalem and who said, “There were consistent rumours that Israeli secret service gave covert support to Hamas, because they were seen as rivals to the PLO.”America has tolerated Israeli endeavours to sideline the PLO, as long as Israel does not undermine her plans to for a two state solution. In return, America declared Hamas a terrorist organisation and pressed her EU allies to do likewise. America has also called upon Hamas to disarm and to recognise Israel. In response, Hamas’s senior leader Khalid Mishaal has publicly offered some concessions. He said that Hamas could agree to a "long-term truce" with Israel if it were willing to return to the 1967 borders and recognise the rights of Palestinians to self-determination.America’s flexible approach towards political Islam signals two things. First, America’s military might has failed to curb the rise of political Islam and this has forced America to establish new partnerships with Islamists with the aim of replacing the current dictatorships and monarchies with some semblance of democracies.Second, the Bush administration is not settled on the modalities of engagement with Islamists. Oscillating between the approaches advocated by confrontationalists and the accommodationists on some occasions, and in other situations adopting a mixture of both, leaves America open to charges of hypocrisy – not to mention uncertainty.Such circumstances leave the door wide-open for America’s opponents – those among western powers who seek to thwart America’s hegemony in the Muslim world and those amongst the Islamists who desire to re-establish the Caliphate. In both situations the winner is political Islam.
The following is an article written by Abid Mustafa, a political commentor who writes for a number of news outlets.
Hamas’s win has once again propelled political Islam to the centre of America’s war on terror. However, Hamas’s victory is not the first for Islamists. Throughout much of the Middle East, Islamists have made unprecedented gains via the ballot box and marginalized their opponents—the modernists whose raison d'etre is to secularise Islam. Amidst this background, fundamental questions are now being asked about the effectiveness of Bush’s foreign policy in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world. While the US media debates the merits of Arab democracy and the success of the Islamists in Palestine, Egypt, Iraq and other countries, a fierce debate goes unreported within America’s foreign policy establishment about America’s relationship with political Islam.The divergent views are not over the nuances of Bush’s democracy agenda but are more about America’s reliance on Islamists as the principal partner for transforming the Muslim world into an oasis of democracy and liberal values.Oddly enough, it is amongst the neoconservative movement that these conflicting views are the sharpest. On October 24 2005, neoconservatives Daniel Pipes director of the Middle East Form and Ruel Marc Gerecht a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute went head to head in a debate entitled “Should the United States Support Islamists?” Gerecht a strong proponent of using political Islam to buttress US interests in the Muslim world argued: “the United States must support the participation of Islamists in democratic elections. Since the authoritarian regimes currently in power will not permit the development of democratic institutions, open elections should be the first step in the reform process. Islamist political parties must be included in these elections due to their significant popular support because a ban on their participation would discredit the electoral process—robbing it of legitimacy.” He also recognized that as the Middle East becomes more democratic, it will be more anti-American and anti-Zionist; however, there is little the United States will be able to do about this trend. Gerecht did not view support for moderates as a viable option, due to their lack of popularity.Pipes on his part argued: “facilitating the immediate political participation of Islamists is tantamount to helping the enemy. He cited four distinct characteristics of Islamist movements that render them anathema to a democratic society: devotion to Sharia, rejection of Western influence, totalitarian ideology, and a drive to power.” Pipes held that both violent and non-violent Islamists share these characteristics as part of the same movement striving towards radical change. Pipes concluded that it is preferable to have in power today’s dictators rather than tomorrow’s Islamists. He preferred a twenty-year goal, which would allow the U.S. to focus its efforts on a long-term democratic transformation. He was dismayed at the scheduling of the Iraqi elections only twenty-two months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, saying that the appropriate interval would have been more like twenty-two years.Such opposing views are not new to American foreign policy makers; rather they are a product of a long standing effort to formulate a coherent policy towards the Islamic world. At present there a two schools of thought that dominate American thinking on this subject. The first, led by Professor Barnard Lewis and his disciples such as Samuel Huntington and the arch neoconservative Richard Perle maintain that political Islam by definition is anti-democratic and anti-Western. Co-existence with Islam is not possible unless there is a major revision of Islamic texts such as the Quran—otherwise the clash of civilisations is inevitable. Lewis asserted his clash of civilisation theory as early as 1964 when he wrote in his book the ‘Middle East and the West’: “We [must] view the present discontents of the Middle East not as a conflict between states and nations, but as a clash of civilisations.” Furthermore, the confrontationalists advocate that America can never trust Islamists and must do more to assist modernists to take power in the Muslim countries.The other school of thought led by Professor John Esposito espouses that the West has nothing to fear from political Islam and those Islamists who eschew violence can be accommodated. These accommodationists insist that through the inclusion of Islamists in government, Muslims will quickly lose confidence in their ability to rule by Islam and will naturally turn to secular values to solve their problems. Thus America will be able to cultivate a healthy relationship with the Islamic world.Despite their apparent differences, both confrontationalists and the accommodationists recognise that America’s continued support for dictatorships in the Muslim world breeds anti-western sentiments and is an incubator of Islamic radicalism. After September 11 2001, both concur that America must promote democracy to counter the rise of political Islam.For decades these two factions have competed for influence amongst policy makers and US government officials. For the most part, successive US governments adopted a pragmatic approach and used political Islam to bolster US client states and support the jihad against the Communists. But the demise of the Soviet Union ushered in a period where US officials began to search for a new enemy to replace communism and many ended up subscribing to the two dominant views on political Islam.It was not until 1992 that a serious effort was undertaken by Edward Djerejian; the then US assistant secretary of state for Near-Eastern affairs to sift through the arguments put forward by both factions and come up with a policy on political Islam. The accommodationists prevailed and some of their views were expressed by Djerejian who delivered a speech entitled "The US, Islam, and the Middle East in a Changing World." In the speech he said, “The US government does not view Islam as the new ‘ism’ confronting the West or threatening world peace. The cold war is not being replaced with a new competition between Islam and the West. The crusades have been over for a long time”Nevertheless the speech failed to provide a coherent framework on how to combat political Islam. The Clinton administration continued to traverse the path followed by previous administrations Exploitation of political Islam to stabilise dictatorships and protect US interests throughout the Muslim world became the mainstay of the Clinton era. This remained the case till September 11 2001. Thereafter, newfound support for the clash of civilisation theory gained popularity in the US and was immediately embraced by the hawks in the Bush administration. But resistance from the State Department, and other government institutions, together with America’s failure to stabilise Iraq and Afghanistan prevented the hawks from launching a full scale crusade against political Islam.Instead, the Bush administration announced its Greater Middle East Initiative and carefully weighed up its policy towards Islamists. In some parts of the Muslim world the US chose to collaborate with Islamists to form governments, while in other parts, America opted to minimise their participation in government. Through these tactics the US is hoping to replace the autocratic regimes of the Muslim world with the Turkish model of democracy.For instance, in 2002, America colluded with Musharraf to facilitate Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) spectacular rise to power in return for shoring up Musharraf’s sagging popularity and preventing the secular parties from forming a viable opposition. When questioned about the success of religious parties that they represented a failure of US policy, US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher replied, “I reject that opinion from the start. We think that the Pakistani people and the government have already demonstrated their strong opposition to terrorism and extremism, their desire to move their society in a more moderate and stable direction. We look forward to working with them on that and we hope that all the parties will be committed to moving in that direction.” Musharraf used the Islamists to cement his pro-American policies by voting through the Legal Framework Order (LFO) in 2004. He then reneged on his promise to step down as COAS, leaving the Islamists bemused and angry. Later, in the local elections of 2005, Musharraf conducted a wide spread purge of the Islamists and favoured secular minded politicians instead.In Iraq, America has collaborated with Ayatollah Sistani and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) to cobble together an Iraqi government that can rule on her behalf. She has also employed the very same Islamists to prevent others in Southern Iraq undermining her occupation. When Muqtada as-Sadr resisted America’s writ, Sistani openly sided with the US to reign in the firebrand cleric and his mahdi army. While America’s tolerance of Shia theologians horrifies many in the West, some US intellectuals fully endorsed it. Gerecht in his book “The Islamic Paradox” wrote:”… secular Shites, not religious oriented ones, are probably the most serious long-term threat to the development of a viable democratic Iraq.”Hamas’s success in the Palestinian election has less to do with the corruption of the PLO and more to do with the policies of Israel and the US. Both Israel and the US hated Yasir Arafat and considered him to close to the British. Hence they systematically destroyed Arafat’s security apparatus and rendered it ineffective against the Palestinian resistance groups. When Abbas (America’s preferred choice) ascended to power he inherited an organisation marred with factional in fighting and unable to curb the activities of Hamas. The weakness of the PLO combined with Israeli military operations against Hamas fuelled Hamas’s popularity. In July 2000 the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted a poll and found that in popularity terms Fatah tallied 42 percent and Hamas 11 percent. The Israelis effectively used Hamas to destroy the PLO. Dreyfuss author of the book “Devil’s Game” quotes Martha Kessler, a senior CIA analyst who said,”We saw Israel cultivate Islam as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalism.” The author also quotes Philip Wilcox, a former US ambassador who headed the US consulate in Jerusalem and who said, “There were consistent rumours that Israeli secret service gave covert support to Hamas, because they were seen as rivals to the PLO.”America has tolerated Israeli endeavours to sideline the PLO, as long as Israel does not undermine her plans to for a two state solution. In return, America declared Hamas a terrorist organisation and pressed her EU allies to do likewise. America has also called upon Hamas to disarm and to recognise Israel. In response, Hamas’s senior leader Khalid Mishaal has publicly offered some concessions. He said that Hamas could agree to a "long-term truce" with Israel if it were willing to return to the 1967 borders and recognise the rights of Palestinians to self-determination.America’s flexible approach towards political Islam signals two things. First, America’s military might has failed to curb the rise of political Islam and this has forced America to establish new partnerships with Islamists with the aim of replacing the current dictatorships and monarchies with some semblance of democracies.Second, the Bush administration is not settled on the modalities of engagement with Islamists. Oscillating between the approaches advocated by confrontationalists and the accommodationists on some occasions, and in other situations adopting a mixture of both, leaves America open to charges of hypocrisy – not to mention uncertainty.Such circumstances leave the door wide-open for America’s opponents – those among western powers who seek to thwart America’s hegemony in the Muslim world and those amongst the Islamists who desire to re-establish the Caliphate. In both situations the winner is political Islam.
Dialogue with Orthodox Islam
Hello,
Dr Salman Ahmed, an Islamic intellecutal, provides a robust argument of how moderate Islam is a myth and any real dialogue needs to take place with orthodox/traditional Islam.
If many media commentators and politicians are to be believed then we are engaged in a struggle to the death with Islamic fascists and nihilists who hate Western societies for their freedoms and who will not be satisfied until they have destroyed Western civilisation. Others claim that Islamic radicals want to drag Muslim societies back to medieval times by returning them to the imagined purity of a seventh century Islamic society. We are told that there is nothing to discuss with these extremists. President Putin when asked by a reporter after the Beslan school massacre if he would now start political dialogue with the Chechen guerrillas replied, "Would you invite Osama bin Laden to the White House or to Brussels and hold talks with him and let him dictate what he wants?" In the war on terror, it seems there will be no dialogue with Muslim insurgents and guerrillas and what remains is to hunt them down and kill them.Traditional Muslim thinkers, scholars and leaders also find that the Western press and politicians are eager to label them as being homophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynists and supporters of terrorists and suicide bombers. Whether or not this is a deliberate policy is a debatable point, but the net result is to intimidate and frighten traditional Muslims from speaking publicly.When Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi came to Britain in July 2004, the print and broadcast media kept on running the story as to why the Sheikh, who they claimed was a "supporter of suicide bombers" and a person who was against homosexuality, had been allowed into the UK. These attacks on the personality of the Sheikh were not only limited to the media. The Labour MP Louise Ellman said it would be "an outrage" to let him visit and create "enormous security problems". Tory leader Michael Howard demanded to know why the cleric had not been refused entry to the UK. Recently, some members of the London Assembly have questioned why London Mayor Ken Livingstone met the Sheikh formally and what his links were with him.What happened to Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi was not an isolated case but rather a reflection of the treatment that religious or traditional Muslims can expect from much of the Western media and many of its politicians. Some Western intellectuals argue that there is no place for Muslim orthodoxy and traditions in today's world, because it intellectually underpins the behaviour of Muslims fighting in Iraq, Palestine and Chechnya; it keeps Muslims from accepting their place in modernity. They point out that the West should be concerned with the reformation of Islam itself so that Muslims will eventually leave their outdated traditions and values and become modern. It was reported that the US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 that "We need an Islamic reformation", and later in the same statement he mentioned that he thought "there is real hope for one". Daniel Pipes of the Philadelphia based Middle East Forum is another prominent figure who calls for the reformation of Islam and is closely aligned to the current US administration - President Bush appointed him to the board of directors of the US Institute of Peace in June 2003. In July 2004 Daniel Pipes stated that the "ultimate goal" of the war on terrorism had to be Islam's modernisation, or as he put it, "religion-building".There have been changes amongst some Muslims in their interpretation of Islam over the last fourteen centuries; for example when Muslims came into contact with people with differing traditions and philosophies such as the Greeks, Persians or Indians, some Muslims tried to integrate the best of the local philosophies and traditions into their understanding of Islam. But throughout the centuries, the majority of Muslims have maintained an attachment to a common set of reference points - the Qur'an and the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) - and were in close agreement on most doctrinal and legal issues. The five most influential schools of Islamic thought (madahib) - Hanafi, Shafi, Hanbali, Maliki and Jafari - named after their founding scholars, were established on this approach and defined much of the body of Islamic interpretations and opinion over many centuries, and still do so today. Although some have termed this attachment ’traditionalism’, ultimately it has been this approach that has won the argument in the sphere of Muslim public opinion.
What those who call for the reformation of Islam for the whole Muslim world are attempting is without precedent. Arguably one of the most influential contemporary advocates of the radical idea to reform Islam is the Middle East expert Bernard Lewis. His fifty years of study and scholarship led him to the conclusion that the West-which used to be known as Christendom-is now in the last stages of a centuries-old struggle for dominance and prestige with Islamic civilisation. It was Bernard Lewis who coined the phrase the "Clash of Civilisations" in a September 1990 Atlantic Monthly article on "The Roots of Muslim Rage" in which he painted Islam as engaged in a fourteen century long war against Christianity. This was three years before Samuel Huntington published his famous article on the "Clash of Civilizations" in Foreign Affairs. Ian Buruma summarised Lewis' argument in an article in the New Yorker as the following: "…The clash between Christendom and Islam has been going on since the Muslims conquered Syria, North Africa, and Spain. Muslims, at the height of their glory, in tenth-century Cairo, thirteenth-century Tehran, or sixteenth-century Istanbul, thought of themselves as far superior to the Christians and Jews among them, who were tolerated as second-class citizens. Since then, however, as Lewis puts it, 'the Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat'. Turks reached Vienna in 1683 but got no farther. When the rampant West expanded its empires, European ideas penetrated, dominated, and dislocated the Muslim world. It was deeply humiliating for Muslims to be humbled by inferior Christians and Jews ("Crusaders" and "Zionists" in modern parlance). Traditional ways, which had produced so much glory in the past, were eroded and often destroyed by ill-considered experiments with Marxism, fascism, and national socialism. Out of political and cultural failure came this Muslim rage, directed against the West, the historical source of humiliation, and out of this rage came the violent attempts to establish a new caliphate through religious revolution."In relation to the attacks of September 11th 2001 on the US, Lewis has said: "I have no doubt that September 11th was the opening salvo of the final battle…" Arguably, the thinking of Lewis has been influential on the current US administration and his ideas have to a large extent shaped how the administration views the Muslim world. He is known to be close to Vice President Dick Cheney and has been invited by President Bush's advisor Karl Rove to speak at the White House. His best-selling book entitled "What Went Wrong?" examines the decline of Muslim civilisation and is regarded in some circles as a kind of handbook in the war against Islamic terrorism.The model of Muslim society that appeals to Lewis and his followers is that of Turkey. In this country Mustafa Kemal seized control of the Ottoman Caliphate in the 1920s and imposed his vision of a secular western society upon the people, irrespective of the people's wishes. Religious schools were closed, the wearing of the Hijab was forbidden in government offices and universities, many religious scholars were imprisoned or killed and the Arabic language was replaced with Turkish. Mustafa Kemal was not a believer in "government of the people, by the people, for the people…" but was more influenced by fascism of the 1920s and followed a style of ruling characterised in his own words as "government for the people - despite the people". He felt that he knew best and could force everyone to follow his opinion.Lewis' argument falls down on a number of points. It is still not clear whether it is possible to make a success out of forcible secularisation of a Muslim society. Undoubtedly, in Turkey there are groups of people who are European in their behaviour, attitudes and values and do not see themselves as Muslim other than in their names; but they represent a small minority of that society. In the same cities where there are very secular Muslims, there are also many more traditional and conservative Islamic communities, and in much of rural Turkey, the values and attitudes of people have not changed much in the last two hundred years. Today, the political party that enjoys the clear support of the majority of the Turkish population is the Islamic Justice and Development Party. Its leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once banned from public service after reciting a poem that said "the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers". It is the institution of the Turkish army that prevents the government from re-adopting Islam politically or publicly which many in Erdogan's party call for - the army stands ready to do a coup if it sees any threat to the political model that Mustafa Kemal established.It follows that Turkey is not really a moderate Muslim society in the way that Lewis, Bush and Wolfowitz understand the term "moderate". Rather it represents the failure to replace by force a culture that was home grown and present for several centuries with a foreign one. As a military supported ruler Mustafa Kemal had no legal limits in what he could do to rid Turkey of its Islamic heritage; many Islamic scholars were killed or imprisoned, religious schools were closed down and people were forced to behave in accordance with western values and so on. Yet even after eighty years of Kemalism, Islamic traditionalism is increasing in strength and gaining influence in the society. The force that prevents Islam from coming to power is the secular army that feels duty bound to defend Kemalism.
Despite fifty years of scholarship Lewis failed to predict how Muslims would respond to an American occupation of Muslim land. In 2001 he said that public opinion in Iraq and Iran was so pro-American that both peoples would rejoice if the US army liberated them. A year later, he repeated the message that "if we succeed in overthrowing the regimes of what President Bush has rightly called the 'Axis of Evil' the scenes of rejoicing in their cities would even exceed those that followed the liberation of Kabul." Perhaps there was a sense of relief felt by many Iraqis when the Saddam Hussein government was removed but a sense of occupation has driven many ordinary Iraqis to take up arms against the US army.Today, many if not most of the Muslim countries are dysfunctional. Politically the governments in many Muslim states are dictatorships based on monarchs, military rulers or life long Presidents. Most Muslims recognise and accept this fact. The 2002 Arab development programme report which was written by a group of Arab scholars from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) described the region as not developing as fast or as fully as other comparable regions. The most striking weakness identified in the report and one which the authors suggest lies behind all other problems is a lack of democracy, which leads to poor governance. The report points out that political participation in the Arab region is still limited compared to other regions and that the region is rated lower than any other for freedom of expression and accountability. The attitude of Arab governments towards civil societies ranged from opposition to manipulation to "freedom under surveillance". This state of affairs cannot be put at the door of Islamic orthodoxy, since Islamic institutions and traditions have been marginalised for most of the last century in the Muslim world. Rather the last century has been one in which most Muslim countries have first been colonised and then inherited political, economic and social institutions that the colonialists left them. Even the concept of many independent countries in the Muslim world was new. During the early part of the twentieth century the French and the British governments agreed between themselves as to who would get which part of the dominions of the Ottoman state. The task of negotiations was delegated to Georges Picot of France and Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and the resulting Sykes-Picot agreement led to the division of the Ottoman state such that France's mandate corresponded to the future states of Syria and Lebanon and Britain's mandate corresponded to Iraq and Transjordan. France ended up with direct control of Mediterranean coastal regions whilst Britain ended up controlling the provinces of Basra and Baghdad and maintained an exclusive relationship with the Arab Gulf Sheikhdoms.Where independence brought multi-party democracies, they were soon to disappear. Most Muslim countries were characterised by one coup after another as different political or military factions often supported by outside powers assumed power. There was the 1947 coup led by Colonel Husni Al-Za'im in Syria, the 1952 coup led by General Neguib in Egypt, the 1953 CIA sponsored coup that ended the rule of Prime Minister Mossadeq, the 1958 coup led by General Ayub Khan in Pakistan, the 1960 coup led by General Cemal Gürsel in Turkey, and so on.
In comparison the Western countries have largely not suffered from this type of political instability during the last hundred years. What differentiates Western political institutions from those in the Muslim world is that they developed organically over a number of centuries, adapted themselves to different realities over time and represent an effective social consensus on how these societies go about solving their problems. For example, the operation of and the relationship between the British Houses of Parliament, the Judiciary, the Monarchy, the Army and the civil service has been defined over a number of years, as the British state found itself in different situations and with different problems. Even today, it is still adapting to new realities; for example the role of the House of Lords is being redefined in light of the fact that aristocracy is no longer as powerful as big business interests and it is difficult to justify why hereditary peers should participate in the legislative process. There is a social consensus over the role of these institutions and as a result it is not possible that a small clique of people - Generals or otherwise - could undertake a coup in Britain and start making the laws themselves; the rest of society would just not accept it. However in the Muslim world, the institutions that exist are not home grown or organically developed, they do not reflect the historical experience of people and do not connect with their traditions or values. What this means is that there is very little social consensus on these systems i.e. they have very limited legitimacy and there is little or no reaction from people when a general undertakes a coup. In addition, Muslim countries tend to have very influential westernised elites, who have usually studied abroad and are often wealthy; they are usually ignorant of their own history and traditions and their wealth allows them to live very detached lives from the rest of society. Because of their situation and attitudes they are unable to comprehend why the rest of society behaves in the way it does and they come to look down upon the masses.Prior to the colonisation of the Muslim world, many Muslim politicians and thinkers had seen modernisation and industrialisation take place in Western nations and had come to the conclusion that the Muslim world was backward and needed to be reformed. This was a natural situation as there was much interaction and trade between the Muslim and non-Muslim world. The debate had started and there were a variety of opinions as to how Muslims should 'modernise' themselves. Iranian intellectuals Mulkum Khan (1833-1908) and Agha Khan Kermani (1853-96) urged Iranians to acquire a Western education and replace the Shariah (the religious legal code) with a modern secular legal code. Some of the Ottoman sultans pursued western models of industrialisation and modernisation of their own accord. For example, Sultan Mahmud II inaugurated the Tanzimat (Regulation) in 1826 which abolished the Janissaries [the highly dedicated elite corps of troops organised in the fourteenth century], modernised the army and introduced some new technology. In 1839 Sultan Abdul Hamid issued the Gulhane decree which made his rule dependent upon a contractual relationship with his subjects and looked forward to major reform of the caliphate's institutions. Some Muslim scholars took an approach of re-interpreting Islam so that it was more conformant to western models; they wanted to maintain some Islamic values and principles whilst justifying the adoption of some western concepts which they thought would bring Muslim progress. There were many such modernising scholars, but two of the most famous ones were Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-97) and Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905). At this time the need for change was evident to many thinkers, but the nature of this change and the path to achieving it was poorly defined.Towards the end of the nineteenth century the desire for reformation was very strong in the Muslim world. It was self evident to most of the political elites, intellectuals, Muslim scholars and educated people that something needed to be done; the status quo was unacceptable. They had concluded that in many respects Muslims were far behind the West and needed to catch up. Looking back to this time it is very likely that if Muslims had been left to their own devices, a social consensus would have been developed in the Muslim world as to what form this change should have taken. The social consensus may have taken several decades to occur but it would have been home grown, would have happened organically and would have adapted the Muslim world to new realities
However occupation by foreign powers and colonialisation led to an interruption of this natural process. When the foreign powers finally departed what they left behind was a medley of countries; many of which may have looked good on a map when the French and British planners created them, but in reality they were completely artificial and did not represent peoples that had been bound together by a common and shared history and set of values. In addition, the institutions that Muslims inherited were based on French or British models. By the time the colonial powers left there was no public role for Islam to play in society, Islamic law and education had been devalued and Islamic scholars had been marginalised. With the old well established moral compass no longer available and with social and political institutions that were French or British in origin and lacking in social consensus, it is not surprising that the Muslim world is blighted by instability, coups, tyranny and totalitarianism. In his new book, entitled "The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization", the Columbia Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, Richard Bulliet, argues that comparative stability prevailed in the Islamic world not because of the Ottomans' success but because Islam was playing its traditional role of constraining tyranny."The collectivity of religious scholars acted at least theoretically as a countervailing force against tyranny. You had the implicit notion that if Islam is pushed out of the public sphere, tyranny will increase, and if that happens, people will look to Islam to redress the tyranny." This began to play out during the period. Instead of modernisation, what ensued was what Muslim clerics had long feared: tyranny. What the Arab world should have seen was "not an increase in modernisation so much as an increase in tyranny. By the 1960s, that prophecy was fulfilled. You had dictatorships in most of the Islamic world." Egypt's Gamel Nasser, Syria's Hafez Assad and others came in the guise of Arab nationalists, but they were nothing more than tyrants.Some Muslims put the blame for the tyranny and the totalitarianism practiced in the Muslim world and the lack of a role for Islam in Muslim societies on western interference. There is little doubt that historically western nations have a share in the responsibility for bringing the Muslim world to where it is; they occupied it, created artificial entities and left the conditions for tyranny to arise. However, arguably the Muslim rulers who practice tyranny upon the Muslim masses and the Muslim elites who support them also have a share of the blame. However some Muslims place all the blame on the West for the current situation of the Muslims and seek to kill western civilians so that westerners also taste the pain of what Muslims have been forced to suffer. Their aim, we are told, is to push for a civilisational war between the western and Muslim worlds; one in which all Muslims will be forced to join in from the sidelines: the irony is that the Lewis-Bush doctrine in Iraq has done far more to realise such an aim than any preachers from within the fold of Islam could have achieved.The majority of Islamic traditional scholars reject the deliberate killing of civilians, and thus most scholars rejected the attacks that took place on America on September 11th 2001. However in the tyrannies of the Muslim world, it is extremely difficult to start a debate upon the correct response to western imperialism using Islamic texts and principles. Islamic scholars in the Muslim world are unable to debate this or other social issues openly because the current regimes in the Muslim world don't tolerate such debate and discussion. For this reason the public scholars, appointed by the governments to preach a message of the governments choosing, lack credibility in their pronouncements. These governments view any genuine Islamic debate as a threat and they fear that once started it will be directed towards them: exposing their own lack of legitimacy and their ongoing tyranny. Whilst some Muslim scholars are kept quiet by paying them off - given government funded positions where they are only able to state the official government position - many others remain locked up in prisons because in the past they have dared to criticise the actions and policies of Muslim governments. Other Islamic scholars practice self censorship of the subjects they will discuss because they are afraid of the consequences of being seen to be critical of the government. Even though orthodox Islam has not played a public role in most Muslim societies for the last century and Islamic scholars and teachings have been marginalised, in many Muslim societies a revival in Islamic practice and teachings is taking place. For more and more Muslims, Islam is becoming a major factor in shaping their attitudes, behaviour and perspective. Many ideas such as Arab nationalism, secularism and socialism have been discredited in the Muslim world by regimes that claimed to be socialist, secular, or pan-Arabist but brought totalitarianism and tyranny and little material progress. Today however, the only public choices that are being presented to Muslims are chosen by governments that are discredited and there is a distinct lack of independent voices - Islamic or otherwise - for people to listen to. Those that exist operate under persecution. Given this lack of open political debate and the sensation of western armies occupying Muslim lands, with the blessing of many Muslim governments, it is unsurprising that many Muslims feel deeply alienated from their own governments and feel closer to those who enact any form of violence against western targets. There is a way of tackling chronic instability in the Muslim world caused mainly by oppressive pro-western dictators. However this requires western politicians and intellectuals to accept that Islam should be allowed to play its natural role in Muslim societies: outside attempts to dictate a secular Islam will fail and occupation of Muslim lands by foreign armies is counterproductive and will just generate more recruits for countering, by any means, the western onslaught. They should do this even if they disagree with some of orthodox Islam’s positions. There are too many Muslims in the world for their beliefs and religion to be sidelined against their wishes. Globalisation means that we will be affected by what happens in other parts of the world. Muslims need to be allowed to complete the transformation of their societies without western interference - a process that started in the nineteenth century - so that they too can find their place in the world of the twenty-first century with governments that fairly represent their own beliefs and values. If liberal and secular thinkers find they have strong disagreements with Muslims then they should try to engage in thought provoking debate with Muslims on the rights and wrongs of their beliefs and system. The approach of the neo-conservatives and intellectuals like Bernard Lewis who want to dictate the reformation of Islam, import American defined democracy upon the Muslim world and occupy large parts of it, will bring about a conflict that will last for many generations. To avoid this, Western politicians and thinkers must find a constructive way of dealing with Muslims and Islam based around the notion that Muslims must define their own political destiny.
Dr Salman Ahmed, an Islamic intellecutal, provides a robust argument of how moderate Islam is a myth and any real dialogue needs to take place with orthodox/traditional Islam.
If many media commentators and politicians are to be believed then we are engaged in a struggle to the death with Islamic fascists and nihilists who hate Western societies for their freedoms and who will not be satisfied until they have destroyed Western civilisation. Others claim that Islamic radicals want to drag Muslim societies back to medieval times by returning them to the imagined purity of a seventh century Islamic society. We are told that there is nothing to discuss with these extremists. President Putin when asked by a reporter after the Beslan school massacre if he would now start political dialogue with the Chechen guerrillas replied, "Would you invite Osama bin Laden to the White House or to Brussels and hold talks with him and let him dictate what he wants?" In the war on terror, it seems there will be no dialogue with Muslim insurgents and guerrillas and what remains is to hunt them down and kill them.Traditional Muslim thinkers, scholars and leaders also find that the Western press and politicians are eager to label them as being homophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynists and supporters of terrorists and suicide bombers. Whether or not this is a deliberate policy is a debatable point, but the net result is to intimidate and frighten traditional Muslims from speaking publicly.When Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi came to Britain in July 2004, the print and broadcast media kept on running the story as to why the Sheikh, who they claimed was a "supporter of suicide bombers" and a person who was against homosexuality, had been allowed into the UK. These attacks on the personality of the Sheikh were not only limited to the media. The Labour MP Louise Ellman said it would be "an outrage" to let him visit and create "enormous security problems". Tory leader Michael Howard demanded to know why the cleric had not been refused entry to the UK. Recently, some members of the London Assembly have questioned why London Mayor Ken Livingstone met the Sheikh formally and what his links were with him.What happened to Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi was not an isolated case but rather a reflection of the treatment that religious or traditional Muslims can expect from much of the Western media and many of its politicians. Some Western intellectuals argue that there is no place for Muslim orthodoxy and traditions in today's world, because it intellectually underpins the behaviour of Muslims fighting in Iraq, Palestine and Chechnya; it keeps Muslims from accepting their place in modernity. They point out that the West should be concerned with the reformation of Islam itself so that Muslims will eventually leave their outdated traditions and values and become modern. It was reported that the US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 that "We need an Islamic reformation", and later in the same statement he mentioned that he thought "there is real hope for one". Daniel Pipes of the Philadelphia based Middle East Forum is another prominent figure who calls for the reformation of Islam and is closely aligned to the current US administration - President Bush appointed him to the board of directors of the US Institute of Peace in June 2003. In July 2004 Daniel Pipes stated that the "ultimate goal" of the war on terrorism had to be Islam's modernisation, or as he put it, "religion-building".There have been changes amongst some Muslims in their interpretation of Islam over the last fourteen centuries; for example when Muslims came into contact with people with differing traditions and philosophies such as the Greeks, Persians or Indians, some Muslims tried to integrate the best of the local philosophies and traditions into their understanding of Islam. But throughout the centuries, the majority of Muslims have maintained an attachment to a common set of reference points - the Qur'an and the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) - and were in close agreement on most doctrinal and legal issues. The five most influential schools of Islamic thought (madahib) - Hanafi, Shafi, Hanbali, Maliki and Jafari - named after their founding scholars, were established on this approach and defined much of the body of Islamic interpretations and opinion over many centuries, and still do so today. Although some have termed this attachment ’traditionalism’, ultimately it has been this approach that has won the argument in the sphere of Muslim public opinion.
What those who call for the reformation of Islam for the whole Muslim world are attempting is without precedent. Arguably one of the most influential contemporary advocates of the radical idea to reform Islam is the Middle East expert Bernard Lewis. His fifty years of study and scholarship led him to the conclusion that the West-which used to be known as Christendom-is now in the last stages of a centuries-old struggle for dominance and prestige with Islamic civilisation. It was Bernard Lewis who coined the phrase the "Clash of Civilisations" in a September 1990 Atlantic Monthly article on "The Roots of Muslim Rage" in which he painted Islam as engaged in a fourteen century long war against Christianity. This was three years before Samuel Huntington published his famous article on the "Clash of Civilizations" in Foreign Affairs. Ian Buruma summarised Lewis' argument in an article in the New Yorker as the following: "…The clash between Christendom and Islam has been going on since the Muslims conquered Syria, North Africa, and Spain. Muslims, at the height of their glory, in tenth-century Cairo, thirteenth-century Tehran, or sixteenth-century Istanbul, thought of themselves as far superior to the Christians and Jews among them, who were tolerated as second-class citizens. Since then, however, as Lewis puts it, 'the Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat'. Turks reached Vienna in 1683 but got no farther. When the rampant West expanded its empires, European ideas penetrated, dominated, and dislocated the Muslim world. It was deeply humiliating for Muslims to be humbled by inferior Christians and Jews ("Crusaders" and "Zionists" in modern parlance). Traditional ways, which had produced so much glory in the past, were eroded and often destroyed by ill-considered experiments with Marxism, fascism, and national socialism. Out of political and cultural failure came this Muslim rage, directed against the West, the historical source of humiliation, and out of this rage came the violent attempts to establish a new caliphate through religious revolution."In relation to the attacks of September 11th 2001 on the US, Lewis has said: "I have no doubt that September 11th was the opening salvo of the final battle…" Arguably, the thinking of Lewis has been influential on the current US administration and his ideas have to a large extent shaped how the administration views the Muslim world. He is known to be close to Vice President Dick Cheney and has been invited by President Bush's advisor Karl Rove to speak at the White House. His best-selling book entitled "What Went Wrong?" examines the decline of Muslim civilisation and is regarded in some circles as a kind of handbook in the war against Islamic terrorism.The model of Muslim society that appeals to Lewis and his followers is that of Turkey. In this country Mustafa Kemal seized control of the Ottoman Caliphate in the 1920s and imposed his vision of a secular western society upon the people, irrespective of the people's wishes. Religious schools were closed, the wearing of the Hijab was forbidden in government offices and universities, many religious scholars were imprisoned or killed and the Arabic language was replaced with Turkish. Mustafa Kemal was not a believer in "government of the people, by the people, for the people…" but was more influenced by fascism of the 1920s and followed a style of ruling characterised in his own words as "government for the people - despite the people". He felt that he knew best and could force everyone to follow his opinion.Lewis' argument falls down on a number of points. It is still not clear whether it is possible to make a success out of forcible secularisation of a Muslim society. Undoubtedly, in Turkey there are groups of people who are European in their behaviour, attitudes and values and do not see themselves as Muslim other than in their names; but they represent a small minority of that society. In the same cities where there are very secular Muslims, there are also many more traditional and conservative Islamic communities, and in much of rural Turkey, the values and attitudes of people have not changed much in the last two hundred years. Today, the political party that enjoys the clear support of the majority of the Turkish population is the Islamic Justice and Development Party. Its leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once banned from public service after reciting a poem that said "the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers". It is the institution of the Turkish army that prevents the government from re-adopting Islam politically or publicly which many in Erdogan's party call for - the army stands ready to do a coup if it sees any threat to the political model that Mustafa Kemal established.It follows that Turkey is not really a moderate Muslim society in the way that Lewis, Bush and Wolfowitz understand the term "moderate". Rather it represents the failure to replace by force a culture that was home grown and present for several centuries with a foreign one. As a military supported ruler Mustafa Kemal had no legal limits in what he could do to rid Turkey of its Islamic heritage; many Islamic scholars were killed or imprisoned, religious schools were closed down and people were forced to behave in accordance with western values and so on. Yet even after eighty years of Kemalism, Islamic traditionalism is increasing in strength and gaining influence in the society. The force that prevents Islam from coming to power is the secular army that feels duty bound to defend Kemalism.
Despite fifty years of scholarship Lewis failed to predict how Muslims would respond to an American occupation of Muslim land. In 2001 he said that public opinion in Iraq and Iran was so pro-American that both peoples would rejoice if the US army liberated them. A year later, he repeated the message that "if we succeed in overthrowing the regimes of what President Bush has rightly called the 'Axis of Evil' the scenes of rejoicing in their cities would even exceed those that followed the liberation of Kabul." Perhaps there was a sense of relief felt by many Iraqis when the Saddam Hussein government was removed but a sense of occupation has driven many ordinary Iraqis to take up arms against the US army.Today, many if not most of the Muslim countries are dysfunctional. Politically the governments in many Muslim states are dictatorships based on monarchs, military rulers or life long Presidents. Most Muslims recognise and accept this fact. The 2002 Arab development programme report which was written by a group of Arab scholars from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) described the region as not developing as fast or as fully as other comparable regions. The most striking weakness identified in the report and one which the authors suggest lies behind all other problems is a lack of democracy, which leads to poor governance. The report points out that political participation in the Arab region is still limited compared to other regions and that the region is rated lower than any other for freedom of expression and accountability. The attitude of Arab governments towards civil societies ranged from opposition to manipulation to "freedom under surveillance". This state of affairs cannot be put at the door of Islamic orthodoxy, since Islamic institutions and traditions have been marginalised for most of the last century in the Muslim world. Rather the last century has been one in which most Muslim countries have first been colonised and then inherited political, economic and social institutions that the colonialists left them. Even the concept of many independent countries in the Muslim world was new. During the early part of the twentieth century the French and the British governments agreed between themselves as to who would get which part of the dominions of the Ottoman state. The task of negotiations was delegated to Georges Picot of France and Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and the resulting Sykes-Picot agreement led to the division of the Ottoman state such that France's mandate corresponded to the future states of Syria and Lebanon and Britain's mandate corresponded to Iraq and Transjordan. France ended up with direct control of Mediterranean coastal regions whilst Britain ended up controlling the provinces of Basra and Baghdad and maintained an exclusive relationship with the Arab Gulf Sheikhdoms.Where independence brought multi-party democracies, they were soon to disappear. Most Muslim countries were characterised by one coup after another as different political or military factions often supported by outside powers assumed power. There was the 1947 coup led by Colonel Husni Al-Za'im in Syria, the 1952 coup led by General Neguib in Egypt, the 1953 CIA sponsored coup that ended the rule of Prime Minister Mossadeq, the 1958 coup led by General Ayub Khan in Pakistan, the 1960 coup led by General Cemal Gürsel in Turkey, and so on.
In comparison the Western countries have largely not suffered from this type of political instability during the last hundred years. What differentiates Western political institutions from those in the Muslim world is that they developed organically over a number of centuries, adapted themselves to different realities over time and represent an effective social consensus on how these societies go about solving their problems. For example, the operation of and the relationship between the British Houses of Parliament, the Judiciary, the Monarchy, the Army and the civil service has been defined over a number of years, as the British state found itself in different situations and with different problems. Even today, it is still adapting to new realities; for example the role of the House of Lords is being redefined in light of the fact that aristocracy is no longer as powerful as big business interests and it is difficult to justify why hereditary peers should participate in the legislative process. There is a social consensus over the role of these institutions and as a result it is not possible that a small clique of people - Generals or otherwise - could undertake a coup in Britain and start making the laws themselves; the rest of society would just not accept it. However in the Muslim world, the institutions that exist are not home grown or organically developed, they do not reflect the historical experience of people and do not connect with their traditions or values. What this means is that there is very little social consensus on these systems i.e. they have very limited legitimacy and there is little or no reaction from people when a general undertakes a coup. In addition, Muslim countries tend to have very influential westernised elites, who have usually studied abroad and are often wealthy; they are usually ignorant of their own history and traditions and their wealth allows them to live very detached lives from the rest of society. Because of their situation and attitudes they are unable to comprehend why the rest of society behaves in the way it does and they come to look down upon the masses.Prior to the colonisation of the Muslim world, many Muslim politicians and thinkers had seen modernisation and industrialisation take place in Western nations and had come to the conclusion that the Muslim world was backward and needed to be reformed. This was a natural situation as there was much interaction and trade between the Muslim and non-Muslim world. The debate had started and there were a variety of opinions as to how Muslims should 'modernise' themselves. Iranian intellectuals Mulkum Khan (1833-1908) and Agha Khan Kermani (1853-96) urged Iranians to acquire a Western education and replace the Shariah (the religious legal code) with a modern secular legal code. Some of the Ottoman sultans pursued western models of industrialisation and modernisation of their own accord. For example, Sultan Mahmud II inaugurated the Tanzimat (Regulation) in 1826 which abolished the Janissaries [the highly dedicated elite corps of troops organised in the fourteenth century], modernised the army and introduced some new technology. In 1839 Sultan Abdul Hamid issued the Gulhane decree which made his rule dependent upon a contractual relationship with his subjects and looked forward to major reform of the caliphate's institutions. Some Muslim scholars took an approach of re-interpreting Islam so that it was more conformant to western models; they wanted to maintain some Islamic values and principles whilst justifying the adoption of some western concepts which they thought would bring Muslim progress. There were many such modernising scholars, but two of the most famous ones were Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-97) and Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905). At this time the need for change was evident to many thinkers, but the nature of this change and the path to achieving it was poorly defined.Towards the end of the nineteenth century the desire for reformation was very strong in the Muslim world. It was self evident to most of the political elites, intellectuals, Muslim scholars and educated people that something needed to be done; the status quo was unacceptable. They had concluded that in many respects Muslims were far behind the West and needed to catch up. Looking back to this time it is very likely that if Muslims had been left to their own devices, a social consensus would have been developed in the Muslim world as to what form this change should have taken. The social consensus may have taken several decades to occur but it would have been home grown, would have happened organically and would have adapted the Muslim world to new realities
However occupation by foreign powers and colonialisation led to an interruption of this natural process. When the foreign powers finally departed what they left behind was a medley of countries; many of which may have looked good on a map when the French and British planners created them, but in reality they were completely artificial and did not represent peoples that had been bound together by a common and shared history and set of values. In addition, the institutions that Muslims inherited were based on French or British models. By the time the colonial powers left there was no public role for Islam to play in society, Islamic law and education had been devalued and Islamic scholars had been marginalised. With the old well established moral compass no longer available and with social and political institutions that were French or British in origin and lacking in social consensus, it is not surprising that the Muslim world is blighted by instability, coups, tyranny and totalitarianism. In his new book, entitled "The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization", the Columbia Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, Richard Bulliet, argues that comparative stability prevailed in the Islamic world not because of the Ottomans' success but because Islam was playing its traditional role of constraining tyranny."The collectivity of religious scholars acted at least theoretically as a countervailing force against tyranny. You had the implicit notion that if Islam is pushed out of the public sphere, tyranny will increase, and if that happens, people will look to Islam to redress the tyranny." This began to play out during the period. Instead of modernisation, what ensued was what Muslim clerics had long feared: tyranny. What the Arab world should have seen was "not an increase in modernisation so much as an increase in tyranny. By the 1960s, that prophecy was fulfilled. You had dictatorships in most of the Islamic world." Egypt's Gamel Nasser, Syria's Hafez Assad and others came in the guise of Arab nationalists, but they were nothing more than tyrants.Some Muslims put the blame for the tyranny and the totalitarianism practiced in the Muslim world and the lack of a role for Islam in Muslim societies on western interference. There is little doubt that historically western nations have a share in the responsibility for bringing the Muslim world to where it is; they occupied it, created artificial entities and left the conditions for tyranny to arise. However, arguably the Muslim rulers who practice tyranny upon the Muslim masses and the Muslim elites who support them also have a share of the blame. However some Muslims place all the blame on the West for the current situation of the Muslims and seek to kill western civilians so that westerners also taste the pain of what Muslims have been forced to suffer. Their aim, we are told, is to push for a civilisational war between the western and Muslim worlds; one in which all Muslims will be forced to join in from the sidelines: the irony is that the Lewis-Bush doctrine in Iraq has done far more to realise such an aim than any preachers from within the fold of Islam could have achieved.The majority of Islamic traditional scholars reject the deliberate killing of civilians, and thus most scholars rejected the attacks that took place on America on September 11th 2001. However in the tyrannies of the Muslim world, it is extremely difficult to start a debate upon the correct response to western imperialism using Islamic texts and principles. Islamic scholars in the Muslim world are unable to debate this or other social issues openly because the current regimes in the Muslim world don't tolerate such debate and discussion. For this reason the public scholars, appointed by the governments to preach a message of the governments choosing, lack credibility in their pronouncements. These governments view any genuine Islamic debate as a threat and they fear that once started it will be directed towards them: exposing their own lack of legitimacy and their ongoing tyranny. Whilst some Muslim scholars are kept quiet by paying them off - given government funded positions where they are only able to state the official government position - many others remain locked up in prisons because in the past they have dared to criticise the actions and policies of Muslim governments. Other Islamic scholars practice self censorship of the subjects they will discuss because they are afraid of the consequences of being seen to be critical of the government. Even though orthodox Islam has not played a public role in most Muslim societies for the last century and Islamic scholars and teachings have been marginalised, in many Muslim societies a revival in Islamic practice and teachings is taking place. For more and more Muslims, Islam is becoming a major factor in shaping their attitudes, behaviour and perspective. Many ideas such as Arab nationalism, secularism and socialism have been discredited in the Muslim world by regimes that claimed to be socialist, secular, or pan-Arabist but brought totalitarianism and tyranny and little material progress. Today however, the only public choices that are being presented to Muslims are chosen by governments that are discredited and there is a distinct lack of independent voices - Islamic or otherwise - for people to listen to. Those that exist operate under persecution. Given this lack of open political debate and the sensation of western armies occupying Muslim lands, with the blessing of many Muslim governments, it is unsurprising that many Muslims feel deeply alienated from their own governments and feel closer to those who enact any form of violence against western targets. There is a way of tackling chronic instability in the Muslim world caused mainly by oppressive pro-western dictators. However this requires western politicians and intellectuals to accept that Islam should be allowed to play its natural role in Muslim societies: outside attempts to dictate a secular Islam will fail and occupation of Muslim lands by foreign armies is counterproductive and will just generate more recruits for countering, by any means, the western onslaught. They should do this even if they disagree with some of orthodox Islam’s positions. There are too many Muslims in the world for their beliefs and religion to be sidelined against their wishes. Globalisation means that we will be affected by what happens in other parts of the world. Muslims need to be allowed to complete the transformation of their societies without western interference - a process that started in the nineteenth century - so that they too can find their place in the world of the twenty-first century with governments that fairly represent their own beliefs and values. If liberal and secular thinkers find they have strong disagreements with Muslims then they should try to engage in thought provoking debate with Muslims on the rights and wrongs of their beliefs and system. The approach of the neo-conservatives and intellectuals like Bernard Lewis who want to dictate the reformation of Islam, import American defined democracy upon the Muslim world and occupy large parts of it, will bring about a conflict that will last for many generations. To avoid this, Western politicians and thinkers must find a constructive way of dealing with Muslims and Islam based around the notion that Muslims must define their own political destiny.
Integration Disintegration
Hello,
The following is a good article by Jamal Okie, an Islamic political writer, looking into integration and multiculturalism in Europe and what can be learnt for the UK.
The outbreak of rioting in Paris in late October has brought into question some of the key underpinnings of the French Republic in a way that has embarrassed the French elite.The riots also underlined the hollowness of claims that France presents a model of integration that should be emulated across Europe. Interior minister and presidential hopeful Nicholas Sarkozy, himself had to admit that exclusion and discrimination had played their role in the outpouring of rage, stating in an interview that, "I challenge the idea that we all start life on the same line. Some people start further back because they have a handicap - colour, culture or the district they come from.We have to help them." Sarkozy considers that the current model needs adjustment to confront the underlying problems that led to the sustained disorder, such as positive discrimination to open opportunities for those suffering from the "handicaps" he mentions. Others insist, notably President Chirac, that the problem is that the model is not being applied rigorously enough, not that it is failing. According to many in the immigrant communities, both sides of the political spectrum are either unwilling or unable to bring about the kind of changes that are really needed. Rioting first occurred in the Clichy-sous-Bois suburb of Paris in late October after news spread that two local youths, Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna had been electrocuted as they hid from police who had been chasing them to check their papers. After the first few nights of rioting, the situation was further exacerbated when a police tear gas canister was launched into one of the mosques in the suburb, affecting hundreds of the worshippers gathered there during Ramadhan. The police gave no explanation of why this incident occurred during a time of such tension. After sustained nights of rioting in the Paris suburbs, the disorder spread to towns and cities across France, as youths in other areas took the opportunity to destroy cars, shops and attack people, especially the hated police. In total, two people were killed by rioters, and more than 10000 vehicles were burned, as were 255 schools and 233 public buildings; the police arrested 4770 people. Currently, all the leading political figures are keen to show that they are taking an active role in addressing the problems that have played a role in the outbreak of disorder. For the Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, and Interior Minister Sarkozy, both looking ahead to the Presidential elections in 2007, the next few months are crucial. They will strive to show that they are active in addressing the problems affecting the minorities. The key issue to achieve electoral success will be reassuring the worried majority that law and order will prevail and that the country is not in danger of another security breakdown. As we have discussed in these pages previously, there has been a sea change in attitudes towards social relations in parts of Europe in the past few years, due to fears about terrorism and immigration, which have led to discussion about which social model will serve Europe best. France has been an advocate of the liberal, individual model which doesn't recognise differing identities among the populace.The only status recognised by law is that of citizen of the Republic, and hence according to this approach consideration is not given to racial or religious distinctions.This is meant to guarantee the cohesiveness of the society, avoiding the emergence of civil strife or competition among different groups that will occur at the expense of the whole. This outlook was established in the revolutionary era, when the new constitutional order was founded upon the idea that the law looked upon all citizens equally, regardless of their background. At that time, France made the transition from a monarchical to a constitutional system, which derived its power from the consent of the people, instead of the force of the king's arms. Representatives of the different provinces of France, whose regions were previously the property of the king,now freely submitted to a united, legitimate order, discarding their regional and linguistic differences.This principle regarding French identity was thus enshrined in French culture and underpins its political life to this day. One of the consequences of this view of French identity is that the state is prohibited from adopting policies or laws which treat citizens differently according to ethnic or religious distinctions. On this basis, the government is prohibited from collecting data on the racial or religious groups present in the Republic.Thus all of the figures quoted in the media about the size of the ethnic or religious minority populations in France are only estimates, as such questions could never be part of an official census (both figures vary between three and eight million according to different sources). This stance has great support in the French population as a whole,and most of the elite commend it as well, since in their view it has enabled France to avoid any policy stance or governmental bias that could lead to official discrimination in favour of or against groups. If the government is officially blind regarding any differences among its people, it will be unable to mistreat them due to these differences. On the other hand, opponents of this stance argue that this information void allows rampant discrimination. Since there is no official tracking of differences in areas such as employment opportunities or education between different groups, there is no impetus for officialdom to counteract the problems that affect France's minorities. Many European countries have looked to elements of the French approach as a way to address some of the tensions evolving between their host communities and immigrant groups, in most cases from Muslim countries. In Britain, the Netherlands and elsewhere, fears about excessive immigration, and the possible development of a fifth column in the Muslim community, have driven the debate to the top of the political agenda. Many commentators in these countries claimed that the multicultural model that guided social policy for decades had to be abandoned, as it had failed to secure the adoption of core values that would guarantee harmony in society.
The Multicultural model had arisen in response to the persistent demand of activist groups working within and alongside nonwhite communities that their communal identity be validated by the state and protected from discrimination or attack, whether verbal or physical. It aimed to achieve intercultural, interracial harmony by recognising different identities and values as equally valid. Both state and society had to refrain from expressing preference or disdain for any of these various identities, and moreover, this entailed that an individual's membership of a particular community was an essential element of their individual identity. Importantly, for critics of this view, this led to group identity taking precedence over the individual, a form of reverse racism and stereotyping. Rather than viewing Ahmed, Joe or Sofia as an individual, interacting with them on the basis of what I perceive to be their personal merits or faults, I treat them as a member of a 'community'. So without taking the person in front of me into account, I should treat them in line with what I have been told are the particular habits and outlook of a member of their 'group'. Critics argue that this is precisely the sort of prejudice that was supposed to have been eradicated by Multiculturalism. Furthermore, the political correctness this outlook obliges hinders the openness and honesty that should characterise interaction in the public sphere. Its end product is artificial and uncomfortable contact between people of different backgrounds, where fear of causing offence means we sacrifice the kind of honest contact with others that would actually contribute to cohesion in society. The other danger of the Multicultural approach in the eyes of its critics was that it promoted a 'rights' culture that didn't recognise responsibilities. In the Muslim, immigrant context, that people constantly talked of how society had to give them more, with no sense that they had a duty to give something back to the society that had offered them so much. These fears were amplified in recent times following the rioting that took place in the towns of northern England in 2001. Across Europe, in the Netherlands, Denmark and elsewhere, parties of the right gained ground by promising to correct government policy gone mad.The bombings in London and the death of Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands have of course magnified the tension surrounding the debate exponentially. In the face of all of the problems the Multicultural approach is blamed for, many commentators have thus looked at the French approach as a potential saviour of Europe's identity.The key marker of France's current position in Europe's social cohesion debate is its decision in 2004 to ban the Islamic hijab and other 'conspicuous/ostentatious' religious symbols. The decision of France's parliament to support a formal ban on such symbols, gained support across the continent. Such proponents argued that these measures were essential to safeguard Europe's future, particularly to combat the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, whether in a politically active or violent manifestation.They encouraged all European countries to undertake similar powerful assertions of liberal,secular values. The riots should thus serve as an indication of how ill-founded such hopes were. The high-blown rhetoric that marked the debate on the hijab has been proved utterly irrelevant to the situation on the ground. It is clear that France has not been successfully at establishing a cohesive relationship with her minorities, and the blame cannot be attributed to the multicultural agenda. Suddenly the French establishment has rediscovered how serious the problems of discrimination and neglect are that affect the banlieues surrounding it towns and cities. One of the few studies of French unemployment that included information on ethnic groups found that the average level of unemployment for immigrants of African origin was 27.38%, against an average of 8.8% for immigrants from the rest of the EU. [1] Even when youths from minority communities are successful academically, they still face discrimination and are unable to advance in the job market. The rioting was brutal and counterproductive, and the youths destroying public buildings and attacking people only harmed their own communities. In most of the areas hit by violence and destruction of property, the victims were fellow residents of the suburbs, living through the same problems as their attackers. As is usually the case in such incidents, while a minority may think they are protesting to get their voices heard, a significant number will simply take advantage of the situation to engage in meaningless acts of violence. Many commentators have found it easy to restrict themselves to condemning the youths who caused the disorder, and refuse to engage in any further analysis of the situation. For instance, right-wing politicians attacked the role of rappers in inciting anti-French sentiments, and in effect laying the groundwork for the rioting; over 200 members of parliament signed a petition calling for the prosecution of seven rap groups and musicians.The MP Francois Grosdidier who led the petition claimed that such music incited violence, "When people hear this all day long…it is no surprise that they then see red as soon as they walk past policemen or simply people who are different from them." [2]Other more paranoid observers saw the long, sinister hand of Al-Qaeda at work in the suburbs, kicking off an intifada on French soil. According to this version, the riots were the first stage, or perhaps a dry run, for serious attempts at overturning the democratic order in Europe. No matter how outlandish the claims are, the real issue the French elite have to address is why such massive numbers of youth are so disaffected from the rest of society. Why it is that such large numbers of people, in the thousands, could be mobilised on such a scale, regardless of how it was organised. It is abundantly clear that French society has not been able to offer these youth the kind of values or vision that would dissuade them from being involved in such actions.
Producing a cohesive society takes more than stirring speeches about values. It is rather the experience of people sharing life together that gives the rhetoric a reality. It is in this sense that France is suffering.The fact is that the high levels of unemployment and discrimination affecting immigrant youth are the result of widespread prejudice.The persistent and growing popularity of the Front National, led by the infamous Jean-Marie Le Pen, is a testament to this hostility. This prejudice is present in the indigenous community, which it is often claimed feels it values and identity are under threat. It seems however that the talk of upholding, republican secular values is a convenient proxy for protecting a national identity framed in ethnic and religious terms, which will never accept the Muslim minority. Back to Multiculturalism? In the UK, many supporters of a multiculturalism have seen the events in France as a grim vindication of their approach. Frankly, they have been on the ropes in the last few years as multiculturalism was derided for its perceived failures. Many even spoke of the death of multiculturalism. Much of the analysis in the wake of the riots, in the British media at least, has thus claimed that, while it has its faults, multiculturalism could offer France a way out of the crisis, an opportunity to strengthen its civil society with more inclusive policies reflecting the needs of its diverse communities. Apparently, the UK has been more successful in its attempts at integration, because the riots that have occurred on British streets have been much smaller than those in France. Though some in the UK would like to portray Britain as a model for others, the fact is that problems of racism and discrimination affect community relations here as well.We can see similar differences in rates of employment for example.The national unemployment rate for white people in 2003 stood at 5.8%, compared with 13% for ethnic minorities as a whole, and 20% and 23% for people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent, respectively. [3] In the Netherlands as well, there has been a big movement away from the multicultural approach that the country was famous for, towards a much more stringent emphasis on liberal values and restrictions on immigration. One of the main complaints of Dutch critics of multiculturalism was that so much has been given, in terms of funds and cultural recognition, to Muslims at the expense of the majority. In return, it is claimed, Muslims have been ungrateful for the privileges they have received, and have been hostile and dismissive of the host culture in return. Again however, as in the UK and France, unemployment among immigrants is significantly higher than in the indigenous population; in 2002 the unemployment rate for North Africans at 10% was twice that of the indigenous Dutch. Even if we adjust for differences in education, the disparity in employment levels does not disappear. Unemployment among North Africans without secondary level qualifications is 22%, but among native Dutch with a similar educational level the rate is only 10%. [4] An International Labour Organisation (ILO) study conducted in 2000 that focused on France, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK found that discrimination was a serious obstacle for ethnic minorities in all of them. Job applicants from minority groups were discriminated against in approximately one in three cases. [5] The figures seem to indicate that there is a common reality of discrimination and a comparative lack of opportunities in the different countries of Europe. Unemployment is only one facet of relations between Europe and its minorities; however it does serve as an indicator of the state of relations between groups from different backgrounds.The issue of integration is commonly presented nowadays as problem of adapting minorities to a dominant national culture. In the case of Muslims in particular, this is related to adopting secular values and a modern conception of national allegiance. However, the hostility that manifests in the form of discrimination on racial or religious grounds points to the existence of a problem in the indigenous community. Notions of nationhood grounded in tradition, and race, still hold ground for many. Whether in countries that embrace multiculturalism, or dismiss it as a liberal indulgence, issues of minorities and immigration are viewed through the prism of a natural, 'true' nation based on ancestry and blood. In this context, abstract notions of citizenship, while earnestly embraced by the intelligentsia, only seem to serve as a way to create hoops for minorities to jump through. If national identity in European countries is still linked to religion or race, rather than a set of civic values, this presents a serious problem to the integration agenda. This would imply that even if the Muslim community were to integrate, in the manner desired, to 'national values' and institutions, the problems of discrimination would still exist. If the general public uses a yardstick of colour of skin or religion when hiring an employee, or choosing a neighbourhood to live in, values don't come into the equation.This does not bode well for the prospects of building the cohesive society so sincerely desired, and presents a troubling image of Europe's future. If this endeavour is not successful, it will lead many to question the official values of which Europe is so proud.The Muslim minority will be disillusioned, but also the majority community will feel that their elite have betrayed them. It will also cast serious doubts on the claims of secularists that their values can actually produce social harmony between differing communities in the manner that they desire.
Reference
Ethnic Minorities in the Labour Market: Comparative Policy Approaches (Western Europe): Andrew Geddes, Liverpool University/European University Institute. P.18
BBC News website;Thursday, 24 November 2005, 15:42 GMT
Measures of Integration; Randall Hansen, Connections Magazine 2003
European Outlook 2: Destination Europe, Immigration and Integration in the European Union, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
European Outlook 2: Destination Europe, Immigration and Integration in the European Union, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. P.70
The following is a good article by Jamal Okie, an Islamic political writer, looking into integration and multiculturalism in Europe and what can be learnt for the UK.
The outbreak of rioting in Paris in late October has brought into question some of the key underpinnings of the French Republic in a way that has embarrassed the French elite.The riots also underlined the hollowness of claims that France presents a model of integration that should be emulated across Europe. Interior minister and presidential hopeful Nicholas Sarkozy, himself had to admit that exclusion and discrimination had played their role in the outpouring of rage, stating in an interview that, "I challenge the idea that we all start life on the same line. Some people start further back because they have a handicap - colour, culture or the district they come from.We have to help them." Sarkozy considers that the current model needs adjustment to confront the underlying problems that led to the sustained disorder, such as positive discrimination to open opportunities for those suffering from the "handicaps" he mentions. Others insist, notably President Chirac, that the problem is that the model is not being applied rigorously enough, not that it is failing. According to many in the immigrant communities, both sides of the political spectrum are either unwilling or unable to bring about the kind of changes that are really needed. Rioting first occurred in the Clichy-sous-Bois suburb of Paris in late October after news spread that two local youths, Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna had been electrocuted as they hid from police who had been chasing them to check their papers. After the first few nights of rioting, the situation was further exacerbated when a police tear gas canister was launched into one of the mosques in the suburb, affecting hundreds of the worshippers gathered there during Ramadhan. The police gave no explanation of why this incident occurred during a time of such tension. After sustained nights of rioting in the Paris suburbs, the disorder spread to towns and cities across France, as youths in other areas took the opportunity to destroy cars, shops and attack people, especially the hated police. In total, two people were killed by rioters, and more than 10000 vehicles were burned, as were 255 schools and 233 public buildings; the police arrested 4770 people. Currently, all the leading political figures are keen to show that they are taking an active role in addressing the problems that have played a role in the outbreak of disorder. For the Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, and Interior Minister Sarkozy, both looking ahead to the Presidential elections in 2007, the next few months are crucial. They will strive to show that they are active in addressing the problems affecting the minorities. The key issue to achieve electoral success will be reassuring the worried majority that law and order will prevail and that the country is not in danger of another security breakdown. As we have discussed in these pages previously, there has been a sea change in attitudes towards social relations in parts of Europe in the past few years, due to fears about terrorism and immigration, which have led to discussion about which social model will serve Europe best. France has been an advocate of the liberal, individual model which doesn't recognise differing identities among the populace.The only status recognised by law is that of citizen of the Republic, and hence according to this approach consideration is not given to racial or religious distinctions.This is meant to guarantee the cohesiveness of the society, avoiding the emergence of civil strife or competition among different groups that will occur at the expense of the whole. This outlook was established in the revolutionary era, when the new constitutional order was founded upon the idea that the law looked upon all citizens equally, regardless of their background. At that time, France made the transition from a monarchical to a constitutional system, which derived its power from the consent of the people, instead of the force of the king's arms. Representatives of the different provinces of France, whose regions were previously the property of the king,now freely submitted to a united, legitimate order, discarding their regional and linguistic differences.This principle regarding French identity was thus enshrined in French culture and underpins its political life to this day. One of the consequences of this view of French identity is that the state is prohibited from adopting policies or laws which treat citizens differently according to ethnic or religious distinctions. On this basis, the government is prohibited from collecting data on the racial or religious groups present in the Republic.Thus all of the figures quoted in the media about the size of the ethnic or religious minority populations in France are only estimates, as such questions could never be part of an official census (both figures vary between three and eight million according to different sources). This stance has great support in the French population as a whole,and most of the elite commend it as well, since in their view it has enabled France to avoid any policy stance or governmental bias that could lead to official discrimination in favour of or against groups. If the government is officially blind regarding any differences among its people, it will be unable to mistreat them due to these differences. On the other hand, opponents of this stance argue that this information void allows rampant discrimination. Since there is no official tracking of differences in areas such as employment opportunities or education between different groups, there is no impetus for officialdom to counteract the problems that affect France's minorities. Many European countries have looked to elements of the French approach as a way to address some of the tensions evolving between their host communities and immigrant groups, in most cases from Muslim countries. In Britain, the Netherlands and elsewhere, fears about excessive immigration, and the possible development of a fifth column in the Muslim community, have driven the debate to the top of the political agenda. Many commentators in these countries claimed that the multicultural model that guided social policy for decades had to be abandoned, as it had failed to secure the adoption of core values that would guarantee harmony in society.
The Multicultural model had arisen in response to the persistent demand of activist groups working within and alongside nonwhite communities that their communal identity be validated by the state and protected from discrimination or attack, whether verbal or physical. It aimed to achieve intercultural, interracial harmony by recognising different identities and values as equally valid. Both state and society had to refrain from expressing preference or disdain for any of these various identities, and moreover, this entailed that an individual's membership of a particular community was an essential element of their individual identity. Importantly, for critics of this view, this led to group identity taking precedence over the individual, a form of reverse racism and stereotyping. Rather than viewing Ahmed, Joe or Sofia as an individual, interacting with them on the basis of what I perceive to be their personal merits or faults, I treat them as a member of a 'community'. So without taking the person in front of me into account, I should treat them in line with what I have been told are the particular habits and outlook of a member of their 'group'. Critics argue that this is precisely the sort of prejudice that was supposed to have been eradicated by Multiculturalism. Furthermore, the political correctness this outlook obliges hinders the openness and honesty that should characterise interaction in the public sphere. Its end product is artificial and uncomfortable contact between people of different backgrounds, where fear of causing offence means we sacrifice the kind of honest contact with others that would actually contribute to cohesion in society. The other danger of the Multicultural approach in the eyes of its critics was that it promoted a 'rights' culture that didn't recognise responsibilities. In the Muslim, immigrant context, that people constantly talked of how society had to give them more, with no sense that they had a duty to give something back to the society that had offered them so much. These fears were amplified in recent times following the rioting that took place in the towns of northern England in 2001. Across Europe, in the Netherlands, Denmark and elsewhere, parties of the right gained ground by promising to correct government policy gone mad.The bombings in London and the death of Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands have of course magnified the tension surrounding the debate exponentially. In the face of all of the problems the Multicultural approach is blamed for, many commentators have thus looked at the French approach as a potential saviour of Europe's identity.The key marker of France's current position in Europe's social cohesion debate is its decision in 2004 to ban the Islamic hijab and other 'conspicuous/ostentatious' religious symbols. The decision of France's parliament to support a formal ban on such symbols, gained support across the continent. Such proponents argued that these measures were essential to safeguard Europe's future, particularly to combat the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, whether in a politically active or violent manifestation.They encouraged all European countries to undertake similar powerful assertions of liberal,secular values. The riots should thus serve as an indication of how ill-founded such hopes were. The high-blown rhetoric that marked the debate on the hijab has been proved utterly irrelevant to the situation on the ground. It is clear that France has not been successfully at establishing a cohesive relationship with her minorities, and the blame cannot be attributed to the multicultural agenda. Suddenly the French establishment has rediscovered how serious the problems of discrimination and neglect are that affect the banlieues surrounding it towns and cities. One of the few studies of French unemployment that included information on ethnic groups found that the average level of unemployment for immigrants of African origin was 27.38%, against an average of 8.8% for immigrants from the rest of the EU. [1] Even when youths from minority communities are successful academically, they still face discrimination and are unable to advance in the job market. The rioting was brutal and counterproductive, and the youths destroying public buildings and attacking people only harmed their own communities. In most of the areas hit by violence and destruction of property, the victims were fellow residents of the suburbs, living through the same problems as their attackers. As is usually the case in such incidents, while a minority may think they are protesting to get their voices heard, a significant number will simply take advantage of the situation to engage in meaningless acts of violence. Many commentators have found it easy to restrict themselves to condemning the youths who caused the disorder, and refuse to engage in any further analysis of the situation. For instance, right-wing politicians attacked the role of rappers in inciting anti-French sentiments, and in effect laying the groundwork for the rioting; over 200 members of parliament signed a petition calling for the prosecution of seven rap groups and musicians.The MP Francois Grosdidier who led the petition claimed that such music incited violence, "When people hear this all day long…it is no surprise that they then see red as soon as they walk past policemen or simply people who are different from them." [2]Other more paranoid observers saw the long, sinister hand of Al-Qaeda at work in the suburbs, kicking off an intifada on French soil. According to this version, the riots were the first stage, or perhaps a dry run, for serious attempts at overturning the democratic order in Europe. No matter how outlandish the claims are, the real issue the French elite have to address is why such massive numbers of youth are so disaffected from the rest of society. Why it is that such large numbers of people, in the thousands, could be mobilised on such a scale, regardless of how it was organised. It is abundantly clear that French society has not been able to offer these youth the kind of values or vision that would dissuade them from being involved in such actions.
Producing a cohesive society takes more than stirring speeches about values. It is rather the experience of people sharing life together that gives the rhetoric a reality. It is in this sense that France is suffering.The fact is that the high levels of unemployment and discrimination affecting immigrant youth are the result of widespread prejudice.The persistent and growing popularity of the Front National, led by the infamous Jean-Marie Le Pen, is a testament to this hostility. This prejudice is present in the indigenous community, which it is often claimed feels it values and identity are under threat. It seems however that the talk of upholding, republican secular values is a convenient proxy for protecting a national identity framed in ethnic and religious terms, which will never accept the Muslim minority. Back to Multiculturalism? In the UK, many supporters of a multiculturalism have seen the events in France as a grim vindication of their approach. Frankly, they have been on the ropes in the last few years as multiculturalism was derided for its perceived failures. Many even spoke of the death of multiculturalism. Much of the analysis in the wake of the riots, in the British media at least, has thus claimed that, while it has its faults, multiculturalism could offer France a way out of the crisis, an opportunity to strengthen its civil society with more inclusive policies reflecting the needs of its diverse communities. Apparently, the UK has been more successful in its attempts at integration, because the riots that have occurred on British streets have been much smaller than those in France. Though some in the UK would like to portray Britain as a model for others, the fact is that problems of racism and discrimination affect community relations here as well.We can see similar differences in rates of employment for example.The national unemployment rate for white people in 2003 stood at 5.8%, compared with 13% for ethnic minorities as a whole, and 20% and 23% for people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent, respectively. [3] In the Netherlands as well, there has been a big movement away from the multicultural approach that the country was famous for, towards a much more stringent emphasis on liberal values and restrictions on immigration. One of the main complaints of Dutch critics of multiculturalism was that so much has been given, in terms of funds and cultural recognition, to Muslims at the expense of the majority. In return, it is claimed, Muslims have been ungrateful for the privileges they have received, and have been hostile and dismissive of the host culture in return. Again however, as in the UK and France, unemployment among immigrants is significantly higher than in the indigenous population; in 2002 the unemployment rate for North Africans at 10% was twice that of the indigenous Dutch. Even if we adjust for differences in education, the disparity in employment levels does not disappear. Unemployment among North Africans without secondary level qualifications is 22%, but among native Dutch with a similar educational level the rate is only 10%. [4] An International Labour Organisation (ILO) study conducted in 2000 that focused on France, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK found that discrimination was a serious obstacle for ethnic minorities in all of them. Job applicants from minority groups were discriminated against in approximately one in three cases. [5] The figures seem to indicate that there is a common reality of discrimination and a comparative lack of opportunities in the different countries of Europe. Unemployment is only one facet of relations between Europe and its minorities; however it does serve as an indicator of the state of relations between groups from different backgrounds.The issue of integration is commonly presented nowadays as problem of adapting minorities to a dominant national culture. In the case of Muslims in particular, this is related to adopting secular values and a modern conception of national allegiance. However, the hostility that manifests in the form of discrimination on racial or religious grounds points to the existence of a problem in the indigenous community. Notions of nationhood grounded in tradition, and race, still hold ground for many. Whether in countries that embrace multiculturalism, or dismiss it as a liberal indulgence, issues of minorities and immigration are viewed through the prism of a natural, 'true' nation based on ancestry and blood. In this context, abstract notions of citizenship, while earnestly embraced by the intelligentsia, only seem to serve as a way to create hoops for minorities to jump through. If national identity in European countries is still linked to religion or race, rather than a set of civic values, this presents a serious problem to the integration agenda. This would imply that even if the Muslim community were to integrate, in the manner desired, to 'national values' and institutions, the problems of discrimination would still exist. If the general public uses a yardstick of colour of skin or religion when hiring an employee, or choosing a neighbourhood to live in, values don't come into the equation.This does not bode well for the prospects of building the cohesive society so sincerely desired, and presents a troubling image of Europe's future. If this endeavour is not successful, it will lead many to question the official values of which Europe is so proud.The Muslim minority will be disillusioned, but also the majority community will feel that their elite have betrayed them. It will also cast serious doubts on the claims of secularists that their values can actually produce social harmony between differing communities in the manner that they desire.
Reference
Ethnic Minorities in the Labour Market: Comparative Policy Approaches (Western Europe): Andrew Geddes, Liverpool University/European University Institute. P.18
BBC News website;Thursday, 24 November 2005, 15:42 GMT
Measures of Integration; Randall Hansen, Connections Magazine 2003
European Outlook 2: Destination Europe, Immigration and Integration in the European Union, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
European Outlook 2: Destination Europe, Immigration and Integration in the European Union, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. P.70
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)