Global

The Wall Street Journal Asia 

Cultural Cartographer

Novelist Kamila Shamsie maps extremism from Kyoto to Karachi.

Burnt Shadows
By Kamila Shamsie
(Picador, 384 pages, $14)

By SADANAND DHUME

Forbes.com

COMMENTARY

How will Islamists react to the president-elect?

Sadanand Dhume

Four days after America elected president a man who spent a chunk of his childhood in Indonesia, an Indonesian firing squad took aim at three of those behind the world’s deadliest terrorist attack since 9/11: the 2002 bombings that killed 202 people on the resort island of Bali.

The execution of Imam Samudra and brothers Amrozi and Mukhlas caps one of the world’s least recognized and most successful anti-terrorism efforts. Over the past six years, an elite Indonesian police squad called Detachment 88, trained and funded in part by America and Australia, has rounded up about 400 violent Islamists. Thanks to its efforts, the world’s most populous Muslim country has not experienced a terrorist bombing since a second attack on Bali in 2005.

But though the demise of the Bali bombers offers some closure, Indonesia is also a vivid reminder of how a country can win the battle against terrorism while losing ground in the wider war against Islamism, the totalitarian ideology that seeks to order every aspect of society and the state according to the medieval norms enshrined in sharia law.

Barely a week before, spurred by the efforts of the fundamentalist Justice and Prosperity Party, Indonesia’s version of the Muslim Brotherhood, parliament rammed through a draconian anti-pornography bill whose broadly worded restrictions on clothing and artistic expression potentially criminalize Indonesia’s non-Islamic cultures. Clerical diktats and mob violence have forced the government to effectively ban the Ahmadiyya, a tiny sect considered heretical by some Muslims for revering their founder alongside the prophet Mohammed. In dozens of districts across the archipelago, sharia-inspired regulations have spawned Taliban-lite vice squads, mandatory dress codes for women and random Koran reading tests for students and couples seeking a marriage license.

For Americans of a certain persuasion, (rightly) contemptuous of the Bush administration’s ham-fisted approach to the Muslim world, Barack Hussein Obama is expected to turn the page on a chapter they would rather forget. The election of a black man whose father and step-father were Muslim, who opposed the war in Iraq from the start and who promises to shut down the al-Qaida holding-pen in Guantanamo Bay will, we are endlessly assured, calm Muslim anger and strengthen moderate voices.

But while it’s indeed true that your friendly neighborhood Islamist in Jakarta or Bandung–or indeed in Karachi or Cairo–will find it much harder to demonize BHO than he did GWB, to imagine that Islamists view the world through an American prism betrays a solipsism nearly as delusional as the one that claimed American troops in Iraq would be greeted with candy and flowers.

Those who attack hapless Ahmadiyyas and publicly mourn the Bali bombers as martyrs–like those who raze girls’ schools in Afghanistan and target Buddhist monks in southern Thailand–aren’t merely at odds with America’s support for Israeli settlements in the West Bank or the excesses of Abu Ghraib, but with the very idea of modernity. They seek a society where women are clearly subservient to men, where collective responsibilities trump individual rights, where freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry are curbed, and where non-Muslims are (at best) protected peoples rather than equal citizens. They are backed by powerful clerics, a river of petrodollars from the Gulf and a culture that places religious discourse above the reach of secular criticism.

For Indonesia, then, as for the rest of the world, neither the long overdue execution of the Bali bombers nor the impending elevation of Barack Obama alter this reality. The new president is indeed better equipped than his predecessor to wage a war of ideas. Whether he can win it, though, remains to be seen.

Sadanand Dhume is a Washington, D.C.-based writer and the author of My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist.

Forbes.com

COMMENTARY

Sadanand Dhume

As someone whose politics lean toward the right, John McCain’s presidential campaign has been painful to watch. Up against a calm, cerebral and preternaturally articulate opponent, he has given us the moose-hunting mother of five, the loutish Joe the Plumber and, as if to win an impossible dare, the even less coherent Tito the Builder.

So, while there’s no question in my mind as to who is the better man–what was taught at the Hanoi Hilton can’t be learned at Harvard Law–I have grudgingly acknowledged that the Democrats have fielded the better candidate. His policy positions appear to have been thought through more thoroughly. The searing symbolism of his candidacy, its capacity to both reaffirm and expand the idea of America, is impossible to deny.

Therefore, like most people I know–and, if the polls are to be believed, most people on the planet–I find myself rooting for an Obama victory on Tuesday. But there’s one thing that puts a damper on my enthusiasm: the creepy, cultish odor exuded by the One’s most fervent fans.

Take, for example, Facebook, where as of this writing 2,718 people have enrolled in a group called, I kid you not, “Until Nov. 4, my middle name is Hussein too.” What precisely motivates John Hussein Koppinger of Lexington and Moira Hussein McLaughlin of San Diego and hundreds more like them I shall never know. But apparently, it has something to do with taking a stand against “fear mongering.” (The logic here is circular: If there’s nothing wrong with the middle name Hussein, which of course there isn’t, then why should its use be verboten?)

The middle name movement, though harmless in itself, is symptomatic of something larger. It’s hard to think of another candidate in living memory–certainly not Kerry or Gore or Clinton (Bill or Hillary), let alone either of the Bushes or the almost-forgotten Dole–who has inspired such slavish devotion. It’s not enough to agree with Obama’s position on Iraq, or to admire the lucidness of his prose. For the true believer, supporting him takes on the quality of a religious experience. His name is my name; I am He.

It follows that to criticize Obama at all–to bring up his slender resume, his shady associations, his solipsistic belief in the power of personal diplomacy–is to provoke not merely a political argument but a theological one. You’re as likely to win it as you are to convince an al-Qaida acolyte that a good editor could improve the Koran, or a Sarah Palin groupie that there’s nothing remotely intelligent about intelligent design.

This, in itself, does not negate the logic of Obama’s candidacy, especially when set against eight shabby years of George W. Bush, or the sequence of weird gyrations that have passed for the McCain campaign. Nonetheless, the cult of Obama feels, dare I say it, foreign to the quiet pragmatism that has long been the hallmark of Anglo-Saxon democracy and, one might argue, the secret of its enormous success.

It means that when the results pour in I’ll be cheering for Obama, but as E.M. Forster did for democracy: with two (soft) cheers rather than three full-throated ones.

Sadanand Dhume is a Washington, D.C.-based writer and the author of My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with an Indonesian Islamist.

Forbes.com

IN HIS OWN FOOTSTEPS

Sadanand Dhume

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar

By Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin, $28)

In 1973 Paul Theroux embarked upon a series of train journeys across Eastern Europe and Asia that culminated in a widely acknowledged classic of travel writing: The Great Railway Bazaar.

Thirty-three years later–older, wiser, sexually less adventurous but still reliably crotchety–he returned to cover more or less the same terrain. The result is a fascinating, and to a contemporary reader delightfully old-fashioned, travelogue larded with all the hallmarks of the genre–anecdote, history and, especially, the kind of tart generalization that has become all too rare in a culture that confuses discernment with blandness.

A generation ago Theroux traveled in, as he evocatively puts it, an age of aerograms and postcards and big black unreliable telephones. In his reprise, despite being tethered to his wife in Hawaii via BlackBerry, he finds things less changed than technology alone (or the wide-eyed Thomas Friedman) would suggest.

The food on the train to Bucharest remains stomach-churning. Still tidy and politically soporific, Singapore is “more a corporation or a cult than a country.” Life in India, which in Theroux evokes equal parts affection and horror, is “an unending experience of nonconsensual rubbing.” Capitalist Russia is hardly different from its communist incarnation: “A pretentious empire with a cruel government that was helpless without secret police.”

Nor is the seasoned traveler particularly impressed with a story that consumes acres of newsprint each week, the economic transformations underway in China and India. China strikes him as ugly and soulless. The new prosperity represents “the horror of answered prayers, a peasant’s greedy dream of development.”

Similarly, upwardly mobile India’s pride and joy, the high-technology capital of Bangalore, has become a much less pleasant place to visit. Its transformation brings to mind “less city planning than the urban equivalent of botched cosmetic surgery.”

Smaller countries come in for similar treatment. Romania’s primary exports are apparently wheat and orphans. Like Albania, its principal function is to supply Western Europe with “factory workers, hookers and car thieves.” John McCain’s beloved Georgia is “a supine and beleaguered country of people narcissistic about their differences.” Turkmenistan, at the time of Theroux’s visit is ruled by the megalomaniac Saparmurat Niyazov–who banned beards, ballet and gold teeth and renamed a month after his mother–is succinctly summed up as “a tyranny run by a madman.”

Needless to say, Theroux–like the tropical fruit durian or the music of M.I.A.–is not to everyone’s taste. Indeed, in some ways Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is best appreciated with an Eastern sensibility, one more likely to equate age with wisdom than with ill-temper, and willing to accord the deference due a capacious mind whose grasp encompasses everything from 19th-century Japanese prints to the novels of the Russian gulag to the grammar of road accidents in Africa.

In a broader sense, Theroux’s impolitic frankness is also a welcome relief from the pronouncements of the caste of professional Pollyannas who populate academia, NGOs, the business press and multilateral institutions such as the United Nations. You can’t imagine him announcing that the triumph of liberal democracy is inevitable, or that Islam is a religion of peace, or that poverty will be eradicated in our lifetime.

One may argue, of course, that Theroux, less alert to the grand historical narrative than his mentor-turned-bête noire V.S. Naipaul or the Pole Ryszard Kapuscinski, fails to notice how tens of millions of Asians indeed live lives less socially and economically constrained than those of their parents. There were no women blogging about their sex lives in Mao’s China, and most Indians would gladly take traffic jams over drought.

But at the same time his travels bring to life a sobering truth: Outside North America, Western Europe and Japan, virtually no one lives in a country where political liberty, economic prosperity and social freedom can be taken for granted. As the cliché goes, the more things change the more that they, like the slop served on Romanian railways, remain the same.

 

 

 

 

 

http://globalasia.org/pdf/issue7/v3n3_Dhume.pdf

THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST

By Mohsin Hamid

Harcourt, 192 pages, $22.00

THE ISLAMIST

By Ed Husain

Penguin Global, 304 pages, $18.00

YaleGlobal

Islamists, even when not in power, wield fear and faith to pressure their societies in conservative directions

	Power and faith: Indonesian Muslims pray at a mosque. Outside Islamists wage war on liberalism

Sadanand Dhume

WASHINGTON: In the years since 9/11 two broad narratives have emerged in the West to explain the nature of the so-called War on Terror. On the right it has become commonplace to equate Islamism – the ideology that seeks to order 21st century societies by the medieval norms enshrined in Islamic sharia law – with a long line of totalitarian threats to liberal democracy. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, for instance, calls it a “foul apparition that has succeeded fascism, Nazism, and communism as the world’s next bane.” The left, not surprisingly, sees the issue as a product of poverty or flawed policies toward the Middle East. Robert Fisk of The Independent blames Islamist terrorism on “political situations and injustice in various parts of the world.”

Both views are flawed. Conservatives rightly emphasize the power of Islamism as an idea and the global ambitions of its adherents, but fail to acknowledge the movement’s lack of military and intellectual heft, or its limited global appeal compared to communism in its heyday. Liberals correctly point out that talk of a Muslim takeover of Europe is delusional, or at the very least premature. But they fail to see that in the Muslim-majority societies of Asia and the Middle East Islamism remains a powerful and growing force. Better organized, better motivated, backed by the threat of violence and protected by cultural norms that prohibit any criticism of Islam, Islamists are able to alter the nature of society even where they don’t hold formal power. Unless beleaguered moderates from Iraq to Indonesia can find a way to stand down the mob and broaden the war of ideas they’ll continue to lose ground to a tenacious movement that believes it has both God and history on its side.

At first glance the familiar comparison of the War on Terror with the Cold War appears reasonable enough. Like communists, Islamists value the group over the individual, justify the use of violence for political ends and nurture an almost visceral antipathy to a world order dominated by wealthy liberal democracies. Moreover, in this new Cold War Moscow and Beijing can easily be swapped with Riyadh and Tehran, Karl Marx with Al Jazeera’s equally hirsute Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and the Soviet’s World Federation of Democratic Youth with the Saudi-funded World Assembly of Muslim Youth. The threat within – once symbolized by Western communist parties and their sympathizers – is now represented by such Islamist-friendly groups as the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Council of Britain. Moreover, the argument goes, whereas communist and capitalist proxies skirmished in such remote corners as Angola and Afghanistan, Islamists have brought their battle to the heart of the West. Suddenly New York, London and Madrid are as much battlegrounds as Beirut and Baghdad.

Plausible though it appears, this formulation exaggerates Islamist strength and underestimates the effectiveness of the West’s institutions and the resilience of its societies. True, Islamist intimidation has curbed free speech in some places: the Dutch and the Danes must tread lightly when criticizing Islam or contemplate a life of bodyguards and safe houses. But it has also spawned a generation of bold Muslim thinkers in the West – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani to name just three – who are willing to ask the uncomfortable questions that tend not to be asked in their countries of origin. Terrorism has been contained; only foiled plots make the front pages these days. Moreover, Islamism, steeped in a joyless literal reading of Islam, cannot hope to extend its appeal in the West beyond a minority of a minority – those Muslims drawn to its stark utopian vision. Osama bin Laden’s visage will never grace nearly as many T-Shirts as Che Guevara’s.

The weakness of Islamists in the West is matched by the backwardness of the Muslim world. In its prime the Soviet Union could reasonably claim to match the United States in such varied fields as chess, ballet, mathematics, Olympic sports, aviation technology and space exploration. Strip away the accident of oil wealth from Muslim lands and we’re left with societies that cumulatively boast fewer achievements than a single mid-sized Asian power, albeit an exceptional one, such as Korea.

This reality makes it easy to dismiss the Islamist threat, as do most Western liberals, or to shrink its dimensions to the activities of a handful of terrorist groups – al Qaeda or Southeast Asia’s Jemaah Islamiyah. Yet, paradoxically, it’s precisely the sorry state of Muslim societies that makes Islamism such a formidable force. Reminded daily that they are recipients of God’s final revelation, a large minority of Muslims – perhaps between 10 and 15 percent – embrace the Islamist idea that the cause of their backwardness lies not in a failure to embrace modernity but in a failure to fully embrace their faith. Many more, while not Islamists themselves, are broadly sympathetic to a worldview that’s steeped in conspiracy theories and compulsively blames Muslim failures on outsiders. Jews, Americans and Freemasons are favorite bogeymen.

Of course, neither religious obscurantism nor a lack of self-criticism is a Muslim monopoly. India has its Hindu fundamentalists who riot against Muslims and attack painters and scholars, America its Christians waging war against Darwin in the classroom. Nonetheless the danger to liberal democracy that Islamists pose in Muslim countries is of an entirely different order.

Islamists – although almost always a minority – tend to be better motivated and better organized than their opponents. Weak or sympathetic courts and police allow them to use violence or the threat of violence to control the public square – whether by driving the local edition of Playboy out of Jakarta or by capturing the road to the airport in Beirut. Cultural norms – even in relatively open countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia – put any public criticism of Islam out of bounds. The Spaniard who supports contraception and gay rights can flatly declare that he doesn’t care what the Bible says or what the Pope thinks. An Indonesian or Pakistani who says the same about the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed invites charges of “Islamophobia” and threats of violence.

The influence Islamists exert on the streets and on public discourse has had consequences. Even where they have not claimed formal power – as in Egypt or Pakistan or Indonesia – Islamists have led their societies in an illiberal direction. In Egypt, female university students come under greater pressure to wear the headscarf today than they did a generation ago. In parts of Pakistan, Islamists have declared war on music and soap operas. In Indonesia Christians and heterodox Muslims such as the Ahmadiyya often find their churches and mosques under siege.

In each of these countries those who reject the Islamist message – who believe that gender equity, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience are universal values and not merely Western ones – must do so with one hand tied behind their backs.

So while talk of Islam’s inroads in Washington, London and Paris may indeed be overblown, the special conditions in the Muslim world ensure that the threat to liberal democracy in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Islamabad is not about to disappear any time soon.

dhumeakbarahmed

Far Eastern Economic Review

by Akbar Ahmed, Brookings Institution Press, 323 pages, $28.95

Reviewed by SADANAND DHUME

At a time when a British teacher in Sudan barely escaped a prison term for allowing seven-year-olds to name a teddy bear Muhammad; a Saudi Arabian rape victim needed a royal pardon to evade the prospect of 200 lashes for the crime of being alone with an unrelated man; and Islamists from Gaza to Waziristan step up their war against video stores and barber shops, a book that seeks to explain what exactly is roiling the Muslim world is more than welcome. On the face of it, few people are better qualified to write it than Akbar Ahmed, a Pakistani professor of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, D.C., and, since 9/11, a familiar face on television.

In Journey Into Islam, Mr. Ahmed, accompanied by a clutch of students, travels across much of the Muslim world. In Damascus he dines with mystic sheikhs. In Lahore he rubs shoulders with politicians beneath portraits of Mughal emperors. In Kuala Lumpur he chats with female professionals. In Jakarta he consorts with besieged moderates and militant students. Everywhere he and his students hand out questionnaires to gauge the attitudes and aspirations of the proverbial street. But, unusually for a book of this kind, it is in India that the narrative dwells the longest, and India that provides the analytical prism through which Mr. Ahmed views present-day Islam.

For Mr. Ahmed, three towns in north India—Ajmer in Rajasthan, and Deoband and Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh—capture the range of Muslim responses to globalization and the West. Ajmer, which houses a shrine to the 12th century Sufi saint Moinuddin Chishti, represents a retreat toward a mystical union with the divine. Deoband, birthplace of an ultra orthodox brand of Islam that is the subcontinent’s version of Wahhabism, symbolizes an attempt to defend the faith by adhering strictly to Islam’s core texts. Aligarh, home since 1875 to the famous Mohammedan Anglo-Indian College (now Aligarh Muslim University), stands for the attempt to engage Western ideas while preserving Islamic belief and practice.

Each of these models can claim its share of famous adherents. For the Sufis, there’s the Persian poet Rumi and the female Arab saint Rabia. The modernizers dominate the first half of the 20th century, among them the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and former Iranian Shah Reza Pahlavi. In the literalist Deoband tradition, Mr. Ahmed includes not just the Wahhabis but also such founders of modern Islamism—the drive to impose Shariah law on peoples and governments—as Abul Ala Maududi of the subcontinent’s Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Ahmed finds the Sufis on the defensive, the modernizers in disarray and the Islamists, though he prefers not to use the term, on the ascendant. A popular Deoband writer in India announces that the Taliban and Osama bin Laden are the true champions of Islam. In Indonesia, one in four people surveyed calls bin Laden a role model. In Malaysia the majority profess admiration for such Islamist icons as Qutb and Maududi.

This book makes several important points. It stresses that the Islamic world is not monolithic, and that most Muslims are not on some kind of crazed jihad against the West. It explains that many Muslim women—including many of an Islamist bent—hold responsible jobs and are animated by ideas. It elegantly collapses the crux of Muslim anger into the so-called Taj Syndrome—the Islamic world’s glittering past juxtaposed against its wretched present. It identifi es the inherent tension between the American emphasis on individualism and traditional Muslim attitudes that place greater emphasis on family and community. Mr. Ahmed also deserves to be commended for wearing his erudition lightly; you don’t need to be an expert on Islam or Islamism to grasp his arguments.

And yet, on the whole this is a disappointing book. Nobody expects Mr. Ahmed to be unsympathetic to his faith, but his habit of simply dismissing any Muslim actions he disagrees with as “un-Islamic” is puzzling.

Thus attacks on (Christian and Buddhist) ethnic Chinese in Indonesia are “quite alien to the Islamic values of justice and compassion.” The death sentence (by stoning) handed down by a Shariah court to a Nigerian woman who had a child out of wedlock has “more to do with tribal honor codes and response to globalization than with Islam itself.” The doctrine of armed jihad is defined away as merely “defense of one’s family and community in the face of attack.”

Unwilling or unable to take a hard look at Islam, Mr. Ahmed, predictably enough, turns to America and the West. The usual parade of villains soon surfaces: vengeful American foreign-policy hawks, insensitive Danish cartoonists, chief executive officers of multinational corporations, Christian creators of violent video games and a media “always on the lookout for some controversial issues surrounding Islam.” Globalization, we are informed with lofty certainty, lacks a moral core. Muslims hope to redeem their “honor and dignity” by turning to Mr. bin Laden. Of course, Mr. Ahmed quickly reassures us that this is not quite as alarming as it appears. He has somehow deduced that “many Muslims who sympathize with bin Laden in a broad and general sense would by no means support his more murderous or violent activity.”

When it comes to those who approach Islam and Islamism differently from him, Mr. Ahmed chooses to veil his attacks. Thus it is “scholars of Islam” who consider the distinguished Princeton historian Bernard Lewis to be “the quintessential ‘Orientalist.’” And it falls on unnamed critics to make the somewhat inflammatory allegation that the attacks of 9/11 “would almost be welcome” to Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld because they “would give a new momentum to their neocon worldview.” In a similar vein, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani, three of the most outspoken critics of Islam’s treatment of women, are dismissed as appearing “deliberately provocative” to ordinary Muslims.

This failure to grapple with uncomfortable ideas precludes a deeper analysis of what has gone so profoundly wrong. After all, Muslims, as any Vietnamese or Korean can tell you, can hardly claim a monopoly on recent suffering. Nor are they the only people whose past appears superior to their present. Many Indians and Chinese share similar sentiments. And all societies are struggling in their own way with the rapid change, for good and for ill, wrought by the closer integration of peoples and markets.

The trouble, then, is not globalization as such, but that an organized and tenacious minority of Muslims (the Islamists), believes that the cure for economic and political backwardness lies in embracing barbarism. To these true believers, the palpable failure of their project in Iran, Sudan and Taliban-era Afghanistan offers little discouragement.

To suggest, as Mr. Ahmed does, that Islamists must be engaged, rather than unflinchingly opposed, reveals a curious blindness to this fact. For proof he need not look further than his native Pakistan where, as the assassination of Benazir Bhutto shows, an unchecked Islamist movement now threatens the state itself.

Mr. Ahmed believes that reform—though he prefers the term renaissance—must come from within an Islamic framework, and that it must be introduced by those considered credible by fellow Muslims. This appears plausible enough on the face of it. In practice, however, those calling for meaningful change—for the Islamic world to embrace minority rights, women’s rights, freedom of conscience and freedom of inquiry—seem to immediately lose credibility, and those who have credibility appear more interested in obfuscation and apologetics than in change. Unfortunately, unless Muslims can find a way to solve this conundrum, the odds of any kind of renaissance will remain exceedingly slim.

The Wall Street Journal

OPINION

By SADANAND DHUME

Another Friday in Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi — and as if on cue, the hoarse, bearded and pyromaniacal pour out of the mosques into the streets armed with Union Jacks and effigies of Queen Elizabeth II, Tony Blair and the newly knighted Sir Salman Rushdie.

Having protested Danish cartoons and popish detours into Byzantine history to the point of exhaustion, the proverbial Muslim street is once again seething. Pakistan’s minister of religious affairs said Mr. Rushdie’s award justified suicide bombings, while a group of traders in Islamabad banded together to place a $140,000 bounty on his head. Fathi Sorour, the speaker of Egypt’s parliament, declared that, “Honoring someone who has offended the Muslim religion is a bigger error than the publication of caricatures attacking Prophet Muhammad.” Malaysian protesters besieged the British high commission (embassy) in Kuala Lumpur chanting, “Destroy Britain” and “Crush Salman Rushdie.” With the irony perhaps lost in translation, Iran, whose president thinks nothing of threatening to wipe Israel off the map, condemned the award and called it a clear sign of (that mysterious new ailment) “Islamophobia.”

For many of us, however, her majesty’s conferral is a welcome example of something that has grown exceedingly rare: British backbone. After years of kowtowing to every fundamentalist demand imaginable — from accommodating the burqa in schools and colleges to re-orienting prison toilets to face away from Mecca — the British seem to be saying enough is enough. Nobody expects Mr. Rushdie to be awarded the Nishan-e-Pakistan, the Collar of the Nile or Iran’s Islamic Republic Medal, but in Britain, as elsewhere in the civilized world, great novelists are honored for their work. A pinched view of the human condition or poorly imagined characters may harm your prospects. Blasphemy does not.

In the larger struggle against Islamism — the ideology that demands that every aspect of human life be ordered by the seventh-century Arabian precepts enshrined in Shariah law — the Rushdie affair carries totemic significance. In 1989 the late Ayatollah Khomeini declared a price on Mr. Rushdie’s head for the crime of apostasy, after reading about his mockery of the prophet Mohammed in “The Satanic Verses.” At the time, few could have predicted that this was merely the first act of a drama that’s still unfolding.

Eighteen years after the ayatollah’s fatwa, since lifted, but thanks to freelance fanaticism, never quite extinguished, the Bombay-born Mr. Rushdie has managed to lead a full life. He has turned out eight novels and essay collections, married twice (most recently the model and actress Padma Lakshmi), mentored a generation of young Indians writing in English, and spoken out against obscurantism and religious bigotry of every stripe. He has also witnessed — mirrored in his own predicament — the consequences of a Europe too paralyzed by deathwish multiculturalism and moral relativism to recognize the danger it faces. It has become a continent where an Islamist stabs a film director in broad daylight in Amsterdam, where bombs go off in Madrid commuter trains and London buses, where writers, directors and cartoonists suddenly find themselves bound by sensitivities imported not merely from alien lands but from another age altogether.

No Western country has done more to accommodate Islamists than Britain, and none better shows the folly of this course. Successive governments feted organizations such as the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, and welcomed as refugees a stable of jihadist clerics, including the Syrian-born Omar Bakri Muhammad and the hook-handed Abu Hamza al-Masri. Rather than moderate Muslim passions, this climate of permissiveness gave us Richard Reid the shoe bomber, Daniel Pearl’s murderer, Omar Saeed Sheikh, the quartet behind the 2005 London bombings and the plotters who ensured that we must now worry about carrying moisturizing lotion and baby formula each time we board an airplane. A recent poll by Policy Exchange, a London think tank, shows that 28% of British Muslims would rather live under Shariah than under British law.

But at last it looks like the pendulum has begun to swing the other way. Mr. Rushdie’s elevation signals an intention to draw a line between respecting Islam and allowing a small minority of Islamists to impose their hairtrigger hysteria on secular Muslims and non-Muslims. It highlights two of the core values of Western civilization conspicuously absent in most of the Muslim world: freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry. It squarely rejects the notion that the fossilized norms of Mecca and Mashhad hold sway over Manchester and Middlesex, and beyond them, over Malmo and Minneapolis. Above all, it honors a brave man who has come to symbolize our turbulent times. A little old-fashioned British spine has never been more welcome.

dhume_rand

Far Eastern Economic Review

by Angel Rabasa, Cheryl Benard, Lowell H. Schwartz and Peter Sickle

RAND Corporation, 216 pages, $30

Reviewed by SADANAND DHUME

In recent years it has become axiomatic to claim that radical Islam can only be defeated with the help of its kinder, gentler twin—moderate Islam. Except for one small problem: How do you define a moderate Muslim? The easiest way is to draw a sharp line between the violent—the legion of suicide bombers and throat-slitters who have made a permanent home in our headlines—and everyone else. Most people, it seems, can agree that lopping off a Japanese engineer’s head while chanting a verse from the Koran, or
detonating a bomb-vest in a pizza parlor, aren’t quite acts of moderation.

Beyond that it gets trickier. For example, it turned out that Ahmad Abu Laban, the Danish-Palestinian imam who whipped up last year’s cartoon crisis—slyly adding three especially inflammatory images to the comparatively mild original cartoons, and then touring the Middle East to publicize the alleged insult to Islam—had long been deemed a moderate. Danish taxpayers funded his visits to the Middle East, in effect subsidizing the network-building that allowed Mr. Laban to so effectively turn Muslim wrath against his adopted home.

Or take Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian cleric and éminence grise of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose message reaches millions through his Web site Islamonline and through his popular show on Al Jazeera, Shariah and Life. London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, has called Mr. al-Qaradawi a “leading progressive Muslim.” This despite the fact that Mr. al-Qaradawi refers to Palestinian suicide bombers as “martyrs,” supports female genital mutilation, and can’t make up his mind whether the proper Islamic punishment for a homosexual is to burn him alive or to toss him off a cliff.

Neither Mr. Laban nor Mr. al-Qaradawi would pass the RAND Corporation’s somewhat more discerning use of the label “moderate.” In a landmark report published in late March, four RAND scholars draw a nuanced yet common-sense distinction between radical and moderate Muslims, and make sweeping policy prescriptions that, if implemented, will fundamentally alter the way Western governments tackle what is arguably the most pressing threat of our times.

The report rests on two simple insights. First, that Muslim movements ought to be judged by the ends they seek rather than by the means they employ toward those ends. Moderates are those who exhibit a longterm commitment to democracy, accept non-Islamic sources of law, profess respect for the rights of women and minorities, and actively oppose terrorism and other forms of illegitimate violence. Some useful questions: Do they believe in freedom of conscience, including freedom of religion? Do they support the right of women and religious minorities to seek and hold high office? Do they see internationally recognized human rights as universal, or do they seek an Islamic exception?

The authors recognize that the War on Terror is a misnomer—that the battle is against an ideology rather than a tactic. To some, al Qaeda may resemble little more than a nihilistic criminal enterprise—a kind of Cali cartel whose profits are booked in paradise—that can be fought with beefed-up law-enforcement tactics. In reality Osama bin Laden merely represents the most violent expression of the ideology of radical Islam (or Islamism), which seeks solutions for 21st-century problems in seventh-century Arabia, and which calls for Islam to dictate every aspect of life. For the West, defeating this ideology will require a clarity of purpose and firmness of will last seen in the heyday of the struggle against Soviet communism.

Of course, as the authors acknowledge, the parallel with the Cold War is flawed. The Soviet Union had a nation state to protect, and could be counted on to act in rational self-interest. (The prospect of consorting with dark-eyed virgins in paradise didn’t quite enter your average Soviet military planner’s calculations.) Moreover, communist governments were openly hostile to the capitalist West. By contrast, today’s ostensible allies—Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to name just two—are as much a part of the problem as they are part of the solution. The Soviet empire was centralized; Islamism is a disaggregated force. Fifty years ago, the central media challenge was getting the facts across the Iron Curtain. Today it’s fighting an overload of disinformation and propaganda, such as the widely believed canard that Jews were tipped off in advance about Sept. 11. And while the Soviets threatened communist takeover, the immediate Islamist challenge comes less from their capacity for control than from their capacity for chaos, at least in the West.

Perhaps most tellingly, though the report touches upon this only briefly, the educated Muscovite shared cultural common ground with his peers in West Berlin or New York. The CIA-funded Radio Liberty hired Russian émigrés to host programs that highlighted Russia’s own humanist traditions, including the legacy of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. At times, information warfare meant mailing Western classics such as James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and George Orwell’s Animal Farm to intellectually hungry Czechs, Poles and Hungarians. Soviets and Americans might have disagreed over the word “freedom” in the Congress of Cultural Freedom, a pivotal anticommunist organization. But at least they both had a similar understanding of “culture.”

Nonetheless, comparisons with the Cold War aren’t entirely overblown. Both communism and Islamism are totalitarian ideologies with global ambitions. If Moscow and Beijing represented different brands of communism, then Riyadh and Tehran do the same for Islamism in its Sunni and Shiite variants. In Saudi-funded groups such as the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, you have the equivalent of the Soviet World Federation of Democratic Youth. Islamist-friendly outfits such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Council of Britain perform a role similar to that of Western communists a generation ago: acting as apologists for the movement, and wherever possible slowing down efforts to keep it in check. Finally, Islamists from Egypt to Indonesia have borrowed the Leninist
idea of a highly committed vanguard to lead the movement.

The RAND report argues that network building holds the key to combating the radical threat. Though they are a minority in most Muslim societies, access to global networks and petrodollars gives radicals the edge over moderates. This balance can be corrected by giving moderates—from pious Muslims such as the Indonesian cleric Abdurrahman Wahid to avowed atheists such as the outspoken Syrian-American psychologist Wafa Sultan—the wherewithal to fight back. Special attention must be paid to liberal and secular academics, young moderate clerics, community activists, women’s groups, and journalists, writers and commentators. As in the Cold War, the hands-on work of building these networks ought to be undertaken by quasi-independent organizations specifically set up for this purpose. To guard against backlash, the U.S. ought to partner with local NGOs wherever possible.

You can’t fault the report’s authors for lack of ambition. They suggest focusing first on places where moderate Muslims still have a fighting chance—Europe, Southeast Asia and moderate Arab societies. These networked moderates will then gin up “modern and mainstream” interpretations of Islam, and channel them back to societies dominated by Islamist thought.

But given that the flow of ideas in the Muslim world tends to be one way—from the Arab heartland to the peripheries in South and Southeast Asia—this may be a bit of a stretch. It’s also unclear whether moderates, who often lack the fervor and conviction of their radical peers, have it in them to put up a serious fight. And the report leaves open the question of some sort of organized force that could balance the Islamist penchant for mob violence and intimidation. But these are mere quibbles. All in all, this important contribution to the policy debate ought to get the serious attention it deserves.

dhume_karsh

Far Eastern Economic Review

by Efraim Karsh

Yale University Press, 288 pages, $30

Reviewed by SADANAND DHUME

Two explanations for Muslim violence have emerged since Sept. 11. The first, identified most closely with the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, traces it to Islam’s decline and its consequent eclipse by the West, to the rage of a once great people who now lag in virtually every sphere of human achievement. The other, popular both in Western academe and the Muslim world, places the blame on Western governments and their policies. The problem, we are told, lies less with Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and al Qaeda than with the United States, the United Kingdom and, of course, Israel. Or, to collapse them into a familiar bogeyman, with Western imperialism.

Efraim Karsh, a historian at King’s College in London, makes a compelling case for a third option. Abandoning the shopworn narrative of European aggressors and Muslim victims, he points out that Islam itself is no stranger to the imperialist impulse. From its inception, the faith was as much a political project as a spiritual one, an effort not to create a Kingdom of God, but to use God’s name to build an earthly kingdom.

“I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no God but Allah,’” declared the prophet Muhammad in his farewell address to his followers. As if on cue, within 100 years of the prophet’s death in 632 A.D., Muslim armies had subdued the Persian Sassanids, wrested Egypt and Syria from the Byzantines, overrun North Africa and Spain and planted their banner in India. They would go on to capture Constantinople and, over the course of centuries, lay repeated siege to Vienna.

Traditionally, Islam recognizes no national boundaries. Over 13 centuries, until Kemal Ataturk’s formal dissolution of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924, most Muslims lived—in theory if not usually in practice—as a community of believers, the ummah, united under a spiritual and political leader. If bin Laden’s communiqués and the popularity of pan-Islamic organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizbut Tahrir are anything to go by, then this idea retains a powerful grip on the Muslim imagination.

Moreover, in contrast to postnational and secular Europe, where the imperial past is often as much an embarrassment as a source of pride, Muslims see little to apologize for. As Mr. Karsh points out: “To this day many Arabs and Muslims unabashedly pine for the restoration of Spain and consider their 1492 expulsion from the country a grave historical injustice, as if they were Spain’s rightful owners.”

Though Mr. Karsh trawls through 1,300 years of Middle Eastern history to make his point, it is the chapters on the relatively recent past that carry the most urgency. He traces the ancient quest for global dominance to the influential ideas of the last century’s three leading Islamists: Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian literary critic and Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, the Pakistani Abul Ala Maududi, founder of the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, and their Shia contemporary, Ayatollah Khomeini.

Qutb famously equated democracy—rule by man’s law rather than God’s—with jahiliyya, the term used by Muslims to describe the morally bankrupt state of pre-Islamic Arabia. Maududi, one of the few non-Arabs widely read in the Arab world, detailed the universal Islamist state where “every sphere of activity is coexistent with the whole of human life.” Iran’s Khomeini inspired an entire generation by upgrading Islamism—albeit a Shia variant privileging clerics—from theory to practice. The ideological imprint of one or more of this troika lives on in every Islamist movement in the world, from Hamas and Hezbollah in the Middle East, to al Qaeda’s loosely knit global franchise, to the largely nonviolent yet equally uncompromising cadres of the Jamaat in Pakistan and the Justice and Prosperity Party in Indonesia.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Karsh’s analysis throws up intriguing implications for policy makers. If Islam’s bloody borders have less to do with specific political demands than with a larger failure to bury the imperial impulse, then the prospect of taming Islamists through purely political means appears dim.

For Islamists, traditional concessions of land or political autonomy are as likely to be seen as signs of weakness as of goodwill. Democracy is merely a means to an end—Shariah as the basis for both state and society—rather than an end in itself. Modern notions of women’s rights, freedom of conscience and the equality of all faiths before the law go against the grain of Islamist belief and practice. Against this backdrop, the so-called pothole theory of democracy, which maintains that power will moderate Islamists, ignores the reality that for many the only potholes worth fixing are those on the path to heaven.

On the face of it, this leaves few easy options for Asian governments battling Islam-tinged insurgencies in Kashmir, Mindanao and southern Thailand; and fewer still for Muslim-majority countries such as Indonesia and Pakistan that, fearing a backlash from their own citizens, have done little to combat Islamism. Ruling elites in both Pakistan and Indonesia have attempted to fob off their Islamists with an ever-expanding list of concessions—a ban on alcohol here, scrapping the state lottery there, turning a blind eye to mob violence against non-Muslims, and the persecution of those, such as the Ahmadis, deemed heretical.

In both countries Islamists have only used the space ceded by secularists to expand their influence. They emphasize education, propaganda, and proselytization, secure in the knowledge that a fundamentalist population is the surest route to a fundamentalist state. A similar process has been underway in Malaysia, though disguised from the casual visitor by a large and prosperous Chinese minority.

Yet, bleak though the outlook appears, the battle is far from over. In a far-reaching rhetorical shift, over the past year both George W. Bush and Tony Blair have taken to describing the threat as an ideology and not merely a tactic. The “war on terror” was akin to the war on drugs, essentially a law and order approach to the problem. The “war on Islamofascism” brings to mind the struggle against communism.

This emphasis on ideas rather than tactics is welcome. But for it to mean anything it must be accompanied by a stepped-up effort to identify and support genuine Muslim moderates, those who see Islamists as agents of retardation not progress. The soft bigotry that judges Muslims by lower standards when it comes to the rights of women and minorities must also end. The ultimate goal should be to foster conditions where Muslims enjoy the spirit of free inquiry and skepticism about faith that is taken for granted in advanced societies—an intellectual and moral climate where burning down an embassy over a cartoon is unthinkable. Only then will Islam, like Europe and Japan before it, finally put its imperialist demons to rest.