The Muslims: Malevolent, Mysterious and Probably Crazy
I dislike the religion of Islam just as much as I do Christianity and Judaism. I realise that I am myself embedded in a culture whose roots are in the Abrahamic religions, and most of my friends have grown up in one or another of these religions, but I don’t believe their theologies and I detest the weird things that the more virulent forms of religious belief do to people’s heads. So it has been very odd to find myself defending Islam all the time, but it had to be done.
After 9/11, all the old Western fears and prejudices about Islam re-emerged in full force, accompanied by some new and thoroughly paranoid fantasies. It was not just unfair to Muslims; it was a huge impediment to clear thinking about the situation.
9 October 2001
Huntington’s Folly (and bin Laden’s)
“The nations of infidels have all united against the Muslims....This is a new
battle, a great battle, similar to the great battles of Islam like the conquest of
Jerusalem....(The Americans) come out to fight Islam in the name of fighting
terrorism. These events have split the world into two camps: the camp of belief
and the camp of disbelief....”
Osama bin Laden, early October 2001
Bin Laden’s videotaped message to the Muslim world, pre-taped for release after the first US strikes against Afghanistan, should give Samuel Huntington a warm glow of satisfaction, for it was he who predicted in his best-selling book in the mid-90s that Islam and the West would become global adversaries in a ‘clash of civilisations’. Bin Laden also believes that this clash will define the next phase of world history, and is doing his best to hurry it along.
Huntington’s book was especially popular among the Washington-based professionals who had built lucrative careers on fighting the Soviet threat, and by the early 90s were desperately in need of a new threat to replace it. Just substitute bearded fanatics for godless commissars, and carry on making money.
In Islamic fundamentalist circles, on the other hand, they had no need of Huntington. They already believed that contemporary history is a morality play in which the oppressed and despised peoples of the Muslim world are destined to unite, wage a final battle against ‘Western civilisation’, and overthrow its domination throughout the world.
This is the world-view that bin Laden pushes relentlessly every time he finds a camera to address, and there are plenty of Muslims, especially in the Arab world, who already believe it. The current crisis will give this definition of the world a big boost in both of the ‘civilisations’ in question, but it remains, nevertheless, pure parochial nonsense. There is no ‘clash of civilisations’, only a clash between traditionalists and modernisers within each culture, religion and ‘civilisation’. All of bin Laden’s real enemies are Muslims.
The battle between reformers and conservatives has been underway in the West for over 500 years, long before it began in other parts of the planet. This lets the defenders of the old ways everywhere else portray their opponents within their own society as mere pawns of Western influence -- and some of the defenders are pretty extreme in their rejection of the modern. As a pro-Taleban youth in an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan put it recently, staking his claim to the moral high ground: “The Americans love Coca-Cola, but we love death.”
It’s a striking statement, but there’s nothing particularly Islamic about it. A Japanese kamikaze pilot in 1945 could have said it with equal sincerity. Every major culture on the planet is at some stage or other of working its way through the same series of changes, and occasionally some country or even some entire ‘civilisation’ may spin out for a while and go slightly mad.
This is not happening to ‘the Muslims’ as a whole, some 1.3 billion people of wildly diverse languages, histories and traditions who live in around fifty different countries in three continents. It is not even happening to the Arabs, who account for only one-fourth of the world’s Muslims. It is conceivable (though not likely) that a couple of Arab states might face revolutionary take-overs by Islamic fundamentalists if the current crisis lasts too long or involves too many innocent Muslims’ deaths, but you still don’t get a ‘clash of civilisations’ out of that.
There is something profoundly amiss in the Arab world, to be sure. Out of eighteen genuinely Arab countries, not one is a fully democratic country. Most do not even make a decent pretence of it. From Algeria to Egypt to Iraq to Yemen, the political culture is one of repression and torture, violence and lies – and in most Arab countries living standards are falling as population soars. (Even Saudi Arabia’s per capita GNP has halved in the past twenty years.)
But this is an Arab problem, not a Muslim one. The vast majority of the world’s Muslims live in Asia, not in the Middle East, and countries such as Indonesia and Bangladesh, while they certainly have their problems, have not been long-term failures at either democracy or development. They will not be joining in Osama bin Laden’s jihad against the West – nor, for that matter, will many Arab countries either.
There are large and genuine global trends at work today: democratisation, globalisation of the economy, equality for women. The ‘global village’ that Marshall McLuhan predicted to much puzzlement forty years ago is a reality, thanks to the new media technologies, and we can and do see everybody all the time.
But these trends, while they cause much puzzlement and frustration, do not show any signs of leading towards a titanic ‘clash of civilisations’. Instead, we are all muddling through the mess, far too busy coping with the deluge of change in our own lives to fall into the grand historical patterns foreseen for us by men like Huntington and bin Laden.
Confident optimism like that almost always conceals certain doubts about whether people will actually live up to your expectations for them, and by the next spring I was starting to have reservations.
4 June 2002
Europe: Islamophobia, not Anti-Semitism
“The most stupid religion is Islam, “said best-selling French novelist Michel Houellebecq. In his latest novel, ‘Plateforme’, he has the narrator say: “Each time that I hear that a Palestinian terrorist, or a Palestinian child, or a pregnant Palestinian woman has been shot in the Gaza Strip, I shiver with enthusiasm at the thought that there is one less Muslim.”
Houellebecq is a cynical poseur who would say anything to gain attention, but the problem is that many Europeans give him the attention he craves rather than shunning him. Yet what are we all being urged to worry about (especially by American political commentators)? Not about rampant Islamophobia in Europe, but rather about the alleged upsurge of anti-Semitism in the continent.
The anti-Semitism scare was unleashed by National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen’s surprise success in pushing the Socialist candidate into third place in the first round of the French presidential elections in April. But Le Pen is not a new Hitler; he is just an opportunistic political thug whose dismissive remarks about the Holocaust (“a detail of history”) have never been forgotten or forgiven by the majority of French voters.
In the run-off round of voting in May, 82 percent of French voters held their noses and supported President Jacques Chirac despite his obvious corruption, rather than vote for the racist rabble-rouser Le Pen. As for the 18 percent who did back Le Pen, far more would have been motivated by their hatred and fear of ‘immigrants’ (i.e. Muslims) than of Jews.
The reality is that the recent and unprecedented entry of far-right political parties into governing coalitions in a number of European countries is directly connected with rising popular resentment of ‘immigrants’, and that the majority of those immigrants almost everywhere are Muslims. Look at the recent inclusion of far-right parties in the Danish, Norwegian and Portuguese governments: not an anti-Semitic word or hint in any of their campaigns,.
Look at the remarkable success of assassinated politician Pim Fortuyn’s party in last month’s Dutch election: he won his popularity by calling for an end to immigration and referring to Islam as “a backward religion”, but he never uttered a single word that suggested he harboured anti-Semitic views. Even Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a right-wing populist who freely airs his anti-Muslim views, would never dream of saying anything anti-Semitic in public.
There are occasional anti-Semitic outrages in Europe – desecration of Jewish graveyards, daubing swastikas on synagogues and the like – because in a continent of 700 million people there are bound to be some malevolent fools. The recent increase in these incidents is probably due to the fact that some Muslims resident in Europe have picked up the anti-Semitic ideas that once flourished in the continent, but are alien to traditional Islamic cultures. But there is no new wave of anti-Semitism in Western Europe, and it is no worse in Eastern Europe than it was ten years ago.
In all of Europe, however, there is a rapidly rising tide of Islamophobia: politicians capitalising on popular dislike of Muslim immigrants, and even outright vilification of Islam. It is no worse than the routine public vilification of infidels and their satanic creeds by Islamic extremists that goes unrebuked in many of the world’s Muslim countries, but that is no excuse for Europeans to behave the same way. Why is it happening?
Part of the reason is the sheer number of Muslim immigrants. Whether it’s Turks in Germany, Algerians and Moroccans in France, or Bangladeshis and Pakistanis in Britain, Muslims occupy the same dominant position in immigration flows to Western Europe that Latin Americans do to the United States, so they tend to become the targets for anti-immigrant hostility in general. Coming mostly from poor, rural areas of their old countries, they also trend to end up at the bottom of socio-economic heap in their new ones, and poor people make easy victims.
There is also an ancestral memory in Western European cultures of a time when the Muslims of the Middle East were a powerful and terrifying enemy. None of this old history has much real relevance to today, but it is still there for unscrupulous politicians and attention-seeking journalists to exploit. So we have, for example, the case of Oriana Fallaci, formerly a well-known war correspondent and always a relentless self-promoter, who at the age of 72 has found a new hobby-horse to ride.
Last December she published a book called ‘Anger and Pride’ in which she denounced Europeans who sympathise with the Palestinian cause as anti-Semites “who would sell their own mothers to a harem in order to see Jews once again in the gas chambers.” Her pro-Israeli stance, however, is only a pretext for a attack on Muslims: “vile creatures who urinate in baptistries” and “multiply like rats”.
The book is in its fifth printing in Italy and has also become a bestseller in Spain. It is published in France this week, and stands to do even better than Houellebecq’s filth.
10 January 2003
Al-Jazeera and Arab Democracy
Given that well over two-thirds of the countries on the planet are now democracies, how come none of the 18 Arabic-speaking countries is genuinely democratic? There are a number of sham democracies like Egypt where the elections are always rigged, a couple of half-way democracies like Jordan where the king still has the last word, and one brave experiment in tiny Qatar, but that’s it.
Part of the reason is the curse of oil, which has led foreigners to meddle non-stop in the Arab world. Certainly the half-century of confrontation with Israel, marked by repeated Arab defeats, also played a role. But rather than trying to answer the question, maybe we should note instead that the situation is probably about to change, because at last there is uncensored news available in Arabic.
Once information starts to flow freely, it’s hard to stop democracy. Consider former East Germany, whose Communist rulers were unable to block West German television broadcasts. Seventy percent of the East German population could pick up uncensored news in their own language with only a twisted coat-hanger for an antenna -- and the television told them all the things their rulers didn’t want them to know.
In particular, it showed them the non-violent democratic revolutions in Asian countries in the late 1980s, especially the one where Chinese students tried to overthrow their own Communist regime in the spring of 1989. “We could do that,” the East Germans said to themselves, and six months later they began their own non-violent revolution, starting the avalanche that swept away all the Communist regimes of Europe with hardly a shot fired.
The Arab world has never had that kind of access to uncensored news and free debate -- at least, not until five years ago, when al-Jazeera went on the air. It’s only a single television channel, but it broadcasts by satellite 24 hours a day, and can be picked up by anybody with a dish almost anywhere in the Arab world.
Al-Jazeera has 600 journalists operating in all the Arab capitals (except those where they have been expelled), plus London, Paris, New York and Washington, and it has single-handedly transformed the nature of political debate everywhere. It has interviewed Israeli cabinet ministers live. It has broadcast tapes sent to it by Osama bin Laden. It has allowed Saudi Arabian dissidents to criticise the monarchy. It has even given air time to critics of the Qatar government where it is based.
This may seem like no big thing. After all, it’s only one channel, and you have to be rich enough to own a dish to get it. But that is to misunderstand the nature of the media environment. When a major outlet starts to tell the truth, even if only one Arab in ten sees it (al-Jazeera claims a regular audience of 35 million), the word gets around very fast.
Al-Jazeera grew out a failed attempt by the British Broadcasting Corporation to create an Arabic-language TV service. It was a joint venture with a Saudi company that tried to censor a documentary hostile to the Saudi regime, so the BBC pulled out -- leaving behind talented team of Arab TV journalists who had got a whiff of editorial freedom. So they went to Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the British-educated ruler of the small Gulf state of Qatar, and pitched the idea of al-Jazeera to him.
They picked the right man. Only recently come to power, he was starting to introduce democracy in his own tiny sheikhdom, and was so attracted by the idea of providing uncensored news to the whole Arab world that he agreed to bankroll the channel to the tune of $150 million over five years. It still isn’t making a profit -- partly because a lot of local companies, and some multinational ones too, have been instructed not to advertise on al-Jazeera -- but in five years it has transformed the political environment in the Middle East.
That may seem an exaggeration, since there has been no major change yet in any of the regimes that run the region. But as Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch said ten years ago (to his everlasting mortification, for it wrecked a lucrative deal he was making in China), direct broadcasting from satellites is “an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.” The free flow of information opens people’s minds, and then change can happen.
“I think that if al-Jazeera had been there 15 years ago, there would have been no 11 September,” said marketing director Ali Mohammad Kamal three months ago. If it is still in business 15 years from now, there will be a lot fewer dictatorships and absolute monarchies in the Arab world.
By now there are several other Arabic-language TV networks broadcasting across the Arab world, and you don’t need to be able to afford your own personal dish to watch them. Practically every corner café in the Arab world has a dish and a TV set, and everybody gets to watch. Not all the new channels are as fair and impartial as al-Jazeera, but they are making the idea of free political debate real for a generation of Arabs who have never experienced it, and creating a new kind of pan-Arab consciousness.
Meanwhile, non-Muslim governments from Washington to Moscow to New Delhi are busy trying to smear all Muslims who defy them with the same broad brush.
7 July 2003
The Chechen Quagmire
“All terror acts committed on Chechen territory are financed by international terrorist organisations, including al-Qaida,” claimed Colonel Ilya Shabalkin, head of the Russian FSB security service’s operations in Chechnya, in May. Yes, indeed, said Russian President Vladimir Putin, and everything Russia does in Chechnya is “a contribution to the global war on terror.”
Does that mean that the suicide bombers who killed 17 young Russians at a rock concert outside Moscow on Saturday were agents of Osama bin Laden? No, of course not. But that is what the Russian authorities want us to believe, and elsewhere there is remarkable willingness to go along with it.
India accepts Russia’s definition of the problem because it also faces a terrorist campaign by Muslim separatists in the state of Kashmir. Nine months ago the United States and Britain still condemned the murder of civilians by Russian troops in Chechnya (at least sixty people ‘disappear’ each month) and called for Moscow to negotiate a “political solution” with the separatists, but then they invaded Iraq. Now the US State Department praises the sham elections Moscow is holding in Chechnya and Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair calls them “absolutely the right thing to do.”
If you are occupying a largely Muslim territory and some of the local people start using terrorist violence to get you out, then it is tempting to blame it on an international Islamic terrorist conspiracy. If foreign Muslims sympathise with the locals, that just strengthens your case. And if you link up with other non-Muslim powers who are facing the same kind of local resistance, then maybe you can impose these definitions on the whole world. But it doesn’t make them true.
Chechnya’s real misfortune (apart from being conquered by Russia in the first place) is that it ended up in Soviet times not as a full ‘Union Republic’ like Estonia, Georgia and Tajikistan, but as an ‘autonomous republic’ within Russia. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, all the Union Republics took their independence, including the Russian Federation – but none of the ‘autonomous republics’ within Russia, most of them Muslim-majority, were allowed to follow suit. So the Chechens just declared independence anyway.
There was nothing Islamic about it then, just pure nationalism. The Chechens resisted Russian conquest for a generation before they were finally subdued in 1858. They never really accepted Russian rule, and their welcome for the brief German military incursion into the Caucasus during the Second World War earned them mass deportation to central Asia in 1944 after Stalin’s troops returned. The survivors were allowed to go home in 1957, but half of the entire Chechen population was killed in this savage case of ethnic cleansing. So anti-Russian feeling was as strong in 1991 as it was in 1858.
The Chechen independence leader in 1991 was Dzhokhar Dudayev, a former Soviet air force general whose knowledge of Islam was so slight that he declared that believers should be free to pray three times a day. (The right number is five.) The post-Communist government in Moscow didn’t want to fight, but it didn’t want to let Chechnya go either, partly because vital oil pipelines cross its territory and partly because it feared a domino effect in other Muslim-majority parts of the Russian Federation.
After three years of hesitation, Boris Yeltsin sent Russian troops in to end the secession in 1994 – and the Chechens fought them to a standstill. A cease-fire in 1996 might eventually have led to a peaceful separation, but the sheer ruthlessness of the Russian troops had radicalised too many of the Chechen fighters.
Dudayev’s successor, Aslan Maskhadov, was never able to gain control over all of the Chechen guerilla groups, many of them now dedicated Islamists, that sprang up during the war. In the next two years they kidnapped or murdered over a thousand Russians and other foreigners in Chechnya, made terrorist attacks in Russia proper – and gave Moscow a pretext to invade Chechnya again in 1999.
Many people suspect that the terrorist bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow in 1999 were actually done by Russian agents provocateurs, but the voters let Vladimir Putin wrap himself in the Russian flag and win the election of early 2000 as the man who could solve the Chechen problem. Except that it isn’t solved. Of the 600,000 Chechens who lived in the republic in 1991, about one-third have been killed and another third are refugees, but the Chechen resistance continues to kill ten to twenty Russian soldiers a week.
Once in a while, as in the seizure of the theatre in Moscow last October or the rock concert at Tushino airfield last weekend, Chechen terrorists strike targets in Russia itself, but the vast majority of the deaths on both sides are in Chechnya. Despite the great errors and monstrous crimes committed by people on both sides, it is still essentially a problem of decolonisation after the belated end of the Russian empire in 1991, and the right solution for Chechnya is still independence.
It’s easy to see why Putin’s government wants to link Chechnya to more complex issues like India’s presence in Kashmir and the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. It’s a lot harder to understand why New Delhi, Washington and London would allow this blatant case of Russian imperial overstay to blight their already difficult relations with the countries of the Muslim world.
.
17 August 2003
All The News That Fits The Stereotype
Sitting in Cairo in a flat borrowed from a friend. Turn on the TV and catch the news on BBC World: six stories in fifteen minutes. Iraqi guerillas blow up a couple of pipelines. European hostages released by Muslim guerillas in Mali. Nigerian peacekeeping troops in Liberia. Rioting between Muslim sects in Pakistan. Iceland resumes whaling. Islamist terrorists arrested in Indonesia. End of world news.
Four out of six: that’s how many of the stories were about Muslims who do violent things. That would make sense if two-thirds of the world’s people were Muslims, and most of them were violent. Since only one-fifth of the world’s people are Muslims, and many of them don’t even spank their children, it calls for an explanation. Especially because the international news is like this most of the time.
BBC World is not particularly bad. In fact, from Minnesota to Moscow to Manila it is the preferred source of TV news for people with an interest in the world, a knowledge of English and access to cable. It is serious about delivering ‘balanced’ news to a multi-national audience, and yet it is doing an absolutely terrible job. Why?
The BBC is not American, so it’s not following the White House’s agenda. It is not pandering to the paranoid belief, quite widespread in the United States since 11 November, 2001, that Islam is a more violent and dangerous religion than, say, Christianity. Its selection of stories is genuinely driven by what it thinks will be of interest to its audience of a hundred nationalities on five continents, a great many of whom are Muslims. And yet its selection of international stories comes out not very different from Fox News.
The bias in favour of ‘violent Muslim’ stories is less obvious on domestic news channels where the foreign items are buried under a far larger number of domestic stories, but it is the same. Wherever you are in the world (apart from the Muslim parts of the world, of course), try keeping track yourself for a few nights. You’ll find that at least half the foreign stories are about violence committed by or against Muslims.
Consider the four ‘Muslim’ stories among the BBC World six I listed at the top of this article. The Iraq story is legitimate: when the world’s greatest power is sinking into a political and military quagmire, it is going to get coverage. But why Muslim hostage-takers in Mali rather than politically motivated kidnappers in Colombia? Why sectarian clashes between Muslims in Pakistan rather than inter-caste violence among Hindus in India?
The story of suspected terrorists arrested for the Marriott hotel bombing in Jakarta is of legitimate interest, but there’s a lot less follow-up when suspected Basque terrorists are arrested in Spain, or when a resurgent Sendero Luminoso blows something up in Peru. The BBC is not anti-Muslim, but it is responding to a definition of international news that makes ‘violent Muslims’ more newsworthy than violent people in other places.
It is largely a Western definition, following an agenda set mainly by the dominant US media. It is rooted in Western perspectives on the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict, and has been vastly strengthened by the Islamist terrorist attack on the United States two years ago. It is also a huge, steaming heap of horse-feathers.
I’m not preaching pious nonsense about Islam being a ‘religion of peace’: the only peaceful religions are dead religions. And I’m not denying that the Muslim world has a big historical chip on its shoulder: having run one of the most powerful and respected civilisations on the planet for the first thousand years after they burst out of Arabia and conquered large chunks of Europe, Asia and Africa, Muslims have spent the past three centuries being overrun, colonised and humiliated by the West. But the image of Muslims that the rest of the world gets through international news coverage is deeply misleading.
For the past month I have been wandering around the Middle East with eight other members of my extended family. For some, it was their first time in the region; others of us have lived here or visited often enough to be able to lead everybody astray. And we gave less thought to our personal safety – and much less to petty theft – than we would have done on a comparable trip across America, or even through Europe.
I won’t go on about how kind and friendly most of the people we met were, because most people are like that everywhere. I would point out that every single person I discussed current events with was against the American invasion in Iraq, but that I nevertheless encountered no personal hostility although I am easily mistaken for an American. (Would an Arab doing a similar trip around America have the same experience?)
If Iraq gets completely out of hand, the patience and tolerance that still prevail at street level in the Muslim Middle East will be severely eroded, and even Asian Muslim countries may end up taking sides against the US and Britain. But for the moment Samuel Huntington’s nightmare vision of a coming ‘clash of civilisations’ is still a long way off, and the most striking thing is the sheer ordinariness of daily life in the Muslim world. Don’t be misled by television.
But don’t be complacent, either. Constant repetition will give even patent falsehoods and vicious caricatures credibility among people who feel no urgent need to question their habitual sources of information. And that, unfortunately, is most people, including many in high office.
19 October 2003
Two Fanatics And An Old Fool
"We want all Christians and Jews to go out from our Islamic countries and release our brothers from jail and stop killing Muslims or we will kill you," said a Saudi member of al-Qaeda in a videotape released last week which he made before carrying out a suicide attack on a foreign compound in Riyadh in May. In an accompanying audiotape al-Qaeda's leader Osama bin Laden urged all Muslims to defend their faith from the attacks of the evil Christians and Jews: "You should know that this war is a new crusade against Islam and is a fateful war for the whole (Muslim) nation." No surprise there: you already knew there were Islamist fanatics on the loose.
Then we have Christian fanatics like Lieutenant-General William G. 'Jerry' Boykin of the US Army, who believes that "George Bush was not elected by a majority of voters in the United States; he was appointed by God." (Half right there, Jerry.) Speaking in uniform at the Good Shepherd Church in Sandy, Oregon in June, General Boykin asked: "Why do they hate us so much? Ladies and gentlemen, the answer to that is because we're a Christian nation, because our foundations and our roots are Judaeo-Christian....Our religion came from Judaism, and therefore these radicals will hate us forever."
General Boykin was outed by defence analyst William Arkin in the Los Angeles Times shortly after taking up his new job as deputy undersecretary of defence for intelligence at the Pentagon, which is not exactly where you want to find a fanatic in charge. Speaking of a Muslim militia leader he captured in Somalia in 1993, Boykin has boasted: "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol." The United States has more than its fair share of religious nuts, and quite a few of them have ended up in the current administration.
What is one to make, however, of Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed? In his opening speech to the Islamic Summit Conference last Thursday (16 October), he told the leaders and representatives of 57 Muslim or part-Muslim countries assembled in Putrajaya, Malaysia's new administrative capital, that "the Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."
Muslims have to curb their fury against Israel and start thinking, Mahathir told his audience: "We are up against a people who think. They survived 2,000 years of pogroms not by hitting back but by thinking. They invented Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so that they can enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power." And then the audience gave Dr. Mahathir a standing ovation.
Dr. Mahathir is not a religious extremist. He spent his long political career (which ends with his retirement this month) finding ways to unite Malaysia's spectacularly diverse ethnic and religious communities in building a prosperous and peaceful society, and he has been remarkably successful. So why did he sound so much like Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the master Nazi propagandist, and why did so many other Muslim leaders applaud his sentiments?
Anti-Semitism used to be a Christian disease, not a Muslim one. The '2,000 years of pogroms' happened in Christian Europe, while Jewish communities in Muslim countries mostly lived in peace until the creation of Israel in 1948. After three centuries of defeat and colonial rule by the Europeans followed by fifty years of Arab defeats at the hands of Israel, Muslims everywhere understandably feel a bit battered -- "We are all Muslims. We are all oppressed. We are all being humiliated," Mahathir told his audience -- but for a long time they have resisted demonising Jews.
For much of his speech, Mahathir managed to remember that paranoia and prejudice are not the answer: "We also know that not all non-Muslims are against us....Even among the Jews there are many who do not approve of what the Israelis are doing. We must not antagonise everyone." The real thrust of his speech was that anger and blind violence are doing Muslims no good at all, and indeed play into the hands of their (Israeli and/or Western) enemies.
A wise Muslim leader offering his parting thoughts to other Muslim leaders -- and then he blows it with his stupid remarks about Jews controlling the world's most powerful countries. The Western media go into a feeding frenzy, and next thing you know it's as if Mahathir had been addressing a Nazi rally at Nuremberg. The sad truth is that classic European-style anti-Semitism is becoming so commonplace in the Muslim world that both Mahathir and many in his audience may actually believe that Jews secretly control the American, Russian, British and French governments.
Combine this with the eagerness of jihadis like bin Laden and would-be crusaders like General Boykin to get a full-scale ‘clash of civilisations' going, and you will understand why people in the know are looking very worried these days.
22 December 2003
The Veil in France: Dialogue of the Deaf
The backlash in the Arab world has been so strong that the satellite news channel Al-Jazeera, which never allows its presenters to wear anything that might indicate a particular national or religious affiliation, had to let one of its stars, Khadidja Benganna, appear on-screen wearing a brightly-coloured silk scarf. She was only wearing it as a symbol of protest (she fled her native Algeria in 1994 because of death threats from fundamentalists), but it is a measure of how profoundly France’s decision to ban the ‘Islamic’ head-scarf from schools has shocked its Arab neighbours.
French Muslims themselves are in shock, and thousands marched last weekend in Paris, Strasbourg and Avignon to protest against the law banning the display of religious symbols in state institutions that President Jacques Chirac formally proposed on 17 December. The law is carefully even-handed, banning students and civil servants from wearing Christian crosses, Jewish skullcaps and political party symbols as well, but it arose out of a year-long national controversy about head-scarves in schools and it is almost universally seen as a sign of French ‘Islamophobia’.
Wrong. Or at least, largely wrong. There are many people in France who fear or even hate Muslims, and the fragmented nature of the French political system creates space for single-issue anti-immigrant parties that are much more visible than their counterparts in countries like Britain and the United States that have a strong two-party system. But the fact is that the racist Islamophobes never get more than twenty percent of the popular vote in France, even though the country’s Muslim minority has grown from almost nothing to one-tenth of the total population in a single generation.
There is actually nothing particularly Islamic about covering women’s heads. It was a way of distinguishing upper-class women from peasants, slaves and prostitutes in the Middle East at least from Babylonian times, and was taken over from the Byzantines by the Arab conquerors of Syria. A sensible response would be to say that if fitting their daughters out with the same headwear as Roman matrons and Roman Catholic nuns makes Muslim parents happy, fine. If some of the daughters are less happy about it, they can just take it off as soon as they are out of their parents’ sight.
So far, so good. Exactly the same phenomenon occurs in British and Dutch cities, for example, and nobody minds at all. Everybody assumes that it is a transitional phenomenon that will probably fade away with the next generation. In France, however, it runs up against one of the core principles of the French republic: ‘laicism’.
The word barely exists in English, not even in a secular republic like the United States where there is a formal constitutional separation between religion and the state. In practice, most other Western countries have adopted the same secular principles over the past half-century without making a legal song-and-dance over it. But in France’s history, the same transformation was a long and bitter war with many casualties.
In the century after the great French revolution of 1789, which overthrew not just the monarchy but established religion, there were two ‘restorations’ and two further successful revolutions in France. When the king or the emperor came back, he brought the Catholic church back with him, and together they hunted down the revolutionaries. When he was overthrown, the church was driven out again too. A hundred years of this, hundreds of thousands of dead, and French republicanism, triumphant at last, emerged with an anti-clerical, ‘lay’ tradition that has lasted until this day.
The few other countries with similar histories – notably Mexico in Latin America and Turkey in the Muslim world – have similarly strong anti-clerical reflexes, which can lead sane and tolerant people there into foolish and intolerant positions. This is what is happening in France right now. The real Islamophobes are all in favour of it, of course, but they could never have sparked a national debate about what teenage girls should wear to school, let alone a law banning them from wearing Islamic head-scarves, if there were not this underlying memory of a war to the death between the republic and the Catholic Church.
As for the phony argument about whether Islam and democracy are compatible – traditionally deployed in order to justify Western alliances with absolute monarchs and military dictators in Muslim countries, and more recently used to justify invading Muslim countries in order to “bring them democracy” – the best remedy is a visit to Turkey. This is the country that ruled the whole of the Middle East for centuries, it is 99 percent Muslim, and it was the last home of the Caliphate. It has been semi-democratic for several generations, but it took “Muslim Democrats” to finish the process.
10 August 2003
Muslim Democracy in Turkey
It goes against all the stereotypes about Turkey. Talk to the party secretary of the traditionally secular Republican People’s Party in a small south coast town and she sounds old-fashioned and anti-democratic with her talk of the Turkish army as the ‘last resort’ against the threat of Islamic reaction. Talk to an allegedly Islamist MP from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) in a conservative central Anatolian city, and he comes across as a modern democratic politician advocating genuine freedom of religion. Islamists trying to make their country more democratic? What is going on here?
“What we are seeing are the demands of the European Union and pro-Islamic groups in Turkey overlapping for the first time in Turkish history, with Islamic groups finding in the West an ally that can protect them against the excesses of the Kemalist state,” said Dr Ihsan Dagi of Middle East Technical University in Ankara in March, and this month he was proved right. Last week the Turkish president ratified legal changes that drastically reduced the power of the army in Turkish politics.
Under the old rules, the civilian cabinet had to meet the Turkish General Staff once a month in the National Security Council to discuss an agenda drawn up by the general who controlled the NSC’s secretariat – and democratically elected Turkish governments ignored instructions issued by the NSC at their peril. Two governments dominated by Islamic parties have been removed by the army in the past fifteen years. In future, however, the chief secretary will be a civilian deputy prime minister, and he will decide when the NSC meets.
For the army to accept this from Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan, a man who was once jailed for allegedly inciting Muslims to violence against the secular state, implies a sea-change in Turkish politics. It also has a wider significance for the Muslim world, for Turkey is the oldest Muslim democracy, and ‘Kemalist’ democracy in Turkey (named after the founder of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk) has always rested on the principle of a rigid exclusion of religiously-oriented parties from politics.
Ataturk saved Turkey from partition and European colonial rule after the First World War, but he believed that it must become modern, democratic and ‘Western’ in order to survive and prosper in the long term. He also believed that the traditional Islamic institutions of the dying Ottoman empire would resist all that because they would lose their power, and he was doubtless right about the situation in 1923. So he declared a republic, abolished the Islamic caliphate, banned Islamic forms of dress, and introduced a constitution that rigorously separated mosque and state.
The mass of the Muslim faithful in Turkey abhorred these changes, but the educated minority and the army were with him, so he won. Unfortunately, this transitional struggle congealed into a permanent confrontation between ‘Islamists’ and modernisers in Turkey that has had a profoundly negative influence on the evolution of democracy in other Muslim states. In Turkey, the so-called ‘Kemalist’ principles, including an intolerant army-backed ‘secularism’, have been the basis of the Turkish state from that day to this. What is breaking the deadlock now is the EU on one hand, and the AK Party on the other.
Turkey has been trying to get into the European Union for a long time, but only recently has it really looked possible. Entry talks start late next year, but first Turkey must pass a human rights review. Last August the previous Turkish government amended the constitution to abolish the death penalty, give language and other rights to the Kurdish minority, and end restrictions on the press, all in order to meet EU norms, but the biggest stumbling block remained the army’s entrenched role in politics – which existed mainly to keep the Islamists out.
In 2001 Recep Tayyib Erdogan, once a fiery Islamist who declared that it was impossible “to be a secularist and a Muslim at the same time,” created the AK Party from the wreckage of two previous Islamic parties that were banned for their open hostility to secularism. This one, however, is different. Erdogan, now an older and wiser politician, argues that genuine secularism is not an assault on religion but a pluralist principle that could end the long war between ‘Kemalist’ democracy and Islam.
AK’s election manifesto last year said it plainly: “The basic idea of secularism is the impartiality of the state towards all religious beliefs....It restricts and limits not the individual but the state.” That is the kind of secularism which is actually practised in the European Union and the United States, where parties with a strong religious base like the Republicans and the various Christian Democratic parties are entirely legitimate so long as they respect the rights of their fellow-citizens of other religions or none. We are ‘Muslim Democrats’, Erdogan said, and we can be trusted too.
His argument convinced the army, which is particularly keen to join the EU. The electorate, fed up with the incompetence and corruption of the established parties, was ready to give its votes to any new party that looked trustworthy. AK got a third of the votes, and ended up with 363 seats out of 550. Nine months later, it is more popular than ever at home. Moreover, it is offering an example for how to end the long war between secularists and Islamic parties across the Muslim world in such a way that neither side loses and democracy wins.
Admittedly, there is nothing like the Turkish example to be found in the Arab world. But there’s a reason for that.
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19 July 2004
What’s Wrong with the Arab World
It was just a random statistic, but a telling one: only 300 books were translated into Arabic last year. That is about one foreign title per million Arabs. For comparison’s sake, Greece translated 1,500 foreign-language books, or about one hundred and fifty titles per million Greeks. Why is the Arab world so far behind, not only in this but in practically all the arts and sciences?
The first-order answer is poverty and lack of education: almost half of Arabic-speaking women are illiterate. But the Arab world used to be the most literate part of the planet; what went wrong? Tyranny and economic failure, obviously. But why is tyranny such a problem in the Arab world? That brings us to the nub of the matter.
In a speech in November, 2003, US President George W. Bush revisited his familiar refrain about how the West now had to remake the Arab world in its own image in order to stop the terrorism: “Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe....because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty” – as if the Arab world had wilfully chosen to be ruled by these corrupt and incompetent tyrannies.
But the West didn’t just ‘excuse and accommodate’ these regimes. It created them, in order to protect its own interests – and it spent the latter half of the twentieth century keeping them in power for the same reason.
It was Britain that carved the kingdom of Jordan out of the old Ottoman province of Syria after the First World War and put the Hashemite ruling family on the throne that it still occupies. France similarly carved Lebanon out of Syria in order to create a loyal Christian-majority state that controlled most of the Syrian coastline – and when time and a higher Muslim birth-rate eventually led to a revolt against the Maronite Christian stranglehold on power in Lebanon in 1958, US troops were sent in to restore it. The Lebanese civil war of 1975-90, tangled though it was, was basically a continuation of that struggle.
Britain also imposed a Hashemite monarchy on Iraq after 1918, and deliberately perpetuated the political monopoly of the Sunni minority that it had inherited from Turkish rule. As Gertrude Bell, an archaeologist and political adviser in the British administration in Baghdad, put it: “I don’t for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority, otherwise you’ll have a mujtahid-run, theocratic state, which is the very devil.” When the Iraqi monarchy was finally overthrown in 1958 and the Baath Party won the struggle that followed, the CIA gave the Iraqi Baathists the names of all the senior members of the Iraqi Communist Party (then the main political vehicle of the Shias) so they could be liquidated.
It was Britain that turned the traditional sheikhdoms in the Gulf into separate little sovereign states and absolute monarchies, carving Kuwait out of Iraq in the process. (Saudi Arabia, however, was a joint Anglo-US project.) The British Foreign Office welcomed the Egyptian generals’ overthrow of King Farouk and the destruction of the country’s old nationalist political parties, failing to foresee that Gamal Abdul Nasser would eventually take over the Suez Canal. When he did, it conspired with France and Israel to attack Egypt in a failed attempt to overthrow him.
Once Nasser died and was succeeded by generals more willing to play along with the West – Anwar Sadat, and now Hosni Mubarak – Egypt became Washington’s favourite Arab state: to help these thinly disguised dictators to hang on to power, Egypt has ranked among the top three recipients of US foreign aid almost every year for the past quarter-century. And so it goes.
Britain welcomed the coup by Colonel Gadafy in Libya in 1969, mistakenly seeing him as a malleable young man who could serve the West’s purposes. The United States and France both supported the old dictator Bourbuiga in Tunisia, and still back his successor Ben Ali today.
They always backed the Moroccan monarchy no matter how repressive it became, and they both gave unquestioning support to the Algerian generals who cancelled the elections of 1991 – nor did they ever waver in their support through the savage insurgency unleashed by the suppression of the elections that killed an estimated 120,000 Algerians over the next ten years.
‘Excuse and accommodate’? The West created the modern Middle East, from its rotten regimes down to its ridiculous borders, and it did so with contemptuous disregard for the wishes of the local people. It is indeed a problem that most Arab governments are corrupt autocracies that breed hatred and despair in their own people, which then fuels terrorism against the West, but it was the West that created the problem – and invading Iraq won’t solve it.
If the US really wants to foster Arab democracy, it might try making all that aid to Egypt conditional on prompt democratic reforms. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.