Islam and the West

Q: There are a lot of Muslims who look at the leadership of Egypt warily...Is...this is a bad selection (for President Obama's speech to the Muslim world)?

Press Secretary GIBBS: (Egypt)...is the heart of Arab world...This is a speech to many, many people and a continuing effort by this President ...to demonstrate how we can work together to ensure the safety and security and the future well-being....of the Muslim world.

Q: I guess my only point is there are a lot of Muslims who think of... the Egyptian leaders as part of the problem.

GIBBS: This is not about who the leaders might be of any certain country; this is about the...common progress that we can make to strengthen that relationship and fight extremists.

***********************************************
The above exchange with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs sums up the countervailing pressures that President Obama faces as he prepares for his June 4 speech to the Muslim world. As I understand it, the original purpose of the speech was to offer a master vision of how to narrow the cultural, ideological and political breach between the U.S. and the Muslim world. To highlight these grand themes, some officials proposed that Obama travel to the land of his youth: Indonesia.

First Prize for Best Concluding Lines in a Middle East Policy Article goes to Fouad Ajami. In a clever observation about Syria's current leader, he writes:

"Assad has not been brilliant in the way he has handled the inheritance his father bequeathed to him, but the Assad dynasty and the intelligence barons and the brigade commanders who sustain the regime can be relied on to fight for what they usurped. After all, they stole it fair and square."

"We remind Hosni Mubarak that we are all Egyptians. Where does he want us to go?" Gergis Faris, a 46-year-old pig farmer in Cairo who collects garbage to feed his animals, told the Associated Press. "We are uneducated people, just living day by day... and now if our pigs are taken from us without compensation, how are we supposed to live?"

In the past two days Egyptian authorities have slaughtered some 300,000 pigs. Never mind that health officials from Atlanta to Melbourne have asserted that Swine Flu is transmitted not by pigs but from people to people. As panic sets in on a global level, pork barrel politics of a very different kind is spreading fast, and with equal madness.

"It's a crucial condition if we want to move forward," said Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon,... "Realistically, we need to keep Iran at bay... Until that happens, the Israeli government will largely limit itself to matters such as trying to improve the Palestinian economy and strengthen its civil institutions. The Iranian clock should be measured in months," he said... By contrast, the timetable on Palestinian statehood "is open-ended."

Yesterday, someone called on the Egyptian people to take to the streets...This person also called on the Egyptian Armed Forces...The Egyptian Armed Forces are there to defend Egypt. If need be, they will also protect Egypt against people like you.
-- Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Abu al-Gheit December 29, 2008.

Abu al-Gheit issued the above warning to Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbollah, as Israel was pounding Gaza. Assailing Egypt's effort to stem the flow of weapons to Hamas, Nasrallah went so far as to assert that the "Egyptian position is the cornerstone of what is going on in Gaza." Outraged Egyptian officials retaliated by accusing Hizbollah of sending a "sleeper cell" into Sinai to prepare attacks against Egyptian targets.

We Turks have lately been thinking only in opposites -- that you are either secular or religious, Kurd or Turk, European or Middle Eastern. It took a young foreign leader...to remind us that we are all of those things, and much more.
-- Asli Aydintasbas, former Ankara bureau chief of the newspaper Sabah.

As far as I am concerned, the high point of Obama's first overseas trip as President was his visit to Turkey. There he encountered a land whose leaders are struggling to reconcile contending visions of community. For an American president whose roots lie in Africa, Indonesia, Hawaii and Chicago, Illinois, Turkey's story must have resonated with Obama's own experience.

Iraqi officials...are courteously telling...visiting Arab officials...that Iraq has "special relations with Iran," but that these ties should not compromise Iraq's commitment to being a crucial Arab player...For purposes of confrontation and for those of dialogue, Iraq will remain the key scene of Arab --and possibly America --encounters with Iran.
--Dina Ezzat, "Standing by Iraq." Al-Ahram Weekly.

One of the Obama administration's manifold Middle East challenges is how Iraq will reintegrate into the Middle East. It was not so long ago that Washington envisioned a post-Saddam Iraq as a happy ally--a stalwart backer of the Arab-Israeli peace process whose support for U.S. geo-strategic goals would tip the balance against radical forces.

At Midnight on March 20, 2009, the Barack Obama administration launched into diplomatic orbit the USS Engagement. Using the occasion of the Persian New Year (Nowruz), the president invoked a spring of "new beginnings" to set out the enticing possibility of a normal relationship between Iran and the U.S.

Whether this turns out to be a historic moment, or yet another failed bid to move beyond a three-decade cold war, remains to be seen. It will take a huge dose of sustained political will in Tehran and Washington to overcome the many obstacles that await American and Iranian leaders.

A. "Mr Sharif has a long history of...pretending to be principled," said the spokesman. "As someone who ordered his party supporters to storm the Supreme Court in 1998, his claims to fight for judicial independence sound so hollow."

B. "Mr. Zardari...is destabilizing the nation," said Mushahid Hussain, a...former aide to Sharif. "Just a year ago, we believed it was the dawn of a new democratic era, but our leaders seem to be back in the old mind-set of tearing each other apart."

Anti-Semitism is... becoming part of the political ideology... If you dehumanize a group of people -- and the Islamists dehumanize the Jews -- even if they don't say they want to kill them, the dehumanization is... a crime. -- Bassam Tibi

A Syrian-born German scholar and leading expert on Islamist ideology, Bassam Tibi doesn't mice words. For the sad reality is that many Islamist leaders today espouse a version of Jew hatred that is as odious as any other prejudice.

Rana Jad is a 20-year-old student at Dar al-Hikma Women's College . . . "Girls don't feel very comfortable when males are selling them lingerie, telling them what size is for them . . . He's totally checking the girls out! It's just not appropriate, especially here in our culture."

That's an excerpt from a BBC story about Dr. Reem Asaad, a finance professor who recently launched an Internet campaign to have Saudi Arabia's lingerie shops staffed by women. Taking a solidly business-like approach, Dr. Asaad insists that "the consumers are the final decision makers." Rana Jad -- one of her keen students -- clearly agrees.

The Taliban: Coming to a Phone Near You?

To understand the escalating threat posed by the Taliban to Afghanistan, Pakistan and even Queens, New York, take a look at the Feb. 17 edition of the New York Times.

Story Number 1 is "Taliban Commander's Death Ends An Embarrassment for Afghanistan." In this piece, we learn that Maulavi Ghulam Dastagir--a Taliban commander who organized the November 2008 ambush of an Afghan Army convoy-- was recently killed in an air attack organized by the American military.

We appreciate the...opinions of reformists, like Khatami, and their liberal spirit that allows for realistic communication on all issues...The reformative Islamists [like Khatami] are the best option. However it will not satisfy us much even if they do attain power at the forthcoming spring elections, because they are a wingless dove. Whether or not an agreement is to be reached, it must be reached with the true people in power. -- Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (London), February 10, 2009.

I...do not accept Islamic human rights. If we accept that the Muslims can write an Islamic human rights declaration...from now on, we will see Buddhist human rights declarations...Jewish human rights declarations and so on and so forth...And if the standards are abolished... the weaker people...will be the ones who will suffer.
-- Shirin Ebadi, Iranian Human Rights Activist and Nobel Laureate

As the 30th anniversary of Iran's Islamic Revolution approaches, it is refreshing to hear Shirin Ebadi declare that she does "not accept Islamic human rights." The problem is not merely that a cultural or religious definition of human rights can easily turn into a prescription for autocracy. The more fundamental problem is who gets to wield the ax of cultural interpretation? Mrs. Ebadi knows the answer: those who are in power, those who control the state. That is why "the weaker people" suffer. They suffer the misfortune of having their rights usurped the moment a class of religious leaders reserves for itself the right to say what it means to be a Muslim, Jew, Christian or Buddhist.

The irony now is obvious: George W. Bush as a force for emancipation in Muslim lands, and Barack Hussein Obama as a messenger of the old, settled ways. Thus the "parochial" man takes abroad a message that Muslims and Arabs did not have tyranny in their DNA, and the man with Muslim and Kenyan and Indonesian fragments in his very life and identity is signaling an acceptance of the established order.

--Fouad Ajami commenting on President Barck Obama's interview with Al-Arabiya TV

In the wake of the US invasion (or liberation) of Iraq and the launching of the Bush administration's "Freedom Agenda," some scholars who had previously doubted the capacity of the Arab world to democratize became converts to Bush's neo-Wilsoniansm.

Outside Siedlce a German plane appeared... and we threw ourselves into an adjacent potato field, face down...I heard the bullets whistling over my head and...turning on my side, I saw a solider aiming his rifle at the airplane...It was a bizarre sight.

In his memoirs, my father recounts his and my grandparents' harrowing escape from Poland following the Nazi invasion on September 1, 1939. In the following days, they would see other bizarre and terrible sights, not least of which was a man "with a nearly severed arm dangling bloodily from his side."

It's cool to be an American again...From Jakarta to Johannesburg; Americans who travel or live abroad are being hugged when strangers hear their accent.

--Washington Post, January 16, 2009

Having just returned from a trip to Syria and Saudi Arabia, let me just say that one place it is not automatically "cool" to be an American is in the Arab world. In discussions with government officials, journalists, intellectuals and businessmen, I heard a dangerous combination of anger, despair and rekindled disillusionment.

"(Israel's)... acts made me reflect on some of the commandments given by God to the 'Chosen People': Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house. No one could be chosen by God to annex the land of other people and kill them."

Among the many statements I have read regarding the tragic situation in Gaza the above caught my attention. Penned by a Palestinian professor of American literature, it reminds us of two facts:

Every other year I fly to Oklahoma to spend Christmas with my in-laws. In their small rural town, where churches and barbeque are plentiful, I ponder the interplay of different religious holidays. Hanukkah celebrates a purported miracle that occurred in 165 BCE, when Jewish rebels revolted against Hellenistic idolatry, while Christmas marks the wondrous birth -some 160 years later-- of a charismatic rabbi whose disciples founded a new religion. Totally unrelated, these two holidays - some say-- cannot be compared, much less collapsed into one ecumenical mish-mash.

Well...not so fast.

A {New York} transit rider...was dragged out of a public meeting by police who feared he was about to imitate the Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at President Bush..."This shoe's for you," he shouted as he was hustled out. New York Times, December 18, 2008.

My Hanukkah Memo to President Elect Barack Obama:

Dear President-elect Obama,

Every Washington think-tank has its foreign policy wish list. We'll do our part at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) on January 8, when we hold our "Passing the Baton" event. Still, I want to say something directly to you, something that is both a bit personal and wonkish.

Whose heart was not broken by the image of two-year-old Moshe Holtzberg crying for his parents, both of whom were murdered last week in Mumbai's Jewish Center? The world weeps with this innocent child, and for all of those whose lives were lost or torn apart in last week's carnage.

The Mumbai tragedy brings with it two sad lessons, not merely for South Asia, but for the entire world.

Next week's election has me thinking about democracy both at home and abroad. How, I wonder, can the U.S. promote political reform overseas unless it puts its own house in order? One of our chief problems is widespread political apathy, a long-standing ailment compounded by a congressional redistricting system that encourages political disengagement. Yes indeed, people are "free" to vote or stay at home. But their choices are shaped by the perception that voting does (or does not) advance their interests. As political scientists would put it, the culture of apathy is politically "structured."

I am not in the Joe Six Pack crowd. As my friends and family will attest, if I drink more than two beers, I fall asleep. Moreover, when I do drink, I usually choose beer from exotic places like Germany, Britain (I love Guinness), or even Japan. I also like many microbeers from the good ol' USA. But read my lips: I won't drink a Schlitz. If that makes me an elitist who doesn't grasp the realities of Wasilla Main Street, so be it. The notion that Washington needs a dose of Wasilla intrigues me. American politics has long been animated by a populist tradition that views the inner workings of the nation's capital as far removed from the lifeblood of "real America." While Congress's legislative record might sometimes seem to justify such views, there is far more to the story than that. Born and raised in DC, I have seen the sacrifices our public servants make every day. These men and women, who come from every state in the Union, are joined by some half a million Washingtonians in the public and private as well as non-profit sectors, struggling like the rest of the country to balance work and family and to make ends meet. We have our soccer moms (and dads) and PTA meetings; we are deeply involved in our churches, synagogues and mosques, and we participate in and are affected by local politics of every shape and form. In a city denied the democratic rights enjoyed by the vast majority of Americans, we cope every day with a myriad of urban problems, all of which have been exacerbated by a widening gap between rich and poor and black and white. These realities are blotted out by a reckless manipulation of stereotypes. Disdain for Washington constitutes a kind of geographic and cultural racism that is invoked (and manipulated) during every presidential election season. No amount of folksy kidding around can hide the ugliness of Washington bashing, despite the fact that some of our leading bashers have lived here for decades. Washington bashing also has troubling implications for America's foreign relations. Lurking behind the notion that Washington is alien and disconnected is an inchoate anxiety that the rest of the world is even more foreign and menacing. Though ours is a nation of immigrants, it is also a land where suspicions run deep about the "true loyalties" of the "foreign policy establishment," particularly among those most attracted to the fantasies and prejudices of American populism.

Last week came the big test: our son entered school and promptly - even enthusiastically - put on his brightly colored Central Asian kippah. I was relieved, but also a little worried, since it seemed he was motivated by fact that all the other boys were doing the same thing. Is this the slippery slope to faith by osmosis? And if it is, so what? After all, what else can religion be for a four-year-old? We certainly don't expect him to pose critical questions at this stage - maybe soon, but not now!

Turkey's Constitutional Court has decided against disbanding the Justice and Development Party (AKP), and ruled instead to cut the party's public funding. This sent a clear signal that the AKP is now on probation, and may yet be shut down if it pursues what ardent secularists view as a policy of creeping Islamization.

This is the first of two stories I will tell in the coming weeks about Muslim headscarves. Both illustrate the sometimes paranoid reactions that religious dress often elicits; they also highlight how the political meaning of headscarves shifts in different political and cultural contexts.

"What do the American people think of Ayatollah Khomeini?❠an Iranian TV reporter asked me on my first visit to Tehran in 1999. For a moment I was stumped. If I answered truthfully, I would have to say that the vast majority of Americans had never heard of Khomeini. But Iranian hardliners might easily exploit this observation. And so I simply suggested that most Americans didnâ™t follow international politicsâ”this was the task of a foreign policy elite whose opinions on Iran were as divided as ever.

In recent weeks I have given a lot of thought to the flap over Barack Obama'™s assertion that economic frustration inclines people to 'œcling to guns or religion'. Beyond the domestic debate, the hullabaloo provoked by the Senator'™s remarks offers a useful point of departure to probe the complex motivations that animate Islamist movements and ideologies.

Last week, Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki issued a 72-hour ultimatum to Shi'™ite militants in the port city of Basra to surrender their weapons. When they called his bluff, he extended the offer by a full week, underscoring the great risk that Maliki had undertaken in pursuing a military solution to the conflict with the fiery cleric Muqtada Sadr and his 'œMahdi Army'. In today'™s Iraq, political clout ultimately flows from the barrel of many guns. Thus Sadr's thousands of loyal followers will not disarm. This was the message that Sadr implicitly telegraphed to the government in his '9 point response' to Maliki'™s demands.

Some years back my wife and I befriended three Moroccan brothers who had been summarily locked up for 10 years by the late king of Morocco. Tossed into a cell with little light and a ceiling so low that one of the brothers developed a hunched back, they were only released after a human rights campaign in France secured their freedom. One brother finally came to America, where he settled down in a small town in Texas. There he wrote his memoirs and discovered a kind of happiness, surrounded by people who new little of the world he came from, but who were kind and welcoming.

Recently I agreed to become a regular contributor to washingtonpost.com's provocative blog on religion and politics: 'œOn Faith'. My mission: to elucidate the intricate mysteries of Islamist politics. Something about my reputation for scholarly honesty and objectivity-- I was told--bolstered by my work with Arab democratic activists, suggested that I could make a compelling addition to the On Faith team! Who was I to argue?