Since everyone else is talking ... or talking about how they’re not talking ... or not talking about how they’re talking ... figure I might as well talk about the debt ceiling kerfuffle. Since I can’t claim any real expertise in American politics or economics, not sure I can say much about the domestic ramifications that hasn’t been said better several other places.
But I think there are some things to be said about the international implications of the spectacle. If there is a failure to raise the debt ceiling, the implications for America’s position in the international system and ability to exert positive leadership will be serious and dramatic. Even if the worst outcome is avoided, this sorry episode will still mark another increment in the changing relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.
There are, I think, three distinct dimensions to this summer’s spectacle, each of which is having a negative affect on the United States in the world: the long term implications of rising deficits, the immediate impact of the dangerous flirtation with default, and the consequences of failed governance.
Funding the National Debt: a problem, not a flaming crisis
The long term implications of budget deficits are not a new issue nor a “crisis” that demands immediate resolution. Lots of folks have pointed out for the much of the past decade (since the twin impacts of the Bush tax cuts and blank check financing for war in Iraq began to be felt) that at some point the deficit would be a problem because of the cost of borrowing on global markets to cover it. The U.S. treasury sells bonds to generate the revenue needed to make up the difference between spending in a given year and revenue (the deficit). The total of all those outstanding bonds is the National Debt. The bonds get sold to investors, including rich folks, money managers, international banks, and foreign governments. It costs you and me as tax payers a little something to meet the interest on those bonds.
[side note -- or rant -- the beguilingly simple comparison to the family budget that some folks love to make, as they piously intone “live within your means” is pretty lame. For starters, there aren’t too many Americans who do not borrow money to buy things they could not otherwise afford, like houses and cars. Secondly, governments are NOT like mom and pop sitting around the kitchen table ... Some pretty powerful economic analysis suggests that effective governments should generally NOT balance their budgets, but should spend more to stimulate the economy when times are bad and build up a surplus to cool off inflation when times are good.]
When it comes time to borrow, the United States has been in a uniquely enviable position since the end of the World War II when the dollar became the international reserve currency. Almost every country wants to have some dollars in its treasury so it and its citizens can do business with the rest of the world. This means the U.S. can sell Treasury bonds with dollar amounts with lower interest than, say, Poland whose bonds come in zlotys. (Zlotys aren’t very useful outside Poland except at selected arcades with old school zlot car tracks.) The second major advantage to the U.S. of the fact that foreigners buy so much of our debt is that they are motivated to avoid screwing up the U.S. economy. Yes, China already owns a large chunk of the U.S. debt and yes, China could really mess us up by refusing to buy any more. But if the dollar collapses then China loses a great deal of money.
There is some point, and no one knows where it is, where U.S. debt gets so large that foreigners start to worry that we won’t pay off our bonds and begin to drive up interest rates on bonds. That makes the debt bigger, of course, and worries foreigners even more, and raises interest rates and that hurts the U.S. economy and slows growth, etc.
The size of the debt needs to be addressed, but not in a fevered panic in the next two weeks.
The “crisis” of 2011 could become real
The current hassle over raising the debt ceiling is a manufactured “crisis,” driven by domestic political calculations. But it is pushing the U.S. and the world much closer to a genuine crisis of confidence.
And that could be a major negative consequence of the debt ceiling brouhaha on America’s international position. One of the things that has made U.S. bonds attractive is the belief that they are as good as gold. Actually, they’re better than gold because bonds pay interest. But if the U.S. cannot pay interest when it is due, even if it is only temporary, then the value of bonds themselves (some part of which rests on the fact that they always pay interest) drops. So all of a sudden folks who hold a lot of Treasury bonds, like big global banks and major countries, realize they had less money than they thought and that affects lending and spending around the world.
What could and should have been a small, short term event threatens to mutate into a much larger, far more serious problem if it raises any doubt about the value of U.S. bonds.
America as a circular firing squad
The second major negative consequence of the current debacle for our position in the world is the perception that the U.S. has a dysfunctional political system. The spectacle of a paralyzed United States government, the concern that even the most routine issues may threaten Armageddon, and the inability of presumptive leaders to lead hurts America’s image and interests.
The damage comes in two ways, I think. At the elite level in foreign countries, it undermines leaders’ confidence in the U.S. as a consistent actor, a country that says what it means and means what it says. At the level of everyday people, it gives “democracy” a bad name. The argument people in the Third World (aka Global South) hear most often from authoritarian leaders is that “democracy” means chaos. Everyday people in the Global South are no more, nor less, sophisticated than everyday people in the United States. They are not deeply immersed in the ins and outs of issues and institutions, they’d rather watch CSI: Las Vegas, Desperate Housewives, or the Bold and Beautiful [the drama, comedy and telenovelas/soap opera series with the largest global audiences in 2010] than CSPAN or a lecture on the difference between a presidential and a parliamentary system. But they do have images of other countries, they do think they know something about the world. And many of them are aware of some kind of political imbroglio in the U.S. This episode by itself is not going to change anyone’s mind, but it is going to have an erosive effect on perceptions of the U.S. as a beacon and model for how to organize a society.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
More On Political Islam
As a way of following up and extending the discussion of political Islam let me respond to some questions Cathy raised in an email:
What I think would be helpful as a follow-up would be some explanation of: since these groups and countries are incredibly diverse, how does an outside observer know when “political Islam” IS potentially dangerous to Western democracies? Are there buzzwords to worry about, or others that should be reassuring?
I don’t think it is political Islam that is a threat to the West, but individuals and groups who advocate violence against either us or democratic movements in Muslim countries. The causal dynamics of political violence are complex (hey, they’d try to take back my Political Science degree if I didn’t say that), like all human behavior. And there are major differences between leaders who advocate and organize political violence and followers who carry it out. But neither fits the one dimensional caricature of a simple and simple minded) direct link from a religious commitment to terrorist attacks. Religion, ideology, nationalism, a code of personal honor, among many other value systems, can provide a rationalization for behavior. I don’t mean “rationalization” in the everyday language pejorative sense of a bogus veil of platitudes hiding one’s “true” motives. We have multiple motives, at varying levels of awareness, behind any behavior and underlying every emotion. We use the various ways we think about the world to explain our actions and feelings to ourselves and to others. The buzzwords to watch out for are the exhortations to violence. And you don’t have to be carefully attuned to the nuances of Arabic to pick those up.
Is “jihad” always to be interpreted as calling for physical violence against non-Islamic societies (my guess is not, but I don’t know!).
“Jihad” is typically taken to mean “struggle”. The pious person wages jihad against her or his vices and imperfections. The community is called to jihad against injustice. “Jihad” can also be used in the same ways we use “war” ... as in war on drugs or poverty, as well as war as military conflict. Lots of good Christians still sing “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before” without thinking they are advocating invasion and conquest.
Do Americans just need to educate themselves better about strains of Islam and the cultural background of individual societies? I don’t see THAT happening, unfortunately.
No, I do not think it is necessary for people to become conversant with Islam, let alone hundreds of more or less distinctive cultures. I’m not real fond of the much abused notion of “common sense” but it may be applicable here. Simplistic, sweeping generalizations about other people ought to be always suspect. If you assume that at some deep level all people are alike, that there is only one standard model of “human being,” then you will less likely to buy a superficial account or accept an alien devil image of others.
And what are the alternatives to the “war” paradigm and how can they be couched in a way that people with very little knowledge about Islam or the Middle East can grasp them and be comfortable with them? And if not “war,” how should we respond to groups like Al Quaeda?
If it isn’t “war”, what is it? Crime. Terrorist attacks and threats in Europe are treated as police problems. The attacks on the Madrid and London subways were horrible crimes, not acts of war. And it was the police, not the army, who found the perpetrators. There was no question of making up some special tribunals for trying the accused. (And no hysteria that if we bring a terrorist to the U.S. to try them in court all their friends will come and wreak unspeakable revenge on us!!) The regular courts worked quite well. It’s not that the English and Spanish are more tolerant or more knowledgeable or less frightened by potential terrorism. But it is that their politicians have defined and framed the situation as dealing with crime, not fighting a war.
I don’t mean to gloss over real differences in world views and values. Many people outside North America and Western Europe have profound disagreements with our values and are determined to resist becoming just like us. It is important to know that the aspects of the West that non-Westerners most often reject: materialism, hyper-individualism, moral laxity, hypocritical foreign policies, are the same aspects we ourselves criticize.
What I think would be helpful as a follow-up would be some explanation of: since these groups and countries are incredibly diverse, how does an outside observer know when “political Islam” IS potentially dangerous to Western democracies? Are there buzzwords to worry about, or others that should be reassuring?
I don’t think it is political Islam that is a threat to the West, but individuals and groups who advocate violence against either us or democratic movements in Muslim countries. The causal dynamics of political violence are complex (hey, they’d try to take back my Political Science degree if I didn’t say that), like all human behavior. And there are major differences between leaders who advocate and organize political violence and followers who carry it out. But neither fits the one dimensional caricature of a simple and simple minded) direct link from a religious commitment to terrorist attacks. Religion, ideology, nationalism, a code of personal honor, among many other value systems, can provide a rationalization for behavior. I don’t mean “rationalization” in the everyday language pejorative sense of a bogus veil of platitudes hiding one’s “true” motives. We have multiple motives, at varying levels of awareness, behind any behavior and underlying every emotion. We use the various ways we think about the world to explain our actions and feelings to ourselves and to others. The buzzwords to watch out for are the exhortations to violence. And you don’t have to be carefully attuned to the nuances of Arabic to pick those up.
Is “jihad” always to be interpreted as calling for physical violence against non-Islamic societies (my guess is not, but I don’t know!).
“Jihad” is typically taken to mean “struggle”. The pious person wages jihad against her or his vices and imperfections. The community is called to jihad against injustice. “Jihad” can also be used in the same ways we use “war” ... as in war on drugs or poverty, as well as war as military conflict. Lots of good Christians still sing “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before” without thinking they are advocating invasion and conquest.
Do Americans just need to educate themselves better about strains of Islam and the cultural background of individual societies? I don’t see THAT happening, unfortunately.
No, I do not think it is necessary for people to become conversant with Islam, let alone hundreds of more or less distinctive cultures. I’m not real fond of the much abused notion of “common sense” but it may be applicable here. Simplistic, sweeping generalizations about other people ought to be always suspect. If you assume that at some deep level all people are alike, that there is only one standard model of “human being,” then you will less likely to buy a superficial account or accept an alien devil image of others.
And what are the alternatives to the “war” paradigm and how can they be couched in a way that people with very little knowledge about Islam or the Middle East can grasp them and be comfortable with them? And if not “war,” how should we respond to groups like Al Quaeda?
If it isn’t “war”, what is it? Crime. Terrorist attacks and threats in Europe are treated as police problems. The attacks on the Madrid and London subways were horrible crimes, not acts of war. And it was the police, not the army, who found the perpetrators. There was no question of making up some special tribunals for trying the accused. (And no hysteria that if we bring a terrorist to the U.S. to try them in court all their friends will come and wreak unspeakable revenge on us!!) The regular courts worked quite well. It’s not that the English and Spanish are more tolerant or more knowledgeable or less frightened by potential terrorism. But it is that their politicians have defined and framed the situation as dealing with crime, not fighting a war.
I don’t mean to gloss over real differences in world views and values. Many people outside North America and Western Europe have profound disagreements with our values and are determined to resist becoming just like us. It is important to know that the aspects of the West that non-Westerners most often reject: materialism, hyper-individualism, moral laxity, hypocritical foreign policies, are the same aspects we ourselves criticize.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Is "polticial Islam" Really So Scary?
Preface
Thinking and talking about Islam and politics is not at all that easy. It is further complicated and confused by the way things are simplified, distorted and reduced to slogans in everyday political conversation.
Political Islam, Radical Islam, Islamic Fundamentalism, Salafism, Wahabbism ... terms used almost interchangeably. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Jihadis, Taliban ... all somehow “Islamic” and they all seem to be against us.
Europeans, especially Germans, French and British, worry about the presence of Muslim communities and often see them as a threat to their identity. The long discussions about Turkey joining the European Union have often had a tacit sub text of “Is a Muslim country compatible with ‘European’ values?”
And for those impatient with details and academic niceties, there’s the late Samuel Huntington’s thesis of an inevitable clash of civilizations, focusing heavily on the presumptive fault lines between Islam and Christianity over the past 1200 years.
One way to understand how all this works from the perspective of political psychology might be to go find some of the more alarmist and paranoid literature from the height of the Cold War and substitute “Islam” for “Communism” and “Muslims” for “Reds.”
The final complication in trying to discuss this is that it is going to be dry and boring compared to the lurid image of “Fanatical Jihadists with Medieval ideology who reject everything about the West and modern life and who hate our freedom waging war around the world .”
Religion and Politics
One way to start Thinking about Islam and politics is to consider the consequences of European expansion on the Middle East. In 1500 the Islamic world (the Middle East and North Africa, Persian Empire, much of the Indian subcontinent, large parts of South and Southeast Asia) was in general superior to Europeans in military prowess, intellectual sophistication, science and technology, and consumer goods. The French and British conquest of Egypt at the end of the 18th Century was a dramatic demonstration that was no longer true. As Europeans came to control more and more of the world and especially after World War I when the Middle East was divided into colonial holdings by the British and French, there was a search for answers to the question of how Islamic societies had come to be weak militarily and comparatively impoverished economially and intellectually.
Broad brush, three answers emerged among Muslim intellectuals and politicians. One, reflecting the secularism of The Enlightenment, was to see Islam as the problem and the relegation of religion to the realm of individual piety and Friday practice. A second response was to maintain the importance and centrality of Islam in society but to call for sweeping reforms to make it compatible with “modernity.” The third response was to argue that the real problem was that much of Islam itself had become corrupt and degenerate and the solution was to return to an earlier, purer, more righteous way of life.
Human beings are delightfully more subtle and complex than this near caricature of broad schools of thought. Individual thinkers, political leaders, or everyday folks don’t think so simplistically. These discussions have always had a very practical orientation, an emphasis on what is to be done here and now. They have reflected the dictum that all politics is local and have had as much to do with regime politics or the issues of the day as they have with abstractions and theological or philosophical fine points. But most of the time one can see someone putting more emphasis on one response over the other two and some people clearly flatly reject one or more of the positions.
Real people in the real world do not sit around making careful distinctions between different dimensions of their lives, or reasoning from ideological first principles to what is to be done . You and I do not say, “Ah yes, this attitude of mine is derived from the Western Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, with a soupcon of the Kantian imperative thrown in for seasoning, along with lingering echoes of the American interpretation of Christianity.” Scholaris and Constitutional lawyers may debate the concept of separation of church and state but you and I are busy living our lives and do not worry about the sacred or profane provenance of a given custom or social norm. Nonetheless, it is as if people in Muslim countries (like people in other countries around the world including the U.S.) have experimented with these three broad approaches to the relationship of religion to politics.
In those countries where resistance to colonialism took the form of a nationalist movement, there was a strong tendency for post colonial governments to reflect a secular, rationalist set of values. The leaders of most of these movements were from families who were not tradition al wealthy land owners. They were from the middle strata of their societies, heavily exposed to Western education and values. Traditional elites and religious leaders were often distrustful of the movements and at times even openly opposed. Turkey under Mustafa Kemal was the first, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and Algeria are among many subsequent examples. It is not surprising that these regimes treated religion as part of the background to be tolerated or as a potential source of opposition. Over time secular nationalists and major religious leaders either came to an accommodation, as in Western Africa or Southeast Asia, or religious institutions became centers of anti-regime sentiment.
The traditional monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and the oil rich states of the Persian Gulf, either did not experience direct colonial rule or achieved independence by mutual consent between traditional elites and the colonial power without a mass based independence movement. The legitimacy of the monarchy rests on traditional values which often equate to an apolitical mainstream Islam, social conservatism, and preservation of the old class structure. But most of the monarchies reflect some willingness to accommodate economic and social reforms and adaptation of religious traditions to modernity.
Saudi Arabia is an extreme case. The country owes its origin to an alliance between one set of tribal leaders (the al-Sauds) and a powerful Islamic reformist movement (the Wahabbis.) The royal family and religious establishment remain mutually interdependent. Islam as practiced in Saudi Arabia is much more rigid and austere than Islam almost anywhere else and exemplifies the third response: the times are corrupt and decadent because believers have become lax and sinful. Osama bin Laden was initially driven by the conviction that the Saudi royal family was the primary target because it had become corrupt and had to be replaced by a more faithfully Wahabbi elite.
Talking Politics
OK, so Islam is intellectually diverse, there are a variety of ways of thinking about the relationship between one’s religious commitments and the rest of one’s life, and most people are busy doing rather than drawing fine intellectual distinctions or articulating coherent ideologies. If that is not enough to suggest that “political Islam” is a many splendored thing with enough diversity to fit almost any taste, there’s an additional complication for outsiders. That’s the fact that Islam provides the vocabulary of politics.
In the U.S., liberals and conservatives (with the exception of the vocal evangelical Christians) share a common set of terms and labels, even as they disagree about what they mean and which are the good ones. Everyday people use the same terms to argue with each other. One of the good things about a shared vocabulary is that you can do a fair amount of “Ya know what I’m sayin’?” and your listener does. Our political vocabulary comes from some 2500 years of the Western tradition.
Islam predominates in quite different societies that are quite different from the advanced capitalist milieu of North America and Western Europe, whether we think of the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent or Southeast Asia. Islam and the cultures of its members provides the vocabulary for much of politics in these countries. For someone to couch a political or social argument in terms of what is and is not properly Islamic can be, at best, odd and at worst off putting to you and me because most of us don’t routinely frame issues in terms of what is or isn’t “American.” Debates about what is and what is not “Islamic” are typically ignited by ideas or behaviors that are coming into Islamic societies from outside. Some people use “Islam” to argue against innovation and change or the foreign (like the Saudi Arabian cleric who condemned Pokemon as “un-Islamic”) while others use the argument to justify change. A good recent example is the argument made by the head of Al-Azhar University in Cairo (the preeminent university in Islam for the past several centuries) in support of the changes and reforms in Egypt. The document states that democracy is “the modern formula for the Islamic precept of shura (consultation),” and the author supports “the people’s representatives endowed with the power of legislation in accordance with the precepts of true Islam—a religion which has never throughout its history experienced a religious or a theocratic state.”
It is hard for us outsiders to follow the intellectual currents in the long running debate about Islam and politics, and the very language of the discussion further clouds the issues. It gets very hard to remember that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is not identical to the Brotherhood in Syria or Jordan. The distinctions between the Sunni political tradition in most of the Muslim world and Shi’i tradition in Iran and its neighbors is hugely important to insiders but largely opaque to most outsiders. The debate over religion and politics is sometimes an intellectual exercise and more often the context for rough and tumble practical politics. Positions held by individuals and groups evolve and mutate depending on their political fortunes. Individual human beings always have multiple motives behind what they do but you and I are prone to thinking other people have one “true” motive for their behavior and prone to accept a simplistic account. Consider a suicide bomber who exclaims “God is Great” as he detonates the dynamite vest. It is all too easy to cast him as an Islamic extremist whose religious convictions led him to murder innocent people.
Another unfortunate casualty of language is Islam itself. It is not just that Arabic is the language of Islam, albeit not the language of the majority of Muslims. Even in English, the terms of the discussion are unfamiliar. The result is that Islam is seen as exotic and almost disturbingly alien to many in the West. The critical fact that Islam’s vision of the good person and people’s relationship to God is very similar to Christianity’s gets lost.
No wonder people who are trying to make some sense of America’s relationship to the Middle East and Islam in general fall back on some simplistic version of “radical Islam” or “fundamentalism” and urge us to struggle against, if not go to war with, this pernicious ideology.
The Point Is
First (and maybe foremost) a caution. Political Islam has received a great deal of attention in the last few years and some people are greatly concerned about its potential impact on the Arab Spring. But the rallying cries and slogans during the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt were couched in liberal democratic language. Although the regimes in both Syria and Bahrain have tried to paint their opponents as Iranian-inspired Islamists, and even Muammar Qhadafi has tried to portray himself as the last bastion against “extremism”, the opposition is motivated by a wide range of political ideas and interests. “Political Islam” is not a simple, unified world view nor is it the only major context for the next stage of political development for the 1.6 billion people in the world who are Muslims.
There are some conclusions that can be drawn from this very sketchy overview:
“Political Islam” covers a wide range of positions, from support for liberal democratic institutions to attempts to rethink “democracy” to calls for a theocracy;
Some versions of political Islam are associated with violence directed against both internal enemies and the West, most are not;
The way we in the West think and talk about Islam and politics may be as consequential as the ways people in Islamic communities think and talk about it.
By that I mean that if we frame the question as a struggle or “war” with an ideology, it has two detrimental consequences. One, the “enemy” becomes a ghostly abstraction, a frightening chimera, instead of specific individuals or groups with concrete capabilities and intentions to harm people. Second, the metaphor of “war” has profound ramifications. It is “war” then it is a military struggle and violent coercion takes priority over persuasion and subtlety. The “war on terror” launched after 9/11 has accelerated and deepened the militarization of U.S. foreign policy.
Thinking and talking about Islam and politics is not at all that easy. It is further complicated and confused by the way things are simplified, distorted and reduced to slogans in everyday political conversation.
Political Islam, Radical Islam, Islamic Fundamentalism, Salafism, Wahabbism ... terms used almost interchangeably. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Jihadis, Taliban ... all somehow “Islamic” and they all seem to be against us.
Europeans, especially Germans, French and British, worry about the presence of Muslim communities and often see them as a threat to their identity. The long discussions about Turkey joining the European Union have often had a tacit sub text of “Is a Muslim country compatible with ‘European’ values?”
And for those impatient with details and academic niceties, there’s the late Samuel Huntington’s thesis of an inevitable clash of civilizations, focusing heavily on the presumptive fault lines between Islam and Christianity over the past 1200 years.
One way to understand how all this works from the perspective of political psychology might be to go find some of the more alarmist and paranoid literature from the height of the Cold War and substitute “Islam” for “Communism” and “Muslims” for “Reds.”
The final complication in trying to discuss this is that it is going to be dry and boring compared to the lurid image of “Fanatical Jihadists with Medieval ideology who reject everything about the West and modern life and who hate our freedom waging war around the world .”
Religion and Politics
One way to start Thinking about Islam and politics is to consider the consequences of European expansion on the Middle East. In 1500 the Islamic world (the Middle East and North Africa, Persian Empire, much of the Indian subcontinent, large parts of South and Southeast Asia) was in general superior to Europeans in military prowess, intellectual sophistication, science and technology, and consumer goods. The French and British conquest of Egypt at the end of the 18th Century was a dramatic demonstration that was no longer true. As Europeans came to control more and more of the world and especially after World War I when the Middle East was divided into colonial holdings by the British and French, there was a search for answers to the question of how Islamic societies had come to be weak militarily and comparatively impoverished economially and intellectually.
Broad brush, three answers emerged among Muslim intellectuals and politicians. One, reflecting the secularism of The Enlightenment, was to see Islam as the problem and the relegation of religion to the realm of individual piety and Friday practice. A second response was to maintain the importance and centrality of Islam in society but to call for sweeping reforms to make it compatible with “modernity.” The third response was to argue that the real problem was that much of Islam itself had become corrupt and degenerate and the solution was to return to an earlier, purer, more righteous way of life.
Human beings are delightfully more subtle and complex than this near caricature of broad schools of thought. Individual thinkers, political leaders, or everyday folks don’t think so simplistically. These discussions have always had a very practical orientation, an emphasis on what is to be done here and now. They have reflected the dictum that all politics is local and have had as much to do with regime politics or the issues of the day as they have with abstractions and theological or philosophical fine points. But most of the time one can see someone putting more emphasis on one response over the other two and some people clearly flatly reject one or more of the positions.
Real people in the real world do not sit around making careful distinctions between different dimensions of their lives, or reasoning from ideological first principles to what is to be done . You and I do not say, “Ah yes, this attitude of mine is derived from the Western Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, with a soupcon of the Kantian imperative thrown in for seasoning, along with lingering echoes of the American interpretation of Christianity.” Scholaris and Constitutional lawyers may debate the concept of separation of church and state but you and I are busy living our lives and do not worry about the sacred or profane provenance of a given custom or social norm. Nonetheless, it is as if people in Muslim countries (like people in other countries around the world including the U.S.) have experimented with these three broad approaches to the relationship of religion to politics.
In those countries where resistance to colonialism took the form of a nationalist movement, there was a strong tendency for post colonial governments to reflect a secular, rationalist set of values. The leaders of most of these movements were from families who were not tradition al wealthy land owners. They were from the middle strata of their societies, heavily exposed to Western education and values. Traditional elites and religious leaders were often distrustful of the movements and at times even openly opposed. Turkey under Mustafa Kemal was the first, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and Algeria are among many subsequent examples. It is not surprising that these regimes treated religion as part of the background to be tolerated or as a potential source of opposition. Over time secular nationalists and major religious leaders either came to an accommodation, as in Western Africa or Southeast Asia, or religious institutions became centers of anti-regime sentiment.
The traditional monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and the oil rich states of the Persian Gulf, either did not experience direct colonial rule or achieved independence by mutual consent between traditional elites and the colonial power without a mass based independence movement. The legitimacy of the monarchy rests on traditional values which often equate to an apolitical mainstream Islam, social conservatism, and preservation of the old class structure. But most of the monarchies reflect some willingness to accommodate economic and social reforms and adaptation of religious traditions to modernity.
Saudi Arabia is an extreme case. The country owes its origin to an alliance between one set of tribal leaders (the al-Sauds) and a powerful Islamic reformist movement (the Wahabbis.) The royal family and religious establishment remain mutually interdependent. Islam as practiced in Saudi Arabia is much more rigid and austere than Islam almost anywhere else and exemplifies the third response: the times are corrupt and decadent because believers have become lax and sinful. Osama bin Laden was initially driven by the conviction that the Saudi royal family was the primary target because it had become corrupt and had to be replaced by a more faithfully Wahabbi elite.
Talking Politics
OK, so Islam is intellectually diverse, there are a variety of ways of thinking about the relationship between one’s religious commitments and the rest of one’s life, and most people are busy doing rather than drawing fine intellectual distinctions or articulating coherent ideologies. If that is not enough to suggest that “political Islam” is a many splendored thing with enough diversity to fit almost any taste, there’s an additional complication for outsiders. That’s the fact that Islam provides the vocabulary of politics.
In the U.S., liberals and conservatives (with the exception of the vocal evangelical Christians) share a common set of terms and labels, even as they disagree about what they mean and which are the good ones. Everyday people use the same terms to argue with each other. One of the good things about a shared vocabulary is that you can do a fair amount of “Ya know what I’m sayin’?” and your listener does. Our political vocabulary comes from some 2500 years of the Western tradition.
Islam predominates in quite different societies that are quite different from the advanced capitalist milieu of North America and Western Europe, whether we think of the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent or Southeast Asia. Islam and the cultures of its members provides the vocabulary for much of politics in these countries. For someone to couch a political or social argument in terms of what is and is not properly Islamic can be, at best, odd and at worst off putting to you and me because most of us don’t routinely frame issues in terms of what is or isn’t “American.” Debates about what is and what is not “Islamic” are typically ignited by ideas or behaviors that are coming into Islamic societies from outside. Some people use “Islam” to argue against innovation and change or the foreign (like the Saudi Arabian cleric who condemned Pokemon as “un-Islamic”) while others use the argument to justify change. A good recent example is the argument made by the head of Al-Azhar University in Cairo (the preeminent university in Islam for the past several centuries) in support of the changes and reforms in Egypt. The document states that democracy is “the modern formula for the Islamic precept of shura (consultation),” and the author supports “the people’s representatives endowed with the power of legislation in accordance with the precepts of true Islam—a religion which has never throughout its history experienced a religious or a theocratic state.”
It is hard for us outsiders to follow the intellectual currents in the long running debate about Islam and politics, and the very language of the discussion further clouds the issues. It gets very hard to remember that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is not identical to the Brotherhood in Syria or Jordan. The distinctions between the Sunni political tradition in most of the Muslim world and Shi’i tradition in Iran and its neighbors is hugely important to insiders but largely opaque to most outsiders. The debate over religion and politics is sometimes an intellectual exercise and more often the context for rough and tumble practical politics. Positions held by individuals and groups evolve and mutate depending on their political fortunes. Individual human beings always have multiple motives behind what they do but you and I are prone to thinking other people have one “true” motive for their behavior and prone to accept a simplistic account. Consider a suicide bomber who exclaims “God is Great” as he detonates the dynamite vest. It is all too easy to cast him as an Islamic extremist whose religious convictions led him to murder innocent people.
Another unfortunate casualty of language is Islam itself. It is not just that Arabic is the language of Islam, albeit not the language of the majority of Muslims. Even in English, the terms of the discussion are unfamiliar. The result is that Islam is seen as exotic and almost disturbingly alien to many in the West. The critical fact that Islam’s vision of the good person and people’s relationship to God is very similar to Christianity’s gets lost.
No wonder people who are trying to make some sense of America’s relationship to the Middle East and Islam in general fall back on some simplistic version of “radical Islam” or “fundamentalism” and urge us to struggle against, if not go to war with, this pernicious ideology.
The Point Is
First (and maybe foremost) a caution. Political Islam has received a great deal of attention in the last few years and some people are greatly concerned about its potential impact on the Arab Spring. But the rallying cries and slogans during the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt were couched in liberal democratic language. Although the regimes in both Syria and Bahrain have tried to paint their opponents as Iranian-inspired Islamists, and even Muammar Qhadafi has tried to portray himself as the last bastion against “extremism”, the opposition is motivated by a wide range of political ideas and interests. “Political Islam” is not a simple, unified world view nor is it the only major context for the next stage of political development for the 1.6 billion people in the world who are Muslims.
There are some conclusions that can be drawn from this very sketchy overview:
“Political Islam” covers a wide range of positions, from support for liberal democratic institutions to attempts to rethink “democracy” to calls for a theocracy;
Some versions of political Islam are associated with violence directed against both internal enemies and the West, most are not;
The way we in the West think and talk about Islam and politics may be as consequential as the ways people in Islamic communities think and talk about it.
By that I mean that if we frame the question as a struggle or “war” with an ideology, it has two detrimental consequences. One, the “enemy” becomes a ghostly abstraction, a frightening chimera, instead of specific individuals or groups with concrete capabilities and intentions to harm people. Second, the metaphor of “war” has profound ramifications. It is “war” then it is a military struggle and violent coercion takes priority over persuasion and subtlety. The “war on terror” launched after 9/11 has accelerated and deepened the militarization of U.S. foreign policy.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
The Hard Road Ahead for South Sudan
After over 20 years of brutal civil war and excruciatingly difficult negotiations that succeeded only because of overwhelming pressure on Khartoum from much of the rest of the world, South Sudan has proudly taken its place as a sovereign state. That was the easy part. The next stage, creating a viable state that meets the economic, political and social needs of its people is a daunting project that will require unmatched courage and sacrifice from an entire generation of both leaders and ordinary citizens.
The conflict -- more precisely, conflicts -- in Sudan have never been simply North versus South, Arab versus African, or Muslim versus non-Muslim, nor good versus evil (although given the behavior of the government in Khartoum it is very hard to avoid that frame.) Sudan, like so many countries in the global South, is a largely artificial set of borders imposed on a complex and diverse set of pre-existing communities. In many countries in Africa and elsewhere leaders have at least tried to create a sense of national identity, of membership in a new community that transcended older, narrower identities, but not in Sudan. Since independence in 1956 successive governments have taken a page out of the British colonial playbook and kept the various communities divided. Because the government in Khartoum, controlled by a rigid Islamist ideology, tried to impose Islamic sharia law throughout the country, the primary fault line of conflict for the past 40 years has been along the divide between those groups in the North of the country most heavily influenced by Arab culture and Islam and those in the South whose cultures are closer to those of their neighbors in Kenya, Uganda, and Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The North-South conflict transcended and muted other conflicts, such as that between village farmers and pastoral nomads, or between large “tribal” communities in the South such as the Nuer and Dinka. By the time a loose coalition of international actors, including Sudan’s African neighbors, the United States, and several Western European countries, had brokered peace talks, there were two main protagonists. The government of Sudan and its military (“Khartoum”) and the major opposition movement, the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement and its military wing, the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLM/A).
On a side note, the ongoing conflict in Darfur revolves around the success of the Khartoum government in exploiting tensions between village farmers and nomads with their herds of goats and camels. It is not “Arabs” versus “Africans” or Muslims versus non-Muslims.
On a side note to a side note, the theme of conflict between nomadic herders and settled farmers is ancient and seemingly universal. The conflict makes a dramatic entry in Western literature with the fratricidal clash between Cain the farmer and Abel the shepherd (originating, I’d guess in the period in which the Children of Israel were wandering the desert.) Oklahoma! is a more modern version.
The challenges facing the newly independent South Sudan are both external and internal. The external challenges are unresolved issues with the North, including continued armed conflict in the contested areas of Abiyea, Kordofan, and the Blue Nile. The exact terms and conditions under which North and South would cooperate and share oil revenues were only vaguely defined in the 2005 peace agreement and will have to be worked out quickly because oil represents the major (in the cased of the South, virtually the only) source of revenue for the government. (There is a large cautionary literature on oil as a curse rather than a blessing for a poor country.)
The internal challenges are staggering. Aside from oil, the South has no natural resources and what little infrastructure existed at one time has been severely eroded by the decades of war. Subsistence agriculture and animal herding employ almost all South Sudanese. Almost all manufactured goods are implored via the North. The international community has contributed billions of dollars through the UN and other agencies over the years and major donor countries have promised to continue aid. The diaspora community, largely in Britain and the U.S., has been a source of aid. A number of young men and women who have returned from the diaspora to provide the new government with significant expertise.
Regardless of regime type or ideology, ultimately governments have to deliver the goods and make people feel that they are better off now than they were. Poverty exacerbates frictions between communities and fuels suspicions that “those people” are getting more than their fair share or are undermining “our” progress. Poverty can make politics a zero sum game where benefits for one group come at the expense of everyone else. The challenges of poverty heighten the temptation to create a single party state and have it degenerate into a wealth producing mechanism for a ruling elite. Poverty makes it that much more difficult for the government of South Sudan to reintegrate demobilized soldiers into civilian life and meet the needs of the thousands of veterans of the long conflict.
The great hope for the future, I think, is the immense enthusiasm and optimism of the people. If today’s euphoria and zeal can be channeled into a patient, determined commitment to a long, incremental process of growth and development, the great promise of the South can be realized.
The conflict -- more precisely, conflicts -- in Sudan have never been simply North versus South, Arab versus African, or Muslim versus non-Muslim, nor good versus evil (although given the behavior of the government in Khartoum it is very hard to avoid that frame.) Sudan, like so many countries in the global South, is a largely artificial set of borders imposed on a complex and diverse set of pre-existing communities. In many countries in Africa and elsewhere leaders have at least tried to create a sense of national identity, of membership in a new community that transcended older, narrower identities, but not in Sudan. Since independence in 1956 successive governments have taken a page out of the British colonial playbook and kept the various communities divided. Because the government in Khartoum, controlled by a rigid Islamist ideology, tried to impose Islamic sharia law throughout the country, the primary fault line of conflict for the past 40 years has been along the divide between those groups in the North of the country most heavily influenced by Arab culture and Islam and those in the South whose cultures are closer to those of their neighbors in Kenya, Uganda, and Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The North-South conflict transcended and muted other conflicts, such as that between village farmers and pastoral nomads, or between large “tribal” communities in the South such as the Nuer and Dinka. By the time a loose coalition of international actors, including Sudan’s African neighbors, the United States, and several Western European countries, had brokered peace talks, there were two main protagonists. The government of Sudan and its military (“Khartoum”) and the major opposition movement, the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement and its military wing, the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLM/A).
On a side note, the ongoing conflict in Darfur revolves around the success of the Khartoum government in exploiting tensions between village farmers and nomads with their herds of goats and camels. It is not “Arabs” versus “Africans” or Muslims versus non-Muslims.
On a side note to a side note, the theme of conflict between nomadic herders and settled farmers is ancient and seemingly universal. The conflict makes a dramatic entry in Western literature with the fratricidal clash between Cain the farmer and Abel the shepherd (originating, I’d guess in the period in which the Children of Israel were wandering the desert.) Oklahoma! is a more modern version.
The challenges facing the newly independent South Sudan are both external and internal. The external challenges are unresolved issues with the North, including continued armed conflict in the contested areas of Abiyea, Kordofan, and the Blue Nile. The exact terms and conditions under which North and South would cooperate and share oil revenues were only vaguely defined in the 2005 peace agreement and will have to be worked out quickly because oil represents the major (in the cased of the South, virtually the only) source of revenue for the government. (There is a large cautionary literature on oil as a curse rather than a blessing for a poor country.)
The internal challenges are staggering. Aside from oil, the South has no natural resources and what little infrastructure existed at one time has been severely eroded by the decades of war. Subsistence agriculture and animal herding employ almost all South Sudanese. Almost all manufactured goods are implored via the North. The international community has contributed billions of dollars through the UN and other agencies over the years and major donor countries have promised to continue aid. The diaspora community, largely in Britain and the U.S., has been a source of aid. A number of young men and women who have returned from the diaspora to provide the new government with significant expertise.
Regardless of regime type or ideology, ultimately governments have to deliver the goods and make people feel that they are better off now than they were. Poverty exacerbates frictions between communities and fuels suspicions that “those people” are getting more than their fair share or are undermining “our” progress. Poverty can make politics a zero sum game where benefits for one group come at the expense of everyone else. The challenges of poverty heighten the temptation to create a single party state and have it degenerate into a wealth producing mechanism for a ruling elite. Poverty makes it that much more difficult for the government of South Sudan to reintegrate demobilized soldiers into civilian life and meet the needs of the thousands of veterans of the long conflict.
The great hope for the future, I think, is the immense enthusiasm and optimism of the people. If today’s euphoria and zeal can be channeled into a patient, determined commitment to a long, incremental process of growth and development, the great promise of the South can be realized.
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