Transcript: Unseen World of Islam
THE UNSEEN WORLD OF ISLAM |
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JOHN ESPOSITO: Islam has gone from being relatively invisible and is now the second or third largest religion in Europe and America. |
NARRATOR: But in the west, understanding of Islam lags far behind the growth of the faith, and ignorance becomes fertile ground for fear. |
GEORGE BUSH: We will rid the world of the evildoers. |
REZA ASLAN: We are still talking about each other in these terms and ideas that are so incredibly outdated, continuing to inflame these passions by regurgitating these noxious stereotypes about one another. |
NARRATOR: Today on A World of Possibilities, The Unseen World of Islam. A religion and culture of great antiquity, variety and wisdom, moves back from the edges to the epicenter of history. But its reemergence is blighted by the world’s ignorance and disrespect for the faith. And the desperate violence of the excluded and dispossessed. |
JOSEPH MONTVILLE: There are many periods of history where there was creative coexistence; people knew how to get along. These memories are critical to revive in the 21st century. |
JOHN ESPOSITO: You can’t respect somebody if you don’t understand them. |
NARRATOR: Some prophecy a cataclysmic clash of civilizations, Islam and Christianity trapped in a titanic struggle for supremacy. But those with deeper understanding see a common source, shared faith and rich possibilities for cultural collaboration, if only the divisive extremists can be sidelined by the moderate majorities on all sides. |
ZAINAB AL SUWAIJ: There is always a hope, and I think these cultures can be reconciled in the future. |
NARRATOR: I’m Mark Sommer. Join us for an in-depth exploration of the origins, evolution and myriad expressions of the Muslim faith, in this first in a special four part series on Islam and the west. Welcome to A World of Possibilities. |
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NARRATOR: Religious zealots, politicians and academics alike, have asserted with increasing frequency since 2001 that there is an unbridgeable chasm between Islam and the west. After the World Trade Center attacks, many Americans wondered aloud, “Why do they hate us?” Is there anything to this notion of an inevitable clash of civilizations? And can a religion really clash with a region? To better understand both the origins of the current conflict and the common sources from which spring Islam, Christianity and Judaism alike, we turn to professor John Esposito, a scholar of religion and one of the world’s leading experts on the history of Islam. He’s Editor in Chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the modern Islamic World, the Oxford History of Islam and many other tomes on Islamic history and religion. Professor at Georgetown University, he’s the founding director of the Center for Muslim Christian understanding. John Esposito joins us now by phone from Marcos Island, Florida. |
Give our listeners a primer on the origins of Islam. What kind of world do they emerge into? Where and under what circumstances? |
JOHN ESPOSITO: Islam emerged basically in 7th century Arabia, and at that time in that part of the world you had two major powers: the eastern Byzantine Empire on the one hand and the Sassanid or Persian Empire on the other. These were the dominant forces in the region. They were great empires but empires that were significantly weakened by the fact that they had been warring against each other. On the other hand, within the Arabian Peninsula, you had basically a tribal society, which had no real unity. And part of the significance of what then happened in the 7th century is the rise of Islam but also the ability of the Prophet Mohammed to unite the tribes of Arabia under the religion of Islam, and then to be able to overwhelm the two dominant empires in the area. Which is a product of many things, religious motivation, the political reality of the time, the economic gains to be had, etc. |
NARRATOR: So in Mohammed’s own vision, how did he relate or not relate to Judaism and Christianity? |
JOHN ESPOSITO: For Mohammed, Judaism and Christianity were in fact seen as religious traditions that had received prophets and revelations from the one true God. And so Mohamed declared a belief in the one true God, and believed that that God had sent his revelation to Moses in the Torah, and then subsequently to Jesus as found in the Gospels. But Mohammed believed that the original revelations, first to Moses and then to Jesus, became corrupted. And so while Mohammed and the religion of Islam acknowledge that Moses and Jesus are great prophets, and recognize other, if you will, biblical prophets, there is a belief that God in his mercy one final time, sent the Koran, which is seen as the final and complete revelation, to Mohammed, who is seen as the final messenger or prophet of God. |
NARRATOR: these are all what’s known as Abrahamic traditions, in other words they all see themselves as descended from Abraham, is that correct? |
JOHN ESPOSITO: Precisely, and non-Muslims will say that Islam emerged as a religion in the 7th century. Muslims will simply say that the religion of Islam goes back to the time of Abraham. Just as the religion of Moses and Jesus, and so Islam in many ways is the emergence in the 7th century is that of a reform movement. In essence, it’s analogous to Christians who will see Christianity and Christ not simply as a totally new religion but in fact as a new covenant, fulfilling the old covenant, which God made with the Jews. Well in a sense Islam carries that logic of supercessionism, that is a religion superseding the previous religion, carries it one step further. And so for Muslims Islam supersedes, and the Koran supersedes Judaism and Christianity. |
NARRATOR: At inception, did Islam include what we now think of as fundamentalism, or has that come in more recent centuries? |
JOHN ESPOSITO: The term fundamentalism is very problematic. I mean to begin with, the term really occurred in roughly the 19th century and it grows out of the Christian experience. So you really can’t apply it to that time. What we tend to call fundamentalism today, is really if you will, a modern phenomenon, whether we’re talking about Christian, Jewish or Muslim fundamentalism. |
NARRATOR: The term Jihad has been used a lot since 2001. And usually to characterize a certain kind of militant, violent struggle. Does Jihad have a very different meaning within the Koran and as it was used by Mohammed? |
JOHN ESPOSITO: The basic meaning of Jihad is to exert oneself in the path of God; to strive or struggle to follow God’s will, to be a good Muslim. Now, growing out of that is also the belief that in striving to follow God’s will, if the community is under siege then a Muslim may have a right and indeed a duty and the community may, to defend themselves against attack, and therefore to attack God, or God’s prophet Mohammed, or the community is seen as an action that can be responded to equally militarily. The notion generally though in the Koran is that you fight those that oppress you until they cease to oppress you, and then one should cease fighting. So there’s a sense of kind of proportionality here. But rationales were also developed to legitimate offensive wars, and so for example Islamic rulers – some, not all – justified their |
wars of imperial expansion in the name of defending Islam against an enemy. I always draw the analogy here to the fact that, whether you’re talking about the real bad guys of recent history – let’s say Stalin or Mao Tse Tung – or you’re talking about democratic government – and I’ll also throw Saddam Hussein in, let’s say, as one of the bad guys. All of these, whether it’s the good guys or the bad guys, when they go to war, to legitimate war, they refer to the other side as the oppressor, and so you don’t find Saddam or a Hitler or a Stalin, you know, in effect saying “We’re the bad guys and we’re going to fight the good guys”. And what you have historically is the attempt by Muslim rulers to legitimate their wars of imperial expansion, which were offensive wars, as defense. That is, that we are waging a sacred struggle to defend Islam and the Muslim community, and to spread our faith. |
NARRATOR: Before 9/11, was there really such an issue between, say, the west and Islam? Was it as significant to Americans? And what shifted at that moment? |
JOHN ESPOSITO: Well I think that there are a number of background phenomena that one has to keep in mind as one begins to look at 9/11. The reality of it is that today, and indeed decades ago, Islam is the second largest of the world’s religions. But until a few decades ago when we said that, we were referring to a Muslim world out there, Muslims majority countries, and we can pad that then to the west, which was seen as Judeo-Christian slash secular. The reality of it is that in the last 30 or 40 years, Islam has gone from being, if you will, relatively invisible in geographic and sort of cognitive maps or landscape of the west, and it’s now the second or third largest religion in Europe and America. And so part of the reality that we’re dealing with as we come into 9/11 then, is not only a relationship of the Muslim world and the west, or Muslims out there, but now that Muslims are part of the mosaic of the west, now 9/11 comes along and it exacerbates the tensions between the Muslim world and the west, for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, you have a explosive as well as symbolic tragedy that takes place, with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and it symbolizes, initially, certainly for many in America and the west, a kind of new enemy. Post 9/11 we then have, in the name of a war against global terrorism, the designation of Axis of Evil countries, most of which are Muslim with the exception of North Korea; we have the heating up of the second Intifada in Israel and Palestine; we then have the invasion of Iraq; we have moving to today, talk about Iran and Syria as part of the problem not part of the solution. But on the other hand, increasingly in many parts of the Muslim world, the war against global terrorism, has been seen as generally unilateral, rather indiscriminate, and therefore interpreted not simply as going after the terrorists, but as a rationale for redrawing the map of the Middle East and the Muslim world. And so then it’s seen more as a war against Islam and the Muslim world. And at the same time, Muslims overseas see yes the tragedies that have taken place in America, London and Madrid, but they also see Muslims, what looks to them like the erosion of civil liberties for Muslims living in Europe and America. And more recently, the cartoon controversy as well as the Dubai situation, that also I think feeds on both sides, if you will, if you use this notion of both sides, a sense of growing tensions and conflict and clashing. |
NARRATOR: Are we now facing a situation where we some how need to be able to create or develop a religious sensibility that is at once universalist and extraordinarily tolerant of diversity? |
JOHN ESPOSITO: there’s a challenge even more than ever before for religious traditions on the one hand to yes hold on to their identity and their faith but also to explore and develop those aspects of their faith that promote and feed broader notions, and indeed an imperative to engage in trying to understand others better. That is to promote mutual understanding and respect. You can’t respect somebody if you don’t understand them. |
NARRATOR: Georgetown University Professor, John Esposito. After a short break, Iranian American author, Reza Aslan. |
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NARRATOR: The rhetoric of an apocalyptic collision between Islam and the west reverberates through the language used by some in both cultures to describe and legitimate what one calls Jihad and the other the War on Terror. Just listen to this: |
GEORGE BUSH: This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while, and the American people must be patient. |
MUSLIM MALE: Allah willing the streets of America shall run red with blood, matching drop for drop the blood of America’s victims. |
GEORGE BUSH: We haven’t seen this kind of barbarism in a long period of time. This is a new kind of evil. |
NARRATOR: Evil, barbarism, crusade, blood in the streets. But do we need to revive 1000-year-old history to understand the current conflict in the Middle East? Or is this less a conflict between religious than between rival powers? That exaggerate differences to consolidate control over their own people’s? Reza Aslan, an Iranian American scholar and author who recently wrote the best selling book, No God But God, contends that Mohammed saw Jews and Christians as spiritual cousins. Born in Iran, Reza moved to the United States shortly after the fall of the Shah’s regime in 1979. Reza Aslan currently teaches at the University of California Santa Barbara, and joins us now from a studio in Los Angeles. Various commentators in the west, and there may be their counterparts in the Muslim world, have said that there is an inevitable clash of civilizations. What do you think of that thesis to begin with? |
REZA ASLAN: Well I think the absurdity of it is too great to sort of tackle all at once, I mean, first of all there is a problem here in talking about a religion and a geographical location as being in conflict. Muslims now make up the largest religious minority in the United States. There are more Muslims in this country than there are Jews, than there are Episcopalians, than there are Presbyterians, than there are Buddhists. And the Muslims in the United States have perfectly and comfortably reconciled their faith and values with so-called western traditions. The other thing that’s important to recognize too is that when we talk about Islam what we often mean is the Arab world, and of course Arabs make up 11% of the world’s |
1.2 billion Muslims. The largest Muslim countries, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Turkey, are countries in which we don’t see the same cultural or religious conflict with the “west” that we hear over and over again in these kinds of theories. That said, I think that there is a real historical conflict between Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East, one that has a lot to do with I think territorial and geographic wars and violence’s that go back more than 1000 years, but whose rhetoric, whose propaganda, on both sides, is still very much alive today. I am continuously shocked when I hear some of he anti Muslim rhetoric coming out of Europe or some of the anti Christian rhetoric coming out of the Middle East, about how much it sounds exactly like the rhetoric that you heard in the Crusades, you know, the papal rhetoric about Mohammed being the anti Christ, or the Califeal rhetoric about the Christian we stand the moral depravities of Christianity and Europe. I mean, that to me is where the real problem lies, is the fact that we’re still talking about each other in these terms and ideas that are so incredibly outdated, just continuing to inflame these passions by regurgitating these noxious stereotypes about one another. And I think this clash of civilizations mentality is just another way of doing that. |
NARRATOR: It’s also sometimes framed as modernity versus medievalism. As if the Muslim world is struggling within itself to decide whether it wants to join the 21st century. |
REZA ASLAN: Well the Muslim world doesn’t want to join western modernity, but I think it’s a real misunderstanding of the very complex socio-political and religious conflicts that are taking place within the middle East, by referring to it as anti modern or archaic. Quite the opposite. What is really taking place in the Middle East is a fundamental clash, a fundamental conflict, over what kind of modernism the Muslim world is going to adopt, not whether it’s going to adopt it or not. What the west is really struggling with, in this internal conflict that is raging throughout the Muslim world, is about how to create a distinctly Islamic modern identity, one that is not based on western or colonial ideals of modernity. Now we in the west of course, believe that our vision of modernity is the sole vision of modernity, and if you reject the western conception then you’re rejecting modernity in general. That there is no difference between modernism and westernism. That is not really how it seems throughout the rest of the world. |
NARRATOR: The other dichotomy that’s often sketched is between liberal values and authoritarian or totalitarian values. Is that, too a misconception? |
REZA ASLAN: No. No, absolutely not. It’s absolutely correct that the problem with the Arab world is not Islam but totalitarianism and authoritarianism. However, that said, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that every single one of our Arab allies is an autocrat. And that autocracies of that region, the totalitarianism in that region, has been fed by half a century of US foreign policy. And again this isn’t surprising and in many ways it’s not even a condemnation, I mean all nations have as their primary agenda, the preservation of their own national interests, and the fact of the matter is, is that it is far easier to control an autocrat, one person, than it is to control an entire population which is why this move towards creating amore democratic middle east, has had such a profound effect, not just on Arab peoples but on Arab governments as well. I mean in many cases, you look at the startling political gains by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt by of course Hamas in the Palestinian territories and even Hezbollah in Lebanon. And while it does indicate perhaps a worrying, one could say even radicalization of Arab politics, at least it’s politics, I mean there has been nothing like a political culture in that region for decades upon decades. And as a result there’s been absolutely no social or political development, which has led of course to the rise of extremism and fundamentalism. So in many ways what we’re seeing now is that era of politicians, the Arab political elite of the Middle East, are starting to have to do something that they’ve never bothered doing before, and that is actually earning their votes. |
NARRATOR: You’ve written in your book, No God but God, that Mohammed preached a radical message of sweeping social reform, upholding the rights of the underprivileged and oppressed, but over the centuries this crucial message of Islam was distorted by political and religious elites fearful of losing their power. There seems to be almost a parallel with Christ and then what happened to Christianity when it was institutionalized in various churches. |
REZA ASLAN: I wouldn’t say almost, I mean, the parallel is very stark and it has much more to do with universal experiences, universal phenomena of religions and the history of religions. You know, we have a tendency to think of prophets as inventors of religion. Nothing could be further from the truth. Prophets don’t invent religions, Moses didn’t invent Judaism, Jesus didn’t invent Christianity, and Mohammed certainly by his own admission over and over again, did not invent Islam. Prophets are above all else, reformers. Their task is to take the social and religious and cultural and even political milieu in which they live in and to reshape it, recast it, to provide a new way, a new set of symbols and metaphors by which a people can reimagine their relationship to God and their relationship to each other. It is the prophet’s successors who then take the words and the deeds of a prophet and turn it into a religion. And so when you say, wow, there are these incredible parallels between the message that Jesus preached that Moses preached, that the Buddha preached, that Zarathustra preached, that Mohammed preached, and the reality of the religious institutions that came afterwards, again that’s a universal phenomenon. In Islam in particular it becomes even more complicated because unlike Christianity, Islam never really had a centralized religious authority. There has never been anything like a Muslim pope or a Muslim Vatican, that has the authority to speak for all the world’s Muslims. And so that scattering of religious authority has not only allowed Islam to become a wildly eclectic and diverse religion, but at the same time, it has |
created a real kind of authoritative vacuum which has allowed sometimes the loudest voice to be the only voice that is ever heard, which I think is precisely what’s taking place now. |
NARRATOR: It’s interesting too that, three of the world’s great religions all originated in the Middle East with Abraham seen as the father; or a spiritual father precedent for all three, and that is Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Would it require for us to reconcile these three traditions, would it require that we go back to their original messages that are closer to what you call the social reform and the more eclectic, accepting, tolerant kind of society that each reformer was proposing? |
REZA ASLAN: Yes, I think so. And I think it’s also important, when you look at Moses and Jesus and Mohammed, all three of them tried to connect themselves to Abraham, again to remind their audience that what they were hearing was not a new message, but the message that God gave, that the covenant that god made with Abraham. And I think the idea that now we can recognize that all of these three have essentially the same father, the same spiritual father, then going back to that original message and recognizing the profound similarities in these religions. I mean, as a historian of religion, I’m trained to look for patterns of religious phenomenon in all the world’s religions. But when it comes to Christianity, Judaism and Islam it’s a really easy thing to do because in many ways, these three religions are the exact same religion but spoken in three distinct languages, and unfortunately we have gotten to the point where the language of religion has become more important than what the language is supposed to represent. And whenever that happens, that’s when we see these kinds of religious conflicts. So you’re right, what we do need to do is strip these religions of some of their doctrinal issues that keep them apart; I mean there’s no reason why we can’t celebrate the differences, especially the doctrinal differences between these three religions. But we also have to recognize that morally, when it comes to morals and values and ideas and conceptions of God and conceptions of the universe and conceptions of human beings and their role on earth and their relationship with each other and their relationship with the creator, these three preach the exact same message and that core has to bind us together in a way that we cannot let these doctrinal differences continue to split us apart. |
NARRATOR: If that is indeed what has to happen, who has to lead the way? It seems like the ecclesiastical authorities would be the last ones to do that, because they are deeply invested in their own identities and their own power structures. So does it take kind of a broader reach on the part of people who are in touch with their own faith but also understand and can resonate with the same promptings in other traditions? |
REZA ASLAN: Well you’re right, it’s an individualist movement, and that’s absolutely correct. And it is no coincidence that in all three of these religions, that began as highly individualized movements and then very quickly descended into institutionalism, and then very interestingly all three of them had these so called reformation moments in which that sense of individualism was brought back into the faith. In Judaism of course, we talk about that happening in the first century, and of course perhaps the greatest of the Jewish reformers was Jesus himself, whose message was that religious authority rests, not in the hands of the institutions – in this case the Pharisees, the Sagices – but in the hands of the individual. And then you had that exact same experience happened in the Christian reformation Again the argument being that authority does not rest in the institution, in this case the catholic church, but in the individual. And now you’re having the exact same argument take place throughout the Muslim world, which is why so many of us refer to what is taking place now as the era of the Islamic reformation, because this fundamental question about removing the religious authority, the power to interpret faith, out of the hands of these clerical institutions, and putting it into the hands of individuals, has created a profound schism in the Muslim world, and that sense of individualism, I think, that it shares with Christianity and Judaism, is the common denominator that I think can bind these three religions. You’re right, it’s not necessarily going to be the ecclesiastical authorities that we need to look to. We need to look to the individuals themselves. |
NARRATOR: Reza Aslan, Iranian American author of No God but God. I’m Mark Sommer, and this is A World of Possibilities, distributed by the WFMT Radio Network. |
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This is A World of Possibilities. If you wish to contact us, please direct emails to comments@aworldofpossibilities.com. This program is distributed by the WFMT Radio Network. |
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NARRATOR: I’m Mark Sommer and this is A World of Possibilities. This program, the Unseen World of Islam, is underwritten by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Coming up in this half hour, Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institution. We’ll also speak with former Middle East diplomat, Joseph Montville. But first we turn to Zainab Al-Suwaij, Executive Director of the American Islamic Congress. Zainab fled Iraq in 1991,after participating in the abortive uprising against Saddam Hussein following the US invasion of Kuwait.Established in response to the September 11th attacks, the American Islamic Congress seeks to promote interfaith understanding in an increasingly hostile political environment. Zainab Al-Suwaij, joins us from the studios of ABC Radio in Washington DC. |
The fact that the United States and Britain in particular have supported various regimes in the Middle Eastin Arab countries that have been quite repressive, does the resentment of those authoritarian regimes then extend directly to the United States and those closely linked in people’s minds? |
ZAINAB AL-SUWAIJ: Some of them they do link directly to the United States and most of the countries actually do that. Some they feel no, these are dictators that they are here and we accepted them as presidents and we are paying the price. But it’s very difficult there than here, as you see people are really suffering in most of these countries because of these dictators that they are controlling their countries for sometimes 30, 40 years. So for them it’s always easy to blame it on the west, or somebody else than their own government, because for obvious reason that their own governments can be killing them or persecuting them if they say anything or make any statement against the government. |
NARRATOR: I see, it’s just too dangerous to blame your own government. |
ZAINAB AL-SUWAIJ: Of course. Out of experience, I mean that was used to happen in Iraq as well, beside we used to be forced to go to demonstrations in the street against the west and everything. Butthen people start using it as a tool to express the anger that they have towards their own government. |
NARRATOR: President Bush has said numerous times that the people who are angry with the United States in the Muslim world resent our freedom; do you think that’s true? |
ZAINAB AL-SUWAIJ: They envy it, they really envy it, and they are angry that they don’t have such a freedom. They are angry that they are not able to express their thoughts and ideas, they are angry not to be able to practice their life normally, they are angry because they are not being able to practice their religion freely or improve their societies. And all of that, you know, when you are angry with somebody that much and you are prohibited from and you cannot have it, then that’s generate a lot of anger and a lot of resentment. |
NARRATOR: You’ve said that this kind of contradiction unfortunately is almost everywhere in the Middle East and Muslim countries. Accepting contradiction is a simple survival mechanism when you’re not free. Contradictions become the only way to keep your options open when you see you don’t know what you’re supposed to say or believe. How does that operate? How did it operate in your own mind, before you came to the west and had away of sort of balancing an understanding better what the west was really like? |
ZAINAB AL-SUWAIJ: Certainly it was a lot of thoughts, and at the same time, sometimes a lot of confusion, and anger. For example, the 80’s the west supported Saddam Hussein and he was Iraq Dictator, but as I said we could not express our feelings, we could not say anything so we always blamed the west for the problems that we had. At the same time, we understand deep inside that our problem is among us, is inside the country, it is our dictator that many Iraqi people supported him, to get the power, and also he used violence against people and oppression and you know, killing so many different ethnicities and groups in Iraq. It was very difficult when you live in the middle of it, to understand what the west is like or how its image has been spread there. But when you leave it and you look back into it, you totally understand, because it’s very difficult to separate between the politics and the people. That’s when it becomes really murky and people do not really understand it. |
NARRATOR: As you look at the gulf between Muslims and westerners, what do you think most needs to be done, and what is in practical terms, what can be done to reduce the levels of misunderstanding and stereotyping? |
ZAINAB AL-SUWAIJ: Education, through media, through exchange of students or youth. Especially among the youth, I think it’s very important, because youth for example in Middle East they represent about 70% of the population. That’s what we need to focus on, is the youth and spreading of the word of understanding among the people in the Middle East. And as much as we can, educate them about the west and how things are happening in the west, how are Muslims for example living in the west. How their life is changed. And not only Muslims but also other religions, how people are living in one country from different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different religions. Yet they are living in one country they have, their kids go together to school, the people are colleagues and neighbors and friends. And the messages of mutual understanding. America is not trying to attack Islam or Muslims. This is what I think we should work on. |
NARRATOR: Your personal journey has been one of bridging across these divides. As you look at, on the one hand, all the hazards, all the tensions, the war, the stereotyping, it could lead one to say that these two cultures, these two worlds, are irreconcilable, as some people on both sides have said. What is your feeling? Do you think these cultures on an inevitable collision course? |
ZAINAB AL-SUWAIJ: There is always a hope and I think both cultures can be reconciled in the future. I think when you raise an awareness about both, mutual understanding between the two cultures, two religion, not only two, many religions, many ethnicities. The deeper understanding of each other, I think that’s what’s going to generate the mutual peace for all of the world, not only for both this nation here in the west and the nation back in the Middle East. There is always a hope and the hope is bigger or can be reached faster if people in the Middle East get rid of their dictators. This is the key. I saw Iraq under dictatorship and how people felt and act and all of that. And I saw people after Saddam has been or his government has been gone, and you see how the way they talk, the way they act, they are eager to achieve success and peace inside the country. I think the hope is always there and I think it can be reached very soon, and it can be better for both worlds. |
NARRATOR: Zainab Al-Suwaij. In a December 2005, University of Maryland, Zogni International Poll of six Arab nations, 81% of respondents said the Iraq war had brought less peace to the Middle East. Shibley Telham, the Anwar Sadat professor peace and development at the University of Maryland, says that in the eyes of most Arab Muslims, the Iraq war has brought nothing but disaster. Professor Telhami is author of the best selling books, The Stakes, America and the Middle East. He joins us now from his office in College Park, Maryland. |
Some people have pointed out that just to frame the issue as Islam versus the west, is to compare a religion and a region. In ways that are not really parallel. In addition, Islam is not just one culture. There are Muslims all over the world, and to my surprise I recently realized that just 11% of Muslims live in the |
Middle East. That’s really a very different perception from the way I would imagine most Americans feel it to be. |
SHIBLEY TELHAMI: Well, we certainly in many ways have been hiding all the diversity of the Muslim world, both along the lines of states that are different, but even the cultures and the languages of the Muslim world and the differences. Look, Al Qaeda sees Shi-ite as being infidels, and they’re killing them. The Taliban and Iran had a hostile relationship, and I think what is happening is that when there is a collective sense that there is a greater threat outside than the differences, than those differences are all covered up in order to deal with the bigger threat. Certainly over the past five years, the two issues that have defined their sense of threat, are Iraq and Palestine, more than any other. And I think what is happening in much of the Arab and Muslim world, is people who have major differences put those aside at least temporarily to deal with this sense of big threat, including the perception And that has played into the hands of those who want to use this label of Islam to unify people who have really major differences – culturally, historically, linguistically, in terms of their view of the world, in terms of their values, this is not one world. |
NARRATOR: during the cold war, there was some observers noticed a kind of mirror imaging that went on between the United States and the Soviet Union, that many people held views of the other that actually mirrored the way the other viewed them, and their intentions. Are you finding a similar sort of dynamic in this relationship between say the United States and the Muslim world? |
SHIBLEY TELHAMI: No question. I think what happens in those instances is you, once you define the threat to be a particular entity, that entity starts looking at you as a threat. And I think that the debate here, after 9/11, now our public discourse really very quickly turned into labeling a major culture. And what you then look at from the other side, you start looking at the United States through the prism of those statements that seem threatening. And I think you know, after 9/11 one can say that Americans are looking at the Arab and Muslim world, through the prism of 9/11. They’re looking at it to see those aspects that confirm their fears, that emanate from the fear of terrorism and 9/11,and so their interpretation of Islam inevitably is going to be that, and inevitably you’re going to pick up mostly the statements that are going to confirm that, even if they happen to come from outlandish sources. And I think vice versa. In the Arab and Muslim world, when they see and hear and can think the US is targeting them, they’re picking up the statements of those people who are defining the Muslim world as a threat, and then you have really kind of a self fulfilling prophecy and a dynamic that becomes something like a mirror image. |
NARRATOR: You’ve said that in many parts of the Muslim world and even the Arab world in particular, it’s not a disagreement on the basis of basic values, but policies. If the values are actually quite similar, how do we move the conversation in the direction of the fundamental values, where we may share a great deal? |
SHIBLEY TELHAMI: If you had someone who said they either visited the US or studied in the US or had a family member or relative who visited or studied in the US or had significant encounter with Americans in the middle east, they’re more likely to say they have a favorable view of the US than everyone else. We know in a public diplomacy arena, that the most effective way to reach out and to broaden support and to find commonalities among different segments of people across cultures, is exchanges. And what happens with exchanges, is that essentially people get a more complex view of the other group than the one that they get through their narrow prism in their own country. And that broadening of the view, the good and the bad, the view isn’t always s pretty, you get a lot of ugliness as well as beauty. But the complexity that you get prompts that narrow prism and gives you a better attitude of the other. That’s part of the reaching out, that’s part of the enhancing the understanding, to look beyond that narrow prism. |
NARRATOR: Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat professor of peace and development at the University of Maryland. In a moment, track two diplomacy pioneer Joseph Montville. |
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This is A World of Possibilities, a production of the Mainstream Media Project. Copies of this program are available on CD and can be requested by email at comments@aworldofpossibilities.com. |
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NARRATOR: So what will it take to reduce tensions between the United States and Muslim nations? Will it start with high-level public negotiations? Or will the bridge building begin elsewhere? What psychological wounds are being inflicted or reopened by the war in Iraq and the narrative of a clash of civilizations? For 23 years, Joseph Montville served as US Foreign Service diplomat in the Middle East and North Africa. He also pioneered what he calls track two diplomacy, a range of strategies that include high level back channel negotiations between conflicting parties; as in the Israeli Palestinian Oslo accords, and grassroots citizen diplomacy. And he’s analyzed the psychodynamics of international relations. Currently Director of Preventive Diplomacy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Joseph Montville joins us from Washington DC. |
JOSEPH MONTVILLE: There’s a great resistance to understanding and dealing with the psychodynamics on the part of the policy people. And also the editors and the journalists and others who think they’re being relativistic but they’re not being realistic because they’re cutting out one of the most important sets of variables in their analysis, which is the potential for positive response, and creative response of human beings to fully understand what we all need to hear and know, to transform our relationships into something healthy. |
NARRATOR: The one who is in a stronger position seems to be often the one who is also best able to make the first move, not the weaker one. Is that so? |
JOSEPH MONTVILLE: That’s true. When I’m trying to assemble a workshop for instance, on any ethnic or sectarian conflict, I look for people who are very knowledgeable about their history, but also have the moral strength to acknowledge wrongdoing on the part of their people. And that’s not easy; you can become ostracized by your nation or your tribe, for acknowledging moral responsibility. |
NARRATOR: It’s a cautionary tale on one level that those who most publicly bridged across divides found themselves becoming the enemy number one instead of the so-called enemy itself by intervening in the middle, they caught the sword. Do we need to not depend on individuals so much any more? Is there a kind of a greater safety in numbers, in many people learning how to bridge in many different ways, so that it’s not one martyr? |
JOSEPH MONTVILLE: Yes, I, that’s a very insightful question. My conception of ‘track two diplomacy’ certainly encouraged initiatives of leaders in the Sadat and Rabin and Gandhi category, but puts a great deal of emphasis on trying to create an environment in public opinion that makes it easier for leaders to make compromises and gestures towards peace. In other words try to just make it safe to be a Sadat or a Rabin. One of the great gaps in peacemaking is the failure to understand how critically important it is to shape or influence or try to persuade public opinion through various mechanisms of media, of symbolic acts, of art, of music, that it’s okay to make peace. Especially I think revive the historical precedents to let public opinion know that there is a precedent for good relationships and respectful relationships. There are also values in our sacred literature. The Koran is a very liberal, libertarian document, which helps to explain why Jewish Muslim relationships could be so sympathetic, or copasetic in the Middle Ages. And we don’t know that. |
NARRATOR: If we’re talking about sort of either rewriting history or remembering different parts of history |
– not just the wars and the tribal conflicts, but the richness of bridging across, the richness of multicultural societies that produce extraordinary achievements – we don’t hear that history very much, do we? |
JOSEPH MONTVILLE: No, we don’t. Most of us even well educate people don’t think of history in terms of its impact on contemporary life and memory and conflict. We have to make that connection, and we have to see that history is one of our richest resources, for lessons of creative coexistence and mutual respect. There are many periods of history where there was creative coexistence. People knew how to get along, and these memories are critical to revive in the 21st century. |
NARRATOR: You’ve spoken before of an Abrahamic family reunion. I take it that you mean by that Muslims, Christians and Jews all come from the same, as it were, father, Abraham. Do you see a family reunion at some point in the offing, or at least to be desired? |
JOSEPH MONTVILLE: Well it’s certainly to be desired and I think it’s going to take a lot of work to bring it about. There are some efforts already to emphasize, but the symbolic power of the family reunion comes from the Hebrew bible account of Abraham’s son, Isaac and Ishmael coming together to bury their father in Hebron. The two who had been alienated coming back together. So there is a basis in terms of shared religious values, shared history, it requires the mobilization of resources and people and intelligence and caring about the human value of other humans. It’s a tough environment to work in. There are a lot of people who are not interested in reunions, they’re interested in expulsions or destruction, but those of us who care about this never stop working, never get discouraged. Well, we get discouraged but we never stop working, and then we have our high points. So I think the Abrahamic family reunion is not only morally required but it’s actually doable. |
NARRATOR: Joseph Montville, Director of Preventive Diplomacy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Raised in a culture with little sense of history and still less sense of those beyond its borders, we Americans can easily be persuaded to believe in both the goodness of our friends and evil of our enemies. Yet lest we forget, our most faithful allies today were not so long ago our enemies. Our NATO partner Germany was twice our adversary and the object of libelous cartoon caricatures. Japan is our chief Asian ally, but just half a century ago we incarcerated 112,000 Japanese Americans for four years. China, though still nominally communist is today our most potent trading partner. On the other hand, Iran, now our nemesis, was our ally, until 1979. Confused? Well, as is often said, in politics there are no permanent friends and no eternal enemies. Politicians and strategists evoke and dissolve enemy images to gain tactical advantage, reverse course without ever recanting their rationale, and claim to stand firm while wriggling free of responsibility for the havoc left in their wake. There have been conflicts between Islam and Christianity dating as far back as the crusades, but there’s nothing inherent in Islam that sets it on a collision course with western values or interests. In fact the unacknowledged truth is that the three great religions that are today set against one another, all spring from the same genealogy and claim a common father, in the prophet Abraham. The real question is not whether there’s an inevitable clash of civilizations. Given the divisions and polarities that bedevil both Islam and the west, the underlying conflict might better be termed a clash within civilizations. The real issue is whether the silent or silenced majorities in both cultures will stop taking the bait. Whether after so many manipulations we’ll refuse to demonize whole peoples, religions and civilizations because of the heinous crimes of a few. And while religion has been the source of so much of this division, it’s also fundamentally about reconnecting, binding together the wounds of our conflicted common soul. I’m Mark Sommer, and this has been A World of Possibilities. Thanks for listening. |
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You’ve been listening to A World of Possibilities. We’d like to welcome one of our newer stations, WRHO in Oniata New York. For more information on Islam and its relationship with the west, click on the listener action link at aworldofpossibilities.com. This program was produced and edited by Chuck Rogers, Tim Silva, Cathy Parlato, and Malia Mulder-Wollan. Production engineer is Chuck Johnson. Support for this program is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Music is courtesy of Caltext Records, East West |
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