Posted
By Ruth King on September
16th, 2013
Only when we recognize
the fundamental role Islam plays in the region can we begin to craft sensible
policies that put U.S. interests first.
The
revolutions against dictators in the Middle East dubbed the Arab Spring have
degenerated into a complex, bloody mélange of coups and counter-coups, as have
happened in Egypt; vicious civil wars, like the current conflict in Syria; a
resurgence of jihadists gaining footholds in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the
Sinai; and a shifting and fracturing of alliances and enmities of the sort
throwing Lebanon and Jordan into turmoil. Meanwhile, American foreign policy has
been confused, incompetent, and feckless in insuring that the security and
interests of the United States and its allies are
protected.
A
major reason for our foreign policy failures in the region is our inability to
take into account the intricate diversity of ideological, political, and
especially theological motives driving events. Just within the Islamist outfits,
Sunni and Shia groups are at odds—and this isn’t to mention the many bitter
divisions within Sunni and Shia groups. Add the other players in the Middle
East––military dictators, secular democrats, leftover communists, and
nationalists of various stripes––and the whole region seems embroiled in
endlessly complex divisions and issues.
Yet a greater impediment
to understanding accurately this bloody and complex region is our preconceived
biases.
Too often we rely on explanations that gratify our own ideological preferences
and prejudices, but that function like mental stencils: they are a priori
patterns we superimpose on events to create the picture we want to see, but only
by concealing other events that do not fit the pattern. We indulge the most
serious error of foreign policy: assuming that other peoples think like us and
desire the same goods as we do, like political freedom and prosperity, at the
expense of others, like religious obedience and honor.
One
persistent narrative attributes the region’s disorder to Western colonialism and
imperialism. The intrusion of European colonial powers into the region, the
story goes, disrupted the native social and political institutions, imposing in
their place racist norms and alien values that demeaned Muslims as the “other”
and denigrated their culture to justify the exploitation of resources and
markets. This process culminated after World War I in the dismantling of the
caliphate, and the creation of Western-style nation-states that ignored the
traditional ethnic and sectarian identities of the region. As a result,
resentment and anger at colonial occupation and exploitation erupted in Islamist
jihadism against the oppressor.
The Islamists themselves
have found this narrative a convenient pretext for their violence, thus
reinforcing this explanation for some Westerners. The most important
jihadist theorist, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, wrote, “It is necessary to
revive the Muslim community which is buried under the debris of the man-made
traditions of several generations, and which is crushed under the weight of
those false laws and customs which are not even remotely related to the Islamic
teachings.”
Qutb was clearly alluding
to the European colonial presence in the Middle East, and specifically to the
nearly half-century of British control of Egypt. Al Qaeda, Hamas, and other
jihadist groups similarly lace their communiqués with references to colonial
“oppression” and neo-imperialist interference, as when Osama bin Laden scolded
the U.S. in 2002 for waging war in the region “so that you can secure the profit
of your greedy companies and industries.” The Arabs likewise routinely describe
the creation of Israel as a particularly offensive act of colonial aggression
against the lands of Islam.
Such pretexts, however,
are clearly for Western consumption, exploiting the Marxist demonization of
imperialism and colonialism that informs the ideology of many leftist
intellectuals in Europe and America. When speaking to
fellow Muslims, however, most Islamist groups ground their motives in the
traditional doctrines of Islam, which call for war against the infidel and the
enemies of Islam.
The
narrative of colonial oppression may be gratifying to leftist Western
intellectuals, but it cannot alone explain the disorder of the region that has
persisted long after the exit of the colonial powers. And it is hard to take
seriously complaints of imperialism, colonialism, and occupation coming from
followers of Islam. After all, Muslims were one of history’s most successful
conquerors and imperialists who, as Efraim Karsh writes, “acted in a typically
imperialist fashion from the start, subjugating indigenous populations,
colonizing their lands, and expropriating their wealth, resources, and
labor.”
Something else is needed
to explain Islamic violence when India, a British colony for nearly 200 years,
or South Africa, another ex-colony subjected to the indignities of racial
apartheid, has not spawned global terrorist networks responsible for over 20,000
violent attacks just since 9/11.
The other dominant
narrative is a reprise of Wilsonian democracy promotion. In this view, the
dysfunctions of the region reflect the absence of open economies, liberal
democratic governments, and recognition of human rights. Subjected to autocrats
and dictators, the peoples of the Middle East are denied freedom, individual
rights, and economic opportunity, and as a result are mired in poverty,
oppression, and political disorder that explode into violent
jihad.
George W. Bush sounded
these themes in January 2005 in his inaugural speech, in which he linked U.S.
security and global peace to the “force of human freedom” and the expansion of
democracy: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the
success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the
expansion of freedom in all the world.” Hence Bush’s attempts to build
democratic institutions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and President Obama’s early
support for the “Arab Spring” revolutions: “I think it was absolutely the right
thing for us to do to align ourselves with democracy [and] universal rights.”
Both presidents agree that more democracy in the region will mean less of the
violence, suffering, and disorder caused by frustration and oppression at the
hands of dictators and kleptocrats.
Like the left-wing
narrative of colonialism’s blowback in the form of terror and political
dysfunction, democracy promotion suffers from the same limitations, particularly
the imposition of Western political categories and goods onto a different
culture. The fetishizing of democracy ignores the complex network of mores,
values, and principles that undergird political freedom and that took over two
millennia in the West to coalesce into liberal democracy. And it ignores the
absence of those principles and mores in most Middle Eastern
countries.
So
we focus instead on the photogenic process of voting, the ink-stained fingers
and lines at polling booths that we confuse for belief in the liberal
foundations of genuine democracy. More important, like the left-wing narrative,
democracy promotion is ultimately based on material conditions and the goods of
this world––prosperity and individual freedom–– at the expense of religious
beliefs. Religion is treated as a private lifestyle choice, as it has become in
the West, rather than the most fundamental and important dimension of identity
both personal and political, as it is in the Muslim world.
Much of the conflict in
the Middle East reflects the collision of these two sets of goods, the religious
and the secular, which we oversimplify by emphasizing only the
latter.
We assume that if a liberal democracy can be created, the tolerance for
differences of religious belief, respect for individual rights, and a preference
for settling political conflict with legal processes rather than violence, will
automatically follow. We forget that in our own history, despite the long
tradition of separation of church and state whose roots lie in Christian
doctrine, Europe was torn apart by wars of religion that killed millions before
that tolerance for sectarian differences triumphed.
The power of Islam is the
reality our various narratives ignore or rationalize away when we attempt to
understand the violence and disorder of the Middle East. But as the scholar
Bernard Lewis reminds us, “in most Islamic countries, religion remains a major
political factor,” for “most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim, in a
way and in a sense that that most Christian countries are no longer Christian .
. . in no Christian country at the present time can religious leaders count on
the degree of belief and participation that remains normal in the Muslim lands .
. . Christian clergy do not exercise or even claim the kind of public authority
in most Muslim countries.”
This observation provides
an insight into recent events in Egypt. After Mubarak fell, many believed
that the secular democrats were on their way to creating a more democratic
political order. But ensuing elections brought to power the Muslim Brothers, an
Islamist organization that scorns democracy and Western notions of human rights
as alien impositions preventing the creation of an Islamic social and political
order based on sharia law.
When the deteriorating
economy created frustration with the Muslim Brothers’ arrogance and ineptitude,
mass protests sparked a military intervention that once again was interpreted as
a rejection of the Brothers and sharia, and a yearning for liberal democracy.
Our ideological stencil assumed that our secular goods of freedom and prosperity
had trumped the religious goods of fidelity to Islam and its
doctrines.
Yet
it is not so clear that this is the case. Impatience with the Muslim
Brothers’ inability to provide basic necessities and manage the economy, or
anger at its heavy-handed tactics, do not necessarily entail rejection of the
ultimate goal of a political-social order more consistent with Islamic law.
Polling of Egyptians suggests that the general program of the Muslim Brothers is
still supported even as their tactics and governing are
rejected.
In a Pew survey earlier this year, 74 percent of
Egyptians said they want sharia to be “the official law of the land,” and 55
percent said sharia should apply to non-Muslims, which in Egypt includes 15
million Christian Copts. An earlier survey from 2010 found more specific support
for sharia law: 84 percent of Egyptians supported the death penalty for
apostates, 82 percent supported stoning adulterers, 85 percent said Islam’s
influence on politics is positive, 95 percent said that it is good that Islam
plays a large role in politics, 59 percent identified with Islamic
fundamentalists, 54 percent favored gender segregation in the workplace, 82
percent favored stoning adulterers, 77 percent favored whippings and cutting off
the hands of thieves and robbers, 84 percent favored death for those leaving
Islam, and 60 percent said that laws should strictly follow the teachings of the
Koran.
These attitudes,
consistent with the program of the Muslim Brothers, suggest that their opponents
are angry not with their long-term goal of creating a more Islamized government,
but with the Brothers’ abuse of power and their managerial incompetence that
alienated the even more radically Islamist Nour party. As the Middle East
analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht recently wrote, “Only the deluded, the naïve and the
politically deceitful . . . can believe that Islamism’s ‘moment’ in Egypt has
passed. More likely, it’s just having an interlude.”
These results will not
surprise anyone who understands how profoundly religious beliefs determine
Middle Eastern attitudes to politics and society. Rather than ignoring this
widespread religiosity, or subordinating it to our own goods such as prosperity
and personal freedom, or explaining away the patent illiberal and intolerant
dimensions of this belief, as the dominant narratives continue to do, we
should instead recognize and acknowledge the critical role of Islam in the
violence and disorder rending this geopolitically strategic region. Only then
can we craft a foreign policy that protects our security and
interests.
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